Dead Republic

Category: Drug War

  • The Economics of Prohibition

    The Economics of Prohibition

    For a brilliant and insightful economic analysis into the Drug War and prohibitions generally, check out this brilliant, academic treatise.

    Spoiler alert: prohibition and the Drug War have caused far more harm by any measure than it ever did or was intended to help. Examples: increased potency and dangerousness of the prohibited product, corruption of law enforcement, lawyers, and judges and contempt for the law itself, cartelization of sales, the violence, and the paucity of treatment for true addicts, et. al. These all come not from the essence of the prohibited product, but from the prohibition.

    https://mises.org/library/economics-prohibition-0

  • Human Trafficking Profiteers

    This post will be a place for documenting people and organizations that sustain the prison-industrial complex because they profit from it.

    [In progress]

    Person/OrganizationParticipation
    JPay, Tom Gores, owner of @DetroitPistonsCharges exorbitant prices for low grade hardware and poor quality services that prisoners are forced to buy if they want to communicate with their friends and family. The typical outcomes of monopolies with an added twist of hate. They sell tablets that you have to use to send emails or get pictures from family. In addition to buying the garbage tablet, you also have to pay them with “stamps” for each email. Frequently there are serious bugs in the software and they could care less.
    GTL
    Keefe

    [Just getting started with this document. Feel free to comment if you have suggestions/comments.

  • Beginning of Civil War II

    Beginning of Civil War II

    One of my favorite articles about the drug war and the most telling quote, from one of Nixon’s henchmen, that the war began for the purpose of destroying Black and liberal communities. All the fake reasons that have been passed along for this atrocity are exposed in this one quotation by John Ehrlichman in an interview he gave to author Dan Baum in 1994. In a surprise response to other questions, Ehrlichman admitted:

    You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

    Baum, Dan. “Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs.” Harper’s Magazine, April 2016, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all. Accessed 15 Jul 2021.

    Countless hundreds of thousands of lives have been ended and ruined by these lies; lies told to gain these politicians and many since then an unfair advantage in their own elections. Some of those ended and ruined lives are innocents from foreign countries that our military and intelligence agencies have mowed down. Others are people murdered because they owned property that was advantageous to government agents to continue conducting their war. Then there are the obvious victims – people who made their own adult choice of recreation in the privacy of their own home. The privacy our own homes was among the first civil liberties to fall.