Lou Dobbs: We're Losing the War on Drugs

I am glad that at the very least Dobbs sees through the lies and BS spewed forth by the Bush administration.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- We're fighting a war that is inflicting even greater casualties than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, incredibly, costing even more money. We're losing the War on Drugs, and we've been in retreat for three decades.

That statement may come as a surprise to John Walters, Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, who spent last week trumpeting the Bush administration's anti-drug policies. He claims these policies have led to a decline in drug abuse and improvements in our physical and mental health.

While Walters focused on a marginal decline in drug use, he made no mention of the shocking rise in drug overdoses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week reported unintentional drug overdoses nearly doubled over the course of five years, rising from 11,155 in 1999 to 19,838 in 2004. Fatal drug overdoses in teenagers and young adults soared 113 percent.

More than 22 million Americans were classified with substance abuse or dependence problems in 2005, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Nearly 8,000 people are trying drugs for the first time every day -- that's about 3 million a year. The majority of new users are younger than 18, and more than half of them are female.

Obviously, John Walters and I are not looking at the same statistics. There is simply no excuse for permitting the destruction of so many young lives.

It's too bad that Dobbs fails to make the connection between the ongoing war on drugs and the increased use of drugs. As Peter points out, he does not get to the "how". Dobbs has a long history of missing the point. Just check out this OpEd Dobbs wrote that was published in the New York Daily News a few years back and Ethan Straffins' response.

Also via Peter is an interview between Lou Dobbs and LEAP speaker Terry Nelson. It must be so frustrating to do an interview that begins like this:

DOBBS: Now, you may think, and certainly I do, that we are in the grips of a mass idiocy when it comes to failure to secure our borders and our ports. The U.S. Border Patrol says drug seizures of cocaine and marijuana are up sharply this year. President Felipe Calderon, of Mexico, continues to target drug cartels, to his credit. But despite the idiocy that surrounds border security, there is another idiocy rising up.

A group of law enforcement agents now say that effort is actually fueling drug trafficking and violence, and they say the answer is to end the war on drugs.

It's very frustrating the way that the well-thought out arguments of drug policy reformers can be smacked down like this. Wanting to end the war on drugs makes you an idiot, maintaining the failed status quo isn't, no matter what facts we bring to the table. This really sucks.