We now look at drug addiction as a disease in government and medical institutions, so when are we going to end the War on Drugs and how will we? The War on Drugs has only made drug use more desirable by making them more taboo, thus creating an underground culture where it is cool to avoid detection. Fast cars, fast women, flashy tattoos and jewelry and being the man, or woman, that can supply the need is what spurs the desire to be involved and it makes it cool. There is a social structure involved that includes sex, money, power, control and greed. So if we decriminalize drugs we take the power out of them and the rest of this underground culture. Vicente Fox in Mexico has come down hard on the cartels and 40,000 drug war murders have been the result. In- fighting between cartels like the Sinaloa, Juarez and Zetas has been over how to get the most money from the U.S.'s demand for drugs. Recently, some problems with an operation the ATF dubbed, Fast and Furious, has made headlines with over 2,500 machine guns that our government gave the cartels in a sting operation and have since been used to kill our own law enforcement in Arizona. This is just another example that proves the joke is on us, in this War on Drugs. Another problem, the pharmaceutical giants who sell legal heroin to our kids in pain killers like Oxycontin. The kids smash up the pills and snort them for a quick high. This is leading to the more raw form, Mexican tar heroin. In south Orange County, California there have been 80 overdose deaths in a few years and finally reporters like David Whiting, chief editor for the Orange County Register, has started writing about these very issues.
The solution to this War on Drugs is many fold. First we have to make drugs look less enticing. A mass media campaign must be followed by success stories from those who have turned away from drugs and got their families, careers and lives back. We have to show the public that it is a spiritual war since drug use divides every blessing possible, like families, marriages, freedom, jobs and everything else that is forgotten about during drug use and all the aforementioned are broken and divided to nothingness. Second we have to attack this problem with our over crowded jails and prisons. We have to give these inmates something to turn their lives around while incarcerated, like helping them learn how to write all manner of scripts, along with job and living placement upon release. In Nevada released prisoners are offered jobs in sanitation and released prisoners find meaning in work, getting their families back, fitting into the community and realizing they can survive. Nevada has the lowest recidivism, rate of return back to prison in the nation.
