And now on to your second paragraph . . .

Now here's where I think you are being a very silly monkey, indeed (sorry, listening to Right In Two). An investigation into Afghanistan's present predicament will show you many things. First, the U.S. has forged its "Northern Alliance" by uniting warlords whose militias were (and are-now more than ever) financed by opium production. Second, since these warlords liberated the Afghani people from the Taliban (or exiled the political party that had outlawed opium production thus decimating their funding- you choose!), the amount of Afghani opium, heroin and hashish available on the world market has skyrocketed exponentially (just check for the Arabic writing that says "Thank you for funding our efforts to erradicate your kind," impressed into the next brick of killer hash you acquire). Third, in the interactions between the U.S. Armed Forces and the warlord-militias, our personel are routinely in immediate proximity to mountainside farms teeming with opium and cannabis, yet they do nothing. The Pentagon's official position is that matters of illegal drug production are legal issues and thus not within the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense (of course, Latin Americans may challenge the validity of this claim as they are showered in an extra-powerful formulation of Round-Up by American military aircraft). Fourth, the last time our military employed a strategy like this (by uniting opium-producing warlords to rid Afghanistan of the Soviet menace) also happened to coincide with the last big American heroin boom in the 80's.

Do I have to continue to enumerate coincidences, or is the conspiracy theorist in you ('cause I know you all have one) already foaming at the mouth? I personally don't believe that there is any other logical conclusion to draw other than our military would wipe out the opium producers if the government wasn't making a shitload of money from the distribution of the product. There is no doubt in my mind that by the beginning of the next decade, we will all be subjected to mass-media coverage of Congressional hearings into our second Afghani expedition's very own version of the Iran-Contra scandal. Maybe the scapegoats in this one will have cushy, cabinet jobs under the next round of Republican leadership just like the guys on W.'s cabinet . . . but agian, I digress . . .

The fact is that the United States is a complicit- if not founding- member of the extant drug trafficking operations in the world; and our military is deployed frequently to further that interest. Our actions in Kosovo were consistent with these interests (if you want to do some intense research, look up the Kosovo Liberation Army, aka the KLA, aka Eastern European mules who connected Afghani hash and heroin with the Western European market).

Our installations of brutal dictators all over South and Central America have certainly been consistent with these efforts. This may seem to be in contrast to the policy of military planes dusting Latin America with defoliants, but climb a little deeper down the rabbit hole. As Noam Chomsky points out in "Plan Columbia" (an excellent, one-hour documentary that does a much better job of enumerating the layers of this phenomenon than I am), crop dusting is actually the least cost-effective means of attacking the supply and demand of which we are aware.

So why do we do it? Twofold subterfuge. First of all, the majority of the money in such military programs goes to defense contractors (aircraft) and chemical manufacturers (Round Up=DuPont), so American corporate interest is satisfied. Second, implementing a program like this provides the distraction that allows the American government to sell its people a bill of goods, while simultaneously serving as a safety net that will serve to discredit any attempts to expose their actual motives. The age of information has brought the American people into greater contact with the policies of its government, and has given us the ability to cast a spotlight into the blackness that encompasses our nation's covert agendae.

Thus the nature of the game has shifted; it is no longer sufficient to be secretive when operating an enterprise of this magnitude. Our government must distract us with one hand while running the show behind its back with the other; they persecute drug addicts and suppliers with their public hand while they profit from their cultivation of addiction with the other.

As we train and arm militaries for our installed dictators accross Latin America; and then suppliment that with similarly trained and better-armed, independent militias; it is no wonder that the puppets mimic their pupeteers. The independent para-militaries, whose job it is to uproot dissent in ways that the sanctioned military cannot, must find a way to sustain themselves. They make deals with traffickers to get in on the best action available, using as a negotiating chip, their ability to influence the official military. Thus, the traffickers, the paramilitaries, and the official military work in shadowed concert to force the civilian population into a Coca economy; dedicated to the growth, refinery and transportation of Coca/Cocaine.

Like in America, the innocent masses are caught between the crosshairs of a very profitable hypocrisy. In the U.S., when we are waylaid in this quagmire, we get jailtime- the severity of which I in no way denegrate. But in the third-world, a person is more likely to become a hushed up statistic in the massacre of an entire flyspeck village; or to become the victim of brutal disfigurement/dismemberment torture (often without hopes of obtaining information, but rather of sending a message); or just forced into a life of exploited labor devoted to cocaine production.

The sad reality that rests at the bottom of this rabbit hole is that the biggest gains reaped in this cycle of hypocrisy and oppression are reaped by the military-industrial complex of the United States government. I call you a "silly monkey" because you assert that the legalization of drugs would facilitate multi-billion dollar tax revenues for our government. I call you "silly monkey" because I frequently have to burst the bubble of my inner-idealist by realizing that humans may never see the reversal of this hypocrisy precisiely because of the unknown billions that they stand to gain by propagating it. The system that our government eschews is just so twisted and rife with tragedy that I almost welcome the inevitable coming of our Chinese overlords. The pay and the hours may suck, but at least the Communists and Confuscianists don't really go for the whole drug thing, though they may be learning . . . but one final time, I digress . . .

Allow me to leave you with this . . . I certainly do not think that an honest evaluation of the facts says that there is no distinction between the so-called "soft" drugs and "hard" drugs; I merely assert that this distinction is implicitly a medical one and not a legal one. Stay minded of the model of the 18th and 21st ammendments to the constitution (prohibition of alcohol, the hardest drug of 'em all- see Bill Hicks): the years between the respective passages of these ammendments bore witness to a.) an increase in the consumption of alcohol; b.) an increase in the profitability of alcohol; c.) a revitalization of the Italian Mafia, which had been strugling to maintain its existence, after the lead of Al Capon. Prohibition is not in effective tool in combating the enigma of drug abuse. Remember also, the Swiss model for handling cocaine when you contemplate the validity of the "legalize all drugs" argument. I personally believe that it is the only way to minimize the potential harm of drug abuse. Thanks for letting me bore you by responding in disortation form to your intelligent points. Sorry to single you out, but as you can see, when the spirit moves me . . .