Cuba, Drugs, and Horribly Flawed Logic

Celebrity Boxing was on the TV at a bar last night (where is a crazed Muslim with a highjacked airliner when you need one) and one of the now infamous IF YOU BUY DRUGS YOU SUPPORT TERRORISM commercials comes on. I had heard of these but I had yet to see one aired. I was absolutely floored by the stupidity of the message. They are saying that if you buy drugs then you are an accomplice to terrorism because terrorists make money from drugs.

I didn’t realize that Leni Riefenstahl had risen from the grave and was producing Third Reich style propaganda but apparently I got caught napping. Do the people in charge of drug policy in this country think that they can lie to the public and still retain any credibility? This latest lie is the most foul thing to ever come out of our ludicrous war on drugs. These ads are so completely devoid of sensible logic that they don’t warrant one word of criticism. Just why our government is so terrified of its citizens doing drugs (the ones that aren’t legal) is beyond any rational explanation.

One ad from the Partnership for a Drug Free America implores parents to “tell your kids the truth about marijuana.” I’m all for telling the truth, and from what I have been able to gain from personal experience and extensive reading on the subject, is that marijuana is fairly benign. Most of the people I went to college with smoked a butt-load more dope than I did and they are all successful people. All of those who smoke cigarettes are now in worse shape than I, but tobacco is an accepted drug that kills more than all the “bad” drugs put together. Everyone already knows this.

Bush recently imposed a set of incredibly unrealistic conditions on when the USA would resume normal relations with Cuba. Freeing political prisoners and holding free elections were the two main points he stressed. I’m all for it, but let’s set the same standards for all nations including Saudi Arabia and China. Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women is so deplorable that every woman in that country is basically a political prisoner. As in the case with our country’s fear of drugs, I don’t understand our fear of Cuba. Are the going to attack us? Sounds silly to me but I'm no geo-political expert.

Our policy towards Cuba is set mostly by the Cuban émigrés in Dade County, Florida. The proposal by the present administration concerning Cuba is a direct result of his desire to court the vote of the anti-Castro exiles in Miami--his only hope of taking that state in the next presidential election. This community is one of the most right wing, anti free speech enclaves in this country. They are almost completely responsible for Castro’s continued reign in their native land. Had we ignored their rhetoric and opened trade with Cuba regardless of Castro’s politics, capitalism would have ushered him out of office years ago. Instead, our obstinacy has fueled Cuba’s obstinacy and for 40 years Castro has stayed put. This is almost as long as we have been waging our futile and costly war on drugs. Lies don't serve a democracy.