[nowandthen]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

Can you actually declare war on inanimate objects?

And maybe I'm a skeptic but considering all the documented involvement that U.S. agencies have had in drug trafficking from heroin to cocaine it's hard to believe that their hearts are really in winning this war.

I had a paradigm shift around the term "war on drugs" back in 1995 when I was doing HIV outreach in rural areas out side of Houston Texas. I went to a conference in Austin for work and was in a workshop with a women who was doing outreach work in LA. She was in recovery and self-identified as Latino work in low income and communities of color and gave a great talk. The one thing I took away was here description of "war". She asked us if we knew what happened in a war, we gave different answers. She described it this way, " In a war, people die and we take prisoner". If we look back to the Reagan years, and the "war on drugs until today what have we seen? The government flooded the streets with crack, we had the drug laws that gave more time for rock cocaine vs powder, we got tough on crime with 3 strike laws, and we created the private prison industry.

So language that sound good on the outside actually is a system that has created what Michelle Alexander book, The New Jim Crow exposes which is system of laws that have created a permanent underclass that is in one form or another under the surveillance of the state (Jail, probation, metal institution, work release, etc). So for me the war on poverty is the same thing, war is a devastation not a construction that creates a world without poverty, in fact it recreates the need as a tool of marginalization, blame the victim for not have bootstraps. Ah, the 1% are good