> We can start with the worry here about "the innocent" having their lives
> destroyed. Of course. That is essential to all the many tentacles of the
> repressive machinery created in the U.S. over the last half-century,
> beginning with the War on Drugs. None of these programs is intended to catch
> "malefactors"; all are intended, primarily, to terrify the innocent.
>
> There is, of course, much more to say about all these programs, but as a
> beginning one _must_ focus on them as state terrorism.
>
> Carrol
=================
No. That is the worst functionalism that makes leftists look like idiots.
The WosD doesn't catch "malefactors"; it does catch people who the State regards as engaging in criminal activity. It is a political problem, nothing more, to dismantle the institutional-cum-justificatory practices that perpetuate the criminalization of human beings who want to change their brains and those perpetuating the current supply chains by any means necessary to secure income.
Intimidating non-users with a horrible set of sanctions for deciding to use is part of the problem because it is being done by people who know far less about what illegal drugs do to brains than our best neuroscience even as neuroscience severely underdetermines whether people may use drugs. It is the production of "permission" that is the kernel of the political problem which is why liberty, as uncoerced choice, matters in any putatively democratic society.
The sheer number of drug users in the US and elsewhere would seem to indicate that no one is being terrorized by the WosD. Better analyses and rhetoric is called for.
E.