Crime and Punishment in the United States – Part II

Wolf Moon, 03 January 2026

I wish to start this post with a condemnation of the so-called War on Drugs that has been waged by the United States federal and state governments for decades against its own citizens. I hesitate to even use the label “War on Drugs” because it is purposefully misleading. It is not a war on arbitrarily selected chemicals. It is a domestic war of terror against the people of the United States.

The criticisms of this domestic war are legion. The government has no right to tell people what to do with their bodies. It is the prohibition, not the use of drugs, that generates crime. The war fosters citizens’ disrespect for law enforcement and the judiciary, and corruption within those latter two institutions. The wealth wasted on this domestic war of terror could be put to constructive use. Drugs could be regulated and taxed, like alcohol, generating a revenue stream for governments. The war is the foundation of an overreaching surveillance state.

As such, my commentary would contribute little to dialog on this issue. In a rational world, these arguments would have compelled an ending to the war decades ago. These arguments, however, are purposefully ignored.

Instead, I think it would be more productive to discuss the vested interests who benefit from this domestic oppression. This war is waged on their behalf. More disinfecting sunlight needs to be cast upon those who benefit from, and thus advocate, this travesty.

Offhand, one should first accuse the various components of the US legal system would benefit from this war. After all, more crime means more business, more employment, higher salaries, more confiscations, more money. Such actors include:

Then there are the brutal major cartels that cater to this demand, such as those that dominate Mexico. They would go out of business overnight if drugs were relegalized.

A little more reflection points to other domestic beneficiaries: the beer, wine, and alcoholic beverages industries. Psychoactive (and safer) drugs would be competition and thus bad for business.

But even more potent is mainstream media. The mainstream media thrives on hysteria and fear, and nothing generates hysteria better than shouting “drugs”. From the media’s point of view, there can never be too much hysteria, no matter how many innocent lives it destroys.

And then there is the media’s conjoined twin, the politicians. Any politician who advocates sanity on this issue is immediately tarred with the label “soft on crime”. Politicians also thrive on fear and are thus co-conspirators with media.

A little more research on this topic is more disturbing. Other powerful, private financial interests are also motivated to sustain and expand this terroristic war.

Credible testimony from the United Nations indicates that the global banking system was at least partially sustained in 2008 by the laundering of supposedly illegal drug money:

And then there are the major military contractors as described in:

Hard data is hard to acquire here, but an example suffices to indicate how deeply entrenched the military contractors are. To quote:

Between 2005 and 2009, the U.S. spent more than $1.9 billion in counter-narcotics contracts in Colombia, with the majority going to just five companies: DynCorp, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, ITT, and ARINC.

With all these war mongers, it’s a wonder that half of the United States is not already in prison, imprisoned by the other half of the population. Or perhaps it already is – it’s just that the bars are invisible.

All of which leads to the question: What can be done to rectify the situation? I do not see a clear way out of this catastrophe. Too many people and institutions profit from this misery and corruption. The polite, yet unrealistic, answer is that we need to vote for and thus elect better politicians. That will never happen. The system is rigged. We have already seen this regarding the issue of mass immigration/invasion of the United States and Western Europe. The citizens of these countries never asked for, never voted for, their nations to be flooded with unassimilable migrants. Yet here we are.

Alas, this will probably only change with economic collapse - when the United States cannot no longer afford the luxury of this domestic warfare. We saw something similar in the 1930s when, in the throes of the Great Depression, alcohol was relegalized through complicated legal maneuvering. It is a sad state of affairs when it takes one catastrophe to end another catastrophe.

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