Drug War? - The Combatants Categorised

To get us started, let us set the scene for the battle for human being.

Part One:
The Armies Engaged in the Drug War

Soldiers of the Status Quo
The Corps for Complete Control of Culture: Chemical, Creative, & Community

The Division for Disease (D4D):

Their ammunition - HIV, Hepatitis C, dental decay and gum disease, abscesses and endocarditis. Delivered by: Bureaucrats and fiscal controllers through - Refusal to fund Needle & Syringe Programs or defunding and rolling back existing programs, police blitzes that drive users away from areas where services do exist,(Command, Control & Cash Collection: pharmaceutical transnationals, privatised health care system operators, UN Anti-Narcotics, US government-enforced maintenance of status quo through "dollars for drug laws" aid programs)

Platoon for Propagation of Poverty(P4PP):
Their ammunition: Heavy Artillery: A black market system that (i) ensures prices remain at an artificially inflated level; (ii) prevents peasants and poor farmers from participating in a legitimate market for crops that could ensure their economic viability - opium and coca. Field Guns: Increased use of drug-testing and the removal of basic workers rights defending them from dismissal. Delivered by: Employers, corrupt local governments, big-capital drug cartels. (Command, Control & Cash Collection: 'Legitimate' Industry with illicit interests; agri-business multinationals that want to determine the crops planted, and control the seed-stock used for planting; drug-testing businesses; big capital which wants a workforce desperate, downtrodden & de-unionised)

Confinement-Custodial Column (CCC):
Their ammunition Drug-laws affecting growth, production, possession, and supply. Many US-states have a 3-strikes & you're out clause that can see people sentenced to life imprisonment for 3 counts of supply - amounts can be smaller than a pound. In the NT 'Drug House' laws allow individuals and their homes to be targeted and have basic rights of requiring warrants for searches or police entry to be waived. Sniffer dogs - and the subsequent search-without-cause - are being increasingly employed against users for possession only - on trains, before raves, in clubs. Delivered by: Front-line units of police and drug law enforcement agencies, with their operations targeting small-time user-dealers, particularly those belonging to ethnic and cultural minorities.(Command, Control & Cash Collection : The prison-industrial complex - private profiteers who are paid with our tax dollars to keep communities behind bars and who then manufacture goods with a slave-labour force; along with the concentration-camp construction conglomerates; telco's cashing in on prisoners desperate for contact with their loved ones; arms producers who provide the hand-weapons, rifles, flak jackets, and tear-gas for cops, all the way up to the helicopter gunships used against peasant-run coca farms)

The Battalion of Bullshit, Bigotry & Brainwashing
Their ammunition: Bullshit bullets and battery bombardment brainwashing - A constant 'cradle-to-casket' campaign of indoctrination drawing on the education system, the mass media, medi-business and governmental "information". Their key concepts: (i) Prohibition is a social measure designed to protect public health - illicit drugs create harm inherently, and that is why they are illegal (ii) Drug-taking is anti-social and deviant (iii) Drug users ("addicts") care not at all for their own health, the health of their friends, or the community as a whole (iv) Addiction is the inevitable outcome of illicit drug use (v) Addicts are without morals, and will lie, cheat or steal for their next fix (vi) Despite their loss of moral compass, most addicts were lured into the lifestyle by dealers pushing their product, and have the potential to rejoin the "constructive community" if they receive treatment for their illness. Delivered by: Teachers, journalists, health professionals; and Key Concept Collaborator-Conduits - (While the other sectors of the army rely primarily on the direct-employment of foot-soldiers to carry out their work (programs like Neighbourhood Watch or Dob-in-a-Dealer are only ever limited in scope - communities, for the most part, will not consciously infect, impoverish or imprison their own) the BofBB&B rely on indoctrinating individuals to become ongoing mouthpieces for their lies in order to ensure a constant, unfettered flow of bigoted bullshit. Moreover, instilling the concepts in everyone helps create a gestalt amongst users whereby we internalise the bigotry, where we feel we really are doing something that is wrong, deviant, unclean. This helps make users less likely to challenge the outrages we are subjected to ("well, its my own fault isn't it; i deserve it maybe"), to ensure a divide-and-rule structure amongst users of different drugs ("yeah, I'm fucked up, but at least I'm not as fucked up as them"; "only pot and natural drugs should be made legal"); it can also see us speed up the work of the D4D ("well, all the images I’ve ever seen of users show them hitting up in dirty toilets and sharing fits, I suppose that's just what I've got to do if I want to use drugs" or "well users don't care about our health, so why should I make an effort to use safely”). Instead of being able to turn to our families for support, many users find this environment turned against them into another arena for judgment, for their behaviour to be constrained, or find themselves forced to live a lie, compounding the feelings of guilt and low self-esteem.(Command, Control & Cash Collection : The advertising giants paid to promote & preach prohibition; the corporate media - the radio shock-jocks and the stations who air them, and papers that publish tabloid columnists (who scapegoat users -on rostered rotation with refugees, single mothers, and welfare recipients- and sew fear, misunderstanding and bigotry); religious 'welfare' enterprises operating 'treatment' centres; government-controlled 'research' centres and university faculties churning out unscientific data on non-existent problems )

