Isn’t It Time To Legalize Cocaine?

Don’t you think?

Colin Davis via Unsplash

It is widely accepted that one of the great lies of the 20th century was the war on drugs.

Politicians who had absolutely nothing to offer by way of responsible and progressive policies always found a way to appeal to base instincts of their supporters by giving them what they thought they wanted.

This was certainly the case with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

When Elvis Pressley turned up at the White House during tricky dicky’s time as leader of the free world, it was difficult to know to which of the men had consumed the most amount of mind altering pharmaceuticals.

But it didn’t matter.

So long as these corrupt politicians could use the war on drugs to justify the mass incarceration of Black and Brown men, it wasn’t a problem.

But the real story on the war on drugs was what was really happening in our name, overseas.

The American empire in the 1980s was as much as a military and economic enterprise as it was a drug cartel.

And the Iran-Contra episode was an extraordinary case in point.

We got to learn that Reagan administration was funding its operations in central America and the middle-east…