Free Markets, Indeed

Bolivia's getting ready to have an election considerably more interesting than any the United States has had in the past century. The likely winner of a plurality wants to decriminalize coca production, an excellent idea, but is apparently also under the spell of some heavily Marxist ideas which suck.

His main opponent is supposedly an ardent advocate of the free market, which sounds great, except he excludes coca and its deriviatves from that market, and is highly focused on Bolivia's other main resource, petroleum and natural gas. All well and good, except petroleum and natural gas are hardly commodities exchanged on anything like a free market. An oligarchy of global corporatons and the OPEC cartel call the shots, essentially dictating price, supply, and the amount of environmental responsibility they'll take in the process of exploiting these resources.

I'm not anti-petrol per se, but ask the people in New Orleans how much care the oligarchs took of their natural hurricane buffers while pumping oil out of the Gulf of Mexico.

The U.S., being run in large part by oil interests, would rather the un-free market guy gets the office. Also, because the war on drugs has made a grown industry of prisons, allowed the extension of Jim Crow through selective prosecution, and justified a portion of our grotesque and overgrown military budget for 'interdiction,' a government in Central America that flat-out legalizes cocaine production...well, if that comes to pass, don't be surprised to hear that we have solid intelligence they're developing Weapons of Mass Destruction (which, apparently, it's only okay for the U.S. and a few close friends to have).

What are the drug warriors protecting us from? Aside from a larger black middle class (if you've done tme for a drug offense, it's a bit of an impediment to those high-five-figure career tracks, though the white people in those career tracks use cocaine widely, generally without facing so much as a night in jail)?



I would like to add that in tracking down these numbers (sources vary, for instance, on stogies, from 385,000 to 435,000; alcohol fatalities typically include alcohol related vehicle accidents, but by some accounts, drunk passenters killed by sober drivers 'count' in that tally), I found an interesting side not. The 17,000 deaths claimed (fairly consistently) for illicit drugs is not only microscopic compared to tobacco and booze, but non-steroidal anit-inflammatories (ibuprofen and friends) account for 7,600 U.S. deaths.

Much like the hysteria over shark attacks (in the face of nine people a year gettig eaten in a population of well over six billion), the menace of cocaine and other narcotics in general is realatively small. Do some people destroy their lives with Bolivian Marching Powder? You bet. Others self destruct with the bottle, compulsive sexual behaviors, gambling, etc. You can't legislate sobriety. No one ever decided not to get high because it was 'against the law.'

Big petroleum interests ready to bully the next leader of Bolivia, whoever it ends up being...no harm can come from that, right?