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What role should the US play in reducing the production of illicit drugs-such as cocaine and heroin-in places like Bolivia and Afghanistan?

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Vices will always be a powerful tool for our enemies. When our enemies are barred from entering our country through the front door, with vices they have a back door available that lets them in! Such is the case with drug use in this country.

For most of us, our vices, we so often believe, aren't hurting anybody but ourselves. Truth be told, Illicit drugs generate illicit profits, which must be washed clean in order to be used again in the free market world economy. Time tested paths leading back to the past, funnel this cash and often buying weapons with great destructive power. This is a grave problem in Afghanistan, who produces the world's supply of poppy, and is the, mecca of hatred, toward the US, in the war on terror. And Bolivia also involved in illicit drug trade, and allied with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and former Cuban president Fidel Castrol. Together and separately, they define the divide between us and our enemies, even if their products have medicinal values; they are discouraged from use because they fund people with destructive desires toward our country. All legitimate fears!

Awareness and education always stirs someone's conscience, so if our drug education programs have helped anybody I can't fault it. But realistic depictions of cocaine manufacture might have more impact over the current mascot McGruff the comic narc. Instead let them view a documentary were the production of cocaine as we know it, is exposed. Let them see the fact that kerosene and the soles of the peasants feet are all churned together in a hollowed tree trunk to form the paste that is transported the US. Let them see at a young age that heroin use funds rebels in Afghanistan, who are backing Iraqi resistance, by killing American troops. If this message was getting to our youth we would surely move the conscience of a few more.

Leaving the politics of the war aside, funding our enemies should be deterrence enough against the use of these illicit drugs. Clearly it's not, mainly because the root of the problem is; people have vices, and when vices are handled as a crime, instead of the social anomaly they are, the results of the cure can be worse than the vice, on the world stage and the local home stage alike. We are attacking the problem with million dollar techno bombs abroad, when we could educate our young with stark detail, what their evil profits do! On the home stage we are jailing up a predictable part of our population, and interventions, that require


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What role should the US play in reducing the production of illicit drugs-such as cocaine and heroin-in places like Bolivia and Afghanistan?

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What role should the US play in reducing the production of illicit drugs-such as cocaine and heroin-in places like Bolivia and Afghanistan?

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