Fighting Forces for Pharmaceutical Freedom -The Anti-Prohibition Partisans

1. Units of User Activism:

While it is true that many drug users have played active roles in challenging prohibition since at least the 1950s, it took the impetus of the potential threat of HIV epidemic amongst our communities and the actual experience of losing loved ones to AIDS, before drug user organisations became a feature of the anti-prohibition army, in the late 1980s. User organisations take many forms around the world. In many locations, our groups have been forced to make the difficult decision of entering into a Faustian pact whereby, through acceptance of government funding, we are able to deliver vitally needed health programs for our communities – Needle & Syringe Programs (NSP), peer education, safe using training etc. Within this framework most groups seek to tackle bigger policy issues, and user magazines and other media forms enable us to challenge the accepted orthodoxy and encourage users to reject negative self-image and internalised stereotypes. Funded peer education programs themselves play a vital role in shifting users’ self-perception, and thus helping to build the ranks of the user-activist units. But the potential for organising effective mass, direct action against the system as a whole is compromised by our acceptance of funding from the system, and the fear of what would happen to our people if the programs were scrapped entirely or handed over to 'treatment' centres.Increasingly, specific, campaign-based, user-led anti-prohibition groups are forming. "A movement for liberation must be led by those it seeks to liberate."It is likely that the strongest potential for movement growth is through the parallel development of funded user-controlled organisations, and independent, activist-based anti-prohibition groups
In Australia, the peak-body of drug user organisations is the Australian Injecting & Illicit Drug Users League (AIVL) www.aivl.org.au and the vanguard of user-controlled, direct-action anti-prohibition campaigners is currently the Network Against Prohibition (NT) www.napnt.org

2. Legion of Law Reform
As a result of the assault on drug users, the combined impact of economic pressures, a perceived (and often actual) need for individual secrecy to prevent police harassment or unwanted family complications, the daily time pressures associated with scoring, and the huge ideological assault telling us that using is wrong and prohibition right, it is frequently difficult for drug users to step forwards and play an active role in the fight against the drug war. Consequently, the movement against drug prohibition up until now has frequently been championed by professionals in the fields of medicine & pharmacology, harm reduction, journalism, and law.
Some of the most outstanding examples can be found at www.stopthedrugwar.org (The Drug Reform Coordination Network), www.ihra.net (International Harm Reduction Association), http://www.antiprohibitionist.org (International Anti-Prohibitionist League).
Campaigners for rational, evidence-based drug policy have earned their place in the partisan army, have no doubt. It is important, however, that these organisations give the drug user movement proper recognition, and acknowledge that the place of drug users, wherever and whenever possible, is out in front.

With apologies for butchering the Bard:
"Two social policies, but, alas, only one believer in dignity,
In not-so-fair Victoria, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the factories, bars, bedrooms, squats & hives
An army of star, cross, crest & totem tattooed lovers stake our lives
On efforts we hope overthrowBarbarities best buried with the Bard
Atop the grave we will watch, water, and doof hard as a tree of true humanity doth grow
Bringing forth fruits for fun, fucks, freedom, for fast, and for slow
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend."