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  Tuesday  February 26  2002    11: 01 PM

War Against Some Drugs

This Is American History On Drugs

"The point isn't that if you buy a joint, you're automatically supporting terrorism," an ONDCP [Office of National Drug Control Policy] official told me. "The point is that you know where the money is going."

Well, okay. But I have a suspicion that if I buy a joint, my money will be going to a guy who scored some righteous bud a while back and now grows it using lamps in his basement. The illicit cash I give him will probably help fund sinister activities like paying rent (the one drug dealer I knew well in high school used his ill-gotten earnings to fuel a very ugly blue pickup truck) or buying mad stereo equipment. So although I don't know where my money goes, I have a decent idea. On the other hand, I really haven't a clue as to where most of my tax money goes, and if I decide to ask about some of its more interesting uses, my government's first inclination is usually to tell me to buzz off. But the world is full of people more persistent than me, and some of them have lawyers. As a result, I can now peruse a veritable bounty of declassified documents, and many of them indicate that a fair portion of my tax payment ends up with drug runners and terrorists. So I wouldn't be opposed at all if the ONDCP opened put a new web page called "Drugs and Your Government: A Blowback Story." The drug war is paralyzed by an absurd schizophrenia--the purpose of our domestic policy is the mitigation of our foreign one.
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thanks to wood s lot