Published June 3, 2013, the ACLU’s War on Marijuana in Black and White report (broken down for you on News Genius) is the result of a ten year investigation into the War on Drugs and who the war is being waged on.

As Rand Paul states, the report reveals that not only do blacks use drugs at rates similar to or lower than their white counterparts but that

in the counties with the 15 highest median household incomes (between $85K–$115K), Blacks are two to eight times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites

thus indicating if not outright showing that there astronomincally high arrest rate is not simply due to poverty but, as the ACLU bluntly states, a manifestation of the true nature of the War On Drugs:

Billions of dollars wasted on racially biased arrests

This “Samson complex” is to an extent justified, mainly because the whole world (save the United States) actually is against Israel. You see, for close to half a century the United Nations and almost every nation on Earth has agreed on borders for Israel and Palestine, borders which would and should end the war immediately but won’t because the Israelis consistently choose expansion over security.

For this reason, other Arab nations are drawn into this debacle, such as Lebanon since the late 1940s–mainly because Israel tried to get rid of its Palestinian population and dump them in Lebanon and the consequences which emerged from that. Consequences such as the development of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (the negotiating arm for the Palestianian people, if you will), an organization which in the face of Israeli occupation resorted to terror which has put both sides and surrounding nations in danger of full out war, seeing as how the whole entire region and world supports a two-state solution.

Zeev Maoz makes a very clear case for the long-term goal of a nuclear-free zone in his New York Times Op-Ed, “Deterrent or Bargaining Chip” in which he explains that the nuclear arsenal was not only useless in deterring the attacks of terrorist groups but that holding such weapons would only make it more likely for any conflict to decay the region into a nuclear wasteland.

Instead, he proposes a “nukes for security” or “land for peace” where this time the Israeli government is asking for peace as opposed to threatening the region with it’s ensured absence.

Israel has repeatedly decided that the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty does not reflect Israel’s interests and thus cannot secure it’s place in the Middle East, a place which would have been secured if Israel accepted Egypt’s 1971 peace treaty (in a long line of proposed peace treaties) instead of fawning over expansion of its territory.

Israel remains the first and only Middle Eastern nation with the capacity to build nuclear weapons or the intention to do so. It also has a huge security guarantee in the form of teh United States but despite this forgoes making the region a Nuclear Free Zone (NFZ) to make it an Israel-safe Zone.

This brazen article was written in July 2008 (during Geneva talks with Iran to “abandon it’s nuclear weapons program”) and obviously was written out of a deep yearning for peace. Benny Morris the historian, without a hint of irony or hubris, stated Iran did not even have the option of peace–bombs had to be dropped on Iran’s nuclear sites unless it wanted Israel to drop nuclear bombs.

Benny went so far as to argue:

the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.

But it doesn’t end there:

It is in the interest of neither Iran nor the United States (nor, for that matter, the rest of the world) that Iran be savaged by a nuclear strike, or that both Israel and Iran suffer such a fate. We know what would ensue: a traumatic destabilization of the Middle East with resounding political and military consequences around the globe, serious injury to the West’s oil supply and radioactive pollution of the earth’s atmosphere and water.

So in the spirit of peace and continuity of the Middle East, and the Earth, Israel is reluctantly bombing Iran because the alternative is preemptively and enthusiastically bombing Iran with nuclear weapons–for peace.

Interesting

Michael Krepon wrote this after the United States (under Bush) allowed India to break the international agreement on nuclear arms, the NPT (meant to reduce the flow of the destructive weapons), by unilaterally lifting international bans on the sale of uranium–sales which would have been explicitly forbidden by the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. Krepon stated at the opening of the report:

Now that the United States has given India a free pass around nuclear controls, other states will be lining up to profit from proliferation.

Such a move could very well destabilize entire regions and bring about nuclear war acknowledged internally as a very real possibility.

As predicted by the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model, the mainstream media held nothing but negativity for Iran for it’s failure to bend over backwards to accomadate Western attempts at “stabilization” by preemptively cutting off the risk of nuclear weapons, despite no indication Iran pursued nuclear weapons going back to 2003.

The United States proposed a “freeze-for-freeze” arrangement where the US would stop further sanctions against Iran (mainly US sanctions and sanctions by its client states in West Europe) in exchange for Iran freezing its nuclear enrichment program, the literal exact position we took 30 years ago when Iran was under the control of a U.S. backed dictator, the Shah.

Most rat studies support this idea of drugs being incredibly addictive, to the extent that the rats would kill themselves by continually choosing the drugs and eventually overdosing. However, there is an ill-mentioned experiment, the Rat Park where Dr. Bruce Alexander proved (in the 1970s!!) that addiction was not a behaviorist issue but a social problem and blame lay with poverty and environment not the individual themselves, as many politicians and public figures claim today.

The Rat Park experiment different from the previous Skinner box experiments (the last vestiges of behaviorism) in that it did not isolate rats in metal cages and only give them access to drugs. Instead they were given an enriched environment.

There were three groups of rats. There was one group where, the rats would be forced to take morphine hydrochloride (morphine) for 57 consecutive days, then moved to Rat Park. A second group was kept in cages throughout the whole experiment. A third group was left in Rat Park from start to end. Rat Park (95 sq ft or 200 times larger than the usual cages; large enough for living, raising litters, toys for playing) had at the end of one tunnel large enough for one male to run down and it was there that a sweetened morphine solution (morphine is bitter and rats have a sweet tooth) and plain water.

Caged rats took the morphine instantly, no matter how little sweetener was added, at a rate about 19x the Rat Park groups. Rat Park groups that started and ended in the Park resisted the morphine no matter how sweet the morphine was, trying it sporadically but always preferring water to the morphine. The most interesting result was among the group of rats raised in cages, forced to become addicted to morphine, then moved to the Rat Park.

Those rats would switch, almost instantly, to water and give up morphine. There would be slight withdrawal symptoms, tremors and such, but they would not go back to using the drug in an enriched environment.

This study itself has much to say about the nature of addiction but pretty much puts the nail in the coffin of most drug theories which remain, descendants of the Skinner box/self-administer drug theories which claim addiction is ruthless, inescapable, and all consuming.

Hart’s research has basically found that everything Americans know about drugs is wrong whether it be the best policy to deal with addiction, the mechanism of addiction, the danger of drugs, the racial composition of use, all of it.

This has been become more and more apparent in recent years, with publications such as the ACLU’s report on the Drug War The War On Marijuana In Black And White: Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Motivated Arrests–citing a failure of policy resulting in a largely race-based crusade with little positive results–or the United Nation’s 2009 War on Drugs Report which praised decriminalization, condemned the failed war on drugs, and suggested all nations take up Portugal’s drug policy. Glenn Greenwald’s book on Portugal’s stance towards drugs could also be cited as further evidence that the tide is moving in the direction supported, finally, by groundbreaking research such as Carl Hart’s:

Treat addiction as a public health issue not a criminal issue