From this morning's El Paso Times comes the latest total death figures from last month in the ongoing drug war in Juarez. Dada wishes to congratulate all sides in this seemingly endless battle. Of course, none of this would be possible without the most important of all behind-the-scene contributors -- American dopers!As reported by the Times, a total of 248 Juarez murders (8 per day!) in July has established a new record for violent deaths in that city. This despite Mexican army troop and federal police buildups.
But 248 deaths in one month does more than set a record, it shows the tremendous progress being made in the drug war that during all of 2007 generated a mere 300 total deaths in El Paso's sister city! And it establishes a mark that Dada is sure will endure for, oh, er, at least the next 31 days!
Today's Juarez figures for July come on the heels of the number of deaths being reported that were suffered by the American military in Afghanistan during July. As one mother who lost her only son there on the 22nd of July said (wishing to retain anonymity while choking back tears), "It's good to receive the July death figures for Juarez. It makes me feel somewhat better about my lost son, about Afghanistan. We only lost 43 brave American soldiers there in an oil war last month. Imagine how much worse it could have been if we were fighting a drug war in Mexico!"
4 comments:
it seems we had dopers here long before the just as behind-the-scene obscene costs and brand new market exploitation/development associated with LBJ's Golden Triangle Dance accompanied by the exsanguinating tones of Trickle Dick's DoubleDEAlers (1973) and St Ronnies Coke in America - Guns & Leaves & Poppies Tour backup group (CIA)... and the $40 billion on track for this year just for the 'good guys' in this country may be the real reason for the control of territory shuffle happening across the river rather than the actual consumption habits of a bunch of stoners who would just as soon grow their own little garden patch unmolested by fascistic control fantasies and stupid cronyistic demonization-for-the-sake-of-economic-markets blindness ...
Just think Dada... you are front rowed on the pre-view of what may be the new interactive reality show coming this fall to venues near and far across the land...
it probably is too much to ask of fate that ALL of the homicides were between only the players in the WOD and not those merely in the wrong place & time. sadness.
gaaah ... I had to enlarge the pic, even though you had provided proper warning ... noooooo .... I was immediately thrown backward in time to the far too tender age when I first discovered photos of the holocaust in our household encyclopedia .... so awful I don't think I slept all that year ... so horrible I still have nightmares.
or, to sort of echo the quoted grieving juarez mom, it's a good thing our war casualties don't arrive back here looking like that. a pile of bodies like that would be hard to ignore. but never fear, I'm sure many of our species are more than up to the task.
Nice writing! But what's easier to change, the behavior of 15 million people or the policy we use to control marijuana?
The prohibition's been in place for *seventy years* now and currently 6,000 people use marijuana for the first time every single DAY. 100 million people (a third of this country) acknowledge that they've obtained and consumed marijuana during the prohibition.
I don't think using guilt to change the behavior of "American dopers" is going to be any more successful than seventy years of arrest, incarceration, denial of federal aid, urine tests, and loss of employment has been.
And in the end we don't need Americans to stop using marijuana, we just need them to stop using *cartel* marijuana. And by far the easiest way to achieve that is by undercutting cartel prices with marijuana legally produced and sold to adults in safe and convenient locations. End the prohibition and save lives!
Thanks for the feedback re the drug wars, the oil wars. My reference to "American dopers" in conjunction with the futility of our drug war (and other wars, to include oil and more covert actions) was made in a pre-tabula rasa kind of period before the idealistic Dadaist dismantling of human culture's age old "successful" ways of doing things is accomplished (or not) if, as a species, we are to survive. It's "idealistic" to me in that the inclination to change things is elusive if not outright undesirable.
As Ryan Grim remarks of another drug, LSD, "The cultural hunger for a substance that lets you hold affordable conversations with God, watch walls melt, breathe colors, and explore your psyche remains unsated," and apparently scares the shit out of the powers that be.
Experiencing such realities could dramatically impede mankind's age old way of doing things (er, undoing things). Besides, entire industries of profit have grown up around such prohibitions, leaving Dada skeptical of our reasons for often even denying a dying person their access to adequate pain management. Mightn't they experience euphoria before departing this oft times miserable plane of existence? But I digress.
D.K. The image I chose here is from another senseless result of war, that being a post-Dresden bombing exercise in "pain management."
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