Deliverance

The US Government has a plan. A plan to deliver us from the the scourge of drugs. Really. For sure. Well OK not so sure. It is hard to sell sure after the twentieth or thirtieth time. Well it is all good. But not in fun.

Law enforcement agencies have arrested more than 2,200 people in an investigation targeting Mexican drug trafficking organizations in the United States, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

The probe, called Project Deliverance, focused on the transportation networks that carry methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and marijuana into the United States, with return trips of drug proceeds and weapons.

At a news conference Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the extensive operation began nearly two years ago. He said federal agents targeting violent drug cartels have seized nearly 70 tons of marijuana and nearly 1,500 pounds of heroin. Authorities said some of the drugs were hidden inside buses that cross the Southwest border.

But Holder said the fight is far from over.

“Make no mistake. We know that as successful as this operation was, it is just one battle in what is an ongoing war,” he said.

Yeah. A War On Plants and Plant Extracts is going to be successful one day. Real Soon Now. The war on the opium and coca plants has been going on for 96 years (Harrison Narcotics Act). The war on the hemp plant has been going on for 73 years (Marihuana Tax Act of 1937). So yeah. Real soon now there will be some useful results.

At the news conference in Washington, Michele Leonhart, acting administrator of the DEA, described the law enforcement strategy as an effort to cut off and shut down the supply of drugs headed northward and the flow of drug profits and guns southward into Mexico.

Well the US Government has been doing that for over 70 years with no end in sight. Evidently the government is beginning to wise up. A little. Look at what the Drug Czar recently said about the government effort.

"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told the Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."

So what do you call an effort (how many Drug Kingpins have been collected so far?) that makes things worse and yet is intensified with each successive failure?

A Government Program.

That is how it works with socialism (price supports for criminals). And yet a lot of so called conservatives support this program. A friend of mine tells me that in the new crop of "Conservatives" running for election this year there are quite a few who favor government price supports for criminals (what would a pile of vegetables be worth if it wasn't for Drug Prohibition?). I don't get how you can be a Conservative and support a government program that has never worked, is not working, and will never work in the way proposed by its supporters. Did I mention that it costs at least $50 billion a year (Federal, State, and Local). A rather nice chunk of change in these hard times.

Cross Posted at Classical Values