The Rant Institute

In 1851, Herman Melville wrote an epic sea story of an ill-fated whaling ship that would become one of the Great American Classics.   In the story, an obsessed whaling ship captain hunts a ferocious, enigmatic white whale named Moby Dick, and willingly sacrifices the lives of his entire crew in the process. A central part of the story is a Nantucket whale-ship called the Pequod.   Like Melville’s tale, America’s hunt to solve its drug problems have been conducted with similar obsession, on a similarly ill-fated ship. That ship is made up of the Prison Industrial Complex and the War on Drugs, or like the ship in Melville’s tale of a crew doomed by its captain, the ‘PICWOD.’   The only difference between the two is that one was a whaling ship and the other is a slave ship.   Melville’s description is equally applicable to both ships, however, with each being a “cannibal of a craft” that "tricks herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies."  To destroy all...

America’s modern War on Drugs is actually an internalized continuation of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, with the former being an even bigger quagmire than the latter. As Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg have pointed out, closing the door on Ho Chi Minh in South Vietnam meant opening the door to heroin in America. Evans and Goldberg explain:    “During the Vietnam War, the CIA aided the heroin producing Hmong tribesmen in the Golden Triangle area. In return for cooperation with the U.S. government’s war against the Vietcong and other national liberation forces, the CIA flew local heroin out of Southeast Asia and into America.” [i]     A decade later, Oliver North would use the lessons of Vietnam to bypass the U.S. Congress and provide support for the Contras in Nicaragua.  Having the CIA ship heroin into the United States allowed President Nixon to declare a “war on drugs” in June 1971. That declaration of war allowed him to dramatically...