Will prohibition destroy the Iraq turnaround?
There’s nothing like prohibition to fund gang violence and to corrupt government officials. I think that if alcohol had been illegal in 1787 the United States would not have survived long enough to become a stable country. Alcohol prohibition was bad enough here in the twenties, and prohibition-related gang violence today is still endemic in some parts of the country.
Now, after months of reduced violence in Iraq and Iraqi gangs coming in from the heat to join the democratic process, comes news that opium is taking root in Iraq. This has the potential to derail the good things happening in Iraq and turn it into another narco-state like Columbia and, increasingly, Mexico. Prohibition may well nurture too much violence and corruption for a young Iraq to handle.
We don’t have to legalize heroin to undercut opium trafficking any more than we had to legalize pure alcohol to undercut alcohol trafficking. Re-legalize opium and it will drastically cut demand for the stronger forms of the drug. But the time to undercut the black market in opium is now, and the only way to do it is to bring opium out of the black market.
- Baghdad Security Improved Tenfold
- “Ten times more neighborhoods in Baghdad are secure now than at the start of the surge, according to the US military, and 75% of the Iraqi capital now qualifies for that status. The remarkable improvement comes on the anniversary of the shift in strategy and tactics known as the ‘surge’, and it highlights the dramatic turnaround in Iraq over the past year.”
- Opium fields spread across Iraq as farmers try to make ends meet
- Nothing like making a crop illegal to make the crop more profitable and to fund gang warfare. “The move of local warlords into opium farming is a menacing development in Iraq, where local political leaders are often allied to gangsters. It is they, rather than impoverished farmers, who have taken the lead in financing and organising opium production in Iraq.”
More Iraq
- Lessons for new Presidents: Entangling long-term alliances
- How will our foreign policy change after President Obama’s Fortress America?
- President Obama violin concertos console bereaved Iraqis
- President’s iPod an oasis in crisis for the stress of a historic presidency, and the Middle East.
- It is right to stop genocidal dictators
- “No free nation can remain indifferent to the steady erosion of freedom around the globe. The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”
- Turning Republicans into heroes
- With the war turning around, filibustering Democratic withdrawal proposals is almost a no-lose situation for Republicans.
- Al-Qaeda tea-parties in Iraq?
- Did Saddam Hussein support terrorists? According to the Washington Post, yes. It’s all a matter of how you read their article.
- Seven more pages with the topic Iraq, and other related pages
More prohibition
- Learning from alcohol prohibition
- If the people against ending drug prohibition had been around in the thirties, we would never have ended the prohibition of beer and cocktails, because of the dangers of pure alcohol and bathtub gin. One of the lessons of the alcohol prohibition era is that we don’t have to go from banning everything to allowing everything. There is a middle ground.
- Progressives ruin a different kind of race in New Jersey
- As a potential triple-crown winner prepares for the third race of the Triple Crown, it’s almost impossible to place a bet in Atlantic City, NJ.
- U.S. homicide rate compared to gun control measures
- Extrano’s Alley lists the U.S. homicide rate from 1885 to 1940, and somebody else puts it into a chart.
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition
- Herbert Asbury’s book has to rank as one of the greatest arguments ever written against the drug war; this book about alcohol prohibition chronicles and forecasts all of the problems with modern prohibition that we see today.
- Cannabis Britannica
- Subtitled “Empire, Trade, and Prohibition”, this is an in-depth history of how prohibition came about in Britain, and ends up describing how marijuana prohibition came to the forefront of international attempts to ban opium.
- 26 more pages with the topic prohibition, and other related pages
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
Blogroll
- According To Hoyt
- Ace of Spades HQ
- The Anchoress
- John Hayward
- Legal Insurrection
- National Motorists blog
- The Other McCain
- samizdata.net
- Sultan Knish