As Hillary Clinton and her left-wing supporters try desperately to persuade millennials to abandon their support for Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson and vote for her instead, her foreign-policy position in the Middle East, which, as I pointed out yesterday in part 1 of this blog post, entails a continuation of the 25-year-long U.S. campaign of death and destruction, is not the only Clinton position that she and her ilk are unable to promote to young audiences.
There is also the problem of Clinton’s ardent support of one of the of the most deadly, destructive, failed, immoral, corrupt, tyrannical, and racist government programs in U.S. history — the war on drugs. Throughout her political career, Clinton has been one of the biggest supporters of drug laws, notwithstanding the many people who have had their lives destroyed or ruined by them.
Equally important, Clinton, like her opponent Donald Trump, has made it very clear that if she is elected president, the federal government will continue to wage the war on drugs with ferocity and that her gendarmes will continue putting people, including young people, away for years in penitentiaries and destroying their lives with criminal convictions.
Why would Clinton’s support of the drug war be attractive to young people, many of whom ingest drugs? Even if we assume that drugs are not the healthiest way to live one’s life, why would any young person favor being sent away (or having his friends sent away) to a federal penitentiary for 20-30 years for ingesting a harmful substance, especially when he knows that there are many federal officials (including U.S. presidents) who have ingested illicit drugs without being sent to jail for it.
Why would it surprise anyone that many young people are gravitating to Libertarian Johnson, given his position that, at the very least, marijuana should be legalized, as some states are already doing? (Johnson, of course, doesn’t go far enough. The genuine libertarian position calls for legalizing all drugs, not just marijuana.)
Don’t forget — today there are lots of people serving out decades-long jail sentences because people like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump don’t believe that people should be free to ingest whatever they choose to ingest and want the state to continue punishing them for ingesting substances that the state doesn’t favor. (Ingesting alcohol and tobacco is considered okay in the eyes of the state.)
And that’s not all.
Consider the drug gangs, the drug cartels, and the drug dealers. They would disappear immediately with drug legalization. That’s because drug laws bring into existence a black market, one that entails unsavory people and violent activity. While the drug war purports to go after drug lords, it is the war itself that gives rise to drug lords. And as everyone knows by now, when they bust one, he is quickly replaced by another.
So, think about the irony: While Clinton and Trump and other drug warriors say they want to eradicate the drug lords and the drug gangs, the fact is that they support the governmental program that guarantees their continued existence. It is Johnson and other libertarians who support the only solution (drug legalization) that would immediately put drug lords and drug gangs out of business.
There is the official corruption — the bribes and payoffs to judges, prosecutors, and law-enforcement personnel, not to mention asset-forfeiture laws that provide cops and DEA agents with a license to steal cash from poor people.
There is also all the death and destruction that the war drug has spawned, not only here in the United States but also in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
Let’s not forget the racism associated with the drug war. In fact, it’s the most racist government program since segregation. Recall, for example, the African-Americans in Tulia, Texas, who were framed, convicted, and sent away to jail on bogus drug charges. Presumably, Clinton and her followers block their support of the racist war on drugs out of their minds when they point their hypocritical finger of racism at Donald Trump.
So, why does Hillary Clinton want to continue the war on drugs? For the same reason that Donald Trump does. There is an enormous drug-war bureaucracy that has developed over the decades that is now dependent on the largess that comes with the war on drugs. Like Trump, Clinton is steadfastly committed to that bureaucracy. It is their true constituency.
I’m not talking about the bribes or asset-forfeiture loot. I’m talking about plain old salaries. There are multitudes of judges, prosecutors, law-enforcement officials, and court clerks whose jobs depend on the war on the drugs. They all know that if drugs were legalized, they would no longer have anything to do.
Think of all those federal judges whose dockets consist primarily of drug cases (and immigration cases). They and their law clerks know that they would be sitting in their offices and twiddling their thumbs every day if the drug war were ended. The same goes for deputy sheriffs, policemen, the entire DEA, court clerks, prosecutors, and the rest of the vast drug-war bureaucracy. Add to that the national-security establishment, namely the military and CIA, which also thrives off the drug war.
Hillary Clinton and her left-wing supporters aren’t dumb. They know that Clinton’s support of the drug war will never induce millennials to leave Gary Johnson and vote for her. So, like with her (and Trump’s) foreign policy of death and destruction in the Middle East, she doesn’t talk about her ardent support of the drug war when she talks to young audiences. She saves that talk for old audiences, given the never-ending hope among many old people that the drug war will finally be “won” if only the right person is elected president.
