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Showing posts from June, 2014

The War on Drugs: Bringing the Monster to Life

Make no mistake - America’s war on drugs has always been essentially a race war.   Whether Native American, Mexican, or African American, drugs have helped civilized folk justify their desire to discriminate.   Even the very first drug laws passed in San Francisco in 1875, which banned the smoking of opium in opium dens, were specifically aimed at the “tens of thousands of Chinese men and boys who had been imported into the U.S. during the 1850s and 1880s to build the great western railroads.” [i]   Those who passed such laws justified them by saying too "many women and young girls, as well as young men of respectable families, were being induced to visit the Chinese opium-smoking dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise." [ii]   As it was in the beginning, is now, and perhaps ever will be, the lowest forms of racism are always practiced in the name of the highest moral imperatives.  Ironically enough, America’s growing number of opium users were simply th