[lbo-talk] RE: Panopticon 2003

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Thu Oct 2 05:43:52 PDT 2003


joanna bujes wrote:
>
> I wrote:
> "Surveillance is not treatment."
>
> Brian wrote:
> "It's certainly part of it. Seems to me that getting someone off of drugs
> will involve some degree of surveillance. After all, aren't AA meetings
> just a way of having people check in with their case workers?"
>
> In my experience, addictions can only be cured by the addicts themselves.... Support helps a lot. Support includes: medical support, therapy, places to go and dry out in safety and temporarily away from drugs, places and a means to live while transitioning back to a normal life.
>

Joanna's posts are pretty good on this, but let me underline a point: there is a fundamental and irresolvable contradiction between treatment on the one hand and punishment and/or surveillance on the other. The acceptability of both for drug addicts is in itself fairly conclusive evidence that the war against drugs is a farce and a scam. Treatment is precisely what the "drug programs" are designed to prevent.

The War against Drugs is in any case a Race War, and was intended to be such. It is probably the primary replacement for Jim Crow and Lynching.

See Bill Mullen's review of Mary L. Dudziak, _Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy_, in the new issue of _Science and Society_ (Fall 2003). It also has an interesting review of _Empire_ by Alan Shandro.

Carrol

P.Sl Also see Yoshie's recent post on pedophilia and its treatment. "Critical Support" by leftists of the War Against Crime belongs in the same category with leftist defensives of those two major precursors of the current war, the invasions of Haiti and Yugoslavia. Even the (always abortive) War Against Cancer was intimately connected with the Cold War and the hammering out of a new imperialist strategy over the last 40 years or so.

P.S. 2. I'm not going to try to defend any of these propositions. I'm just tossing them out as something to think about.



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