Part 1: Update On Our Lost War On Drugs: Innocents Die, Presidents Admit The War is A Lost Cause, Trillions Of Dollars Wasted

On a regular basis we do a summary of the latest defeats in our nation’s never-ending, never winning, always expensive war on drugs. This ill fated government approach has been going on for over four decades and has done nothing but waste taxpayer wealth, ruined citizens lives by putting them in prison for petty law breaking of petty drug laws and by not providing enough addiction remedy support, enriched Mexican drug cartels, and encroached on our liberty and privacy.

And even scarier, as you will see, this lost effort may now be turning into a major national security issue. So, what has been going on since we last checked in:

1) A December 2, 2012 NewsMax article, reporting on a U.S. News and World Report article, discussed the lost war on drugs in light of a new documentary coming out soon, “Breaking The Taboo.” The documentary tries to make the case that we have tried to make many times in that the war on drugs has been a failure. The details of the article and the film trailer for the documentary can be found at:

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/clinton-carter-war-drugs/2012/12/03/id/466311?s=al&promo_code=10F70-1

Information from the article and the trailer include the following:

• Since the U.S. government declared war on drugs during the Nixon administration, U.S. taxpayers has paid about $2.5 TRILLION of their wealth to lose this war.
• The worldwide market for illegal drugs, despite a forty year war and effort to stop illegal drug usage, is a whopping $320 billion a year.
• Over the past few years, tens of thousands of innocent Mexican citizens have been killed as a result of our war on drugs, caught in the cross fire of well armed, well financed drug cartels and Mexican anti-drug authorities.
• The trailer claims that after all of these war efforts, illegal drugs today are purer, cheaper, and more widely available than ever before.
• Even two Presidential supporters of the war on drugs, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, are quoted in the documentary that this effort is a failure.
• "If all you do is try to find a police or military solution to the problem, a lot of people die and it doesn't solve the problem, It hasn't worked," says Bill Clinton in the documentary.
• "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself," as written by Jimmy Carter on the film's website.

Is there a way out of this mess, a lost war that has continued unabated under the Obama administration? One solution might be to examine what happened in Portugal when it decriminalized drug possession. Usage went down, treatment went up, and personal freedoms and privacy no longer got abused as much. Details on how and why their more humane approach and coherent approach to drug use and addiction can be found in many sources including the following Time magazine article:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html

2) You probably have never heard of Eugenio Velazquez so let me give you some background on him, as described in a December 9, 2012 Associated press news article:

• He is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Mexico, having been born in the U.S. and raised in Mexico.
• He lives in a modest, suburban San Diego neighborhood but travels frequently to the border town of Tijuana, Mexico.
• He has had an outstanding and famous career designing some of the Mexican border city's most prominent buildings over the past ten years or so including Tijuana’s new main cathedral, an expansion of the Tijuana Cultural Center, and the town’s police headquarters.
• He is also a college professor and a devoted Catholic who has designed more than 400 residential, commercial and religious projects during a 30-year career that includes a position as president of the Tijuana Architects Association.
• His works range from plain, functional industrial parks for multinational corporations to some of the city's most recognized landmarks.
• A Tijuana newspaper named him as its Cultural Person of the Year in 2008.
• That same year, the Tijuana Cultural Center opened "El Cubo," or "The Cube," his $9-million, burnt-sienna structure that stands next to a distinctive globe-shaped building and provides enough space for large art exhibitions.

Quite a resume but now he may be more well known for his impending prison sentence then his design work. According to the article, Velazquez, was to be sentenced to prison last month in San Diego for an attempt to smuggle 12.8 pounds of cocaine into the U.S. in a special traffic lane for prescreened, trusted motorists. A drug-sniffing dog alerted inspectors to five packages hidden in the battery of his 2004 Nissan Quest at San Diego's San Ysidro port of entry.

Why would such a distinguished trusted man do such a foolish thing for such a relatively small amount of illegal drugs? According to his defense attorney, he had to do it, smuggle drugs into the U.S. like a common drug mule, at the behest of local drug cartels or the cartels would have gone after his family. In fact, within hours after he was arrested at the border, death threats were telephoned to his home and his wife who fled for their lives to a relative’s house.

Another innocent victim of our failed war on drugs, another life destroyed. Our lost war on drugs has so enriched and empowered the drug cartels that innocent, ordinary citizens are at the mercy of the cartels, do their bidding or be killed or see their family members killed. Your fame, wealth, and previous good deeds cannot protect you from the war on drugs and its fallout.

3) But famous architects are not the only famous Mexican citizens to get caught up in the drug cartel violence. A November 27, 2012 Associated Press article reported a Mexican beauty queen was killed over the previous weekend in a shootout between suspected soldiers and drug traffickers who likely used the beauty queen as a human shield.

Maria Susana Flores Gamez was crowned 2012 Woman of Sinaloa in February. According to reports, she came out of a drug trafficker car first with a gun in her hands during the shootout, with the other gunmen hiding behind her, according to the official from the local Mexican attorney general's office. She died in a hail of bullets during the shootout. It was unknown when the article was written whether she was a member of the drug trafficker ring or a hostage taken captive by them and turned into a human shield.

Unimaginable horror and violence. A young lady, with probably a bright future ahead of her, dies at a young age, gunned down in the street, as a result of well armed drug cartels.

4) But it is not just innocent Mexican citizens and drug cartel members that get killed by our lost war on drugs. According to a December 4, 2012 Associated Press article, a U.S. Coast Guardsman was killed when a suspected drug cartel smuggling boat rammed a Coast Guard inflatable boat during an interdiction off the coast of California. The suspected cartel smuggling boat was tracked for several hours and eventually and successfully boarded, resulting in the arrest of two Mexicans after a brief struggle.

According to the reporting, the drug cartels have resorted to using smuggling boats to deliver their illegal drugs into the U.S. after it became much more difficult to do so over land at the California and Mexican border. Unfortunately, this new tactic resulted in the unnecessary death of a U.S. Coast Guard sailor, another unnecessary fatality in the war on drugs.

That’s enough for today. Innocent and unnecessary loss of life. Presidents admitting that the war on drugs, a war that they once championed, is a lost cause. Wasted lives and taxpayer wealth to no avail or advantage.

Yes, sounds like a typical Federal government operation. More on this ongoing fiasco tomorrow, with a focus on how this lost war on drugs is endangering our homeland security today in a very real way.

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