Two centuries ago, China lost its War on Drugs. They were known then as the "Opium Wars": a concerted financial campaign, backed by the military might of the European powers, to bankrupt the Chinese economy by addicting their entire population to Opium. And it was extremely successful. The narcotics were grown in newly conquered India, and exported to the Far East by merchants under the guise of "free trade", where Chinese citizens by the millions paid in gold and silver for them. The citizenry had no choice but to accept whatever price the suppliers demanded of them, for the only alternative was going through drug withdrawal, which brought with it pain, despondence, depression, and in some cases, even death.
The Chinese government of course resisted, and fought two wars with Europe in an attempt to stave off the flow of what they considered to be contraband. Unfortunately for them, though, they lost, and the terms of their surrender included a full capitulation to their population's voracious demands for European merchandise. And so the "Invisible Hand" of the free market picked their pockets clean, until China, at one time the most wealthy nation on the planet, was relegated to an impoverished Third World existence. There it would remain for the next two centuries, only just now, in the year 2017, beginning to reclaim its former glory.
The historical lesson is very clear: drug addiction doesn't just destroy people's lives. It also destroys communities, cities, and even entire nations. And a people who have been targeted by drug lords must do everything within their power to fight back, for the fate of their civilization is at stake.
It is very ironic that as Eastern civilization finally begins to recover from the blow dealt to it by the West generations ago, America finds itself struggling not just with similar problems, but with the exact same narcotic in purified and enhanced form: Heroin and its Opioid derivatives. They are already sucking American communities dry, siphoning wealth away and leaving hollowed out husks behind. The inner cities of America have long since suffered that very same fate, having been all but destroyed by the Cocaine epidemic in the latter half of the 20th century, compounded by misguided administrative policies that only exacerbated the problem. And just as the fate of Black America has foreshadowed the fate of the rest of the nation by virtually every other metric, so too is the American Heartland just now beginning almost as rapid a decline in living standards.
"So what is the answer?" you might ask. In my view, it is to treat the drug epidemic not as a criminal matter for the police and courts to handle, but as it truly is: a public health crisis that requires the expert care of doctors, nurses, and hospital personnel. China's mistake all those years ago was to try to solve their drug problems through force of arms alone, instead of incentivizing their people to fight the addictions that were destroying their lives and their communities.
That is not to say that the Justice System should be dormant in countering the Opioid threat. But throwing an addict in prison, where they still have access to smuggled-in drugs, is not a solution, nor is going to war with the international drug lords, whether they be in South America, Central Asia, or in America itself. Neither of those policies will stave off that same voracious demand for illicit merchandise that doomed the Chinese people to countless decades of poverty and despair.
Beyond that, though, I have very few answers, largely because there are virtually no historical examples of a successfully won War on Drugs. It may sound pessimistic, but those are the unfortunate facts of the matter. If someone has become addicted to Opium, Cocaine, Heroin, or any other substance, quitting is an exceptionally difficult personal struggle that they must go through, and while others can certainly help to ease the burden, ultimately no one has power over their remission except for themselves. That, as one could say, is their prerogative.
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