A Few Words About Old Joe

First of all, evidently, the term "Old Joe" is slang for... all kinds of things, none of them Joe Biden. However, "Old Joe Biden" does seem to be a nickname-ish for Biden. I suppose there are so many Old Joes out there that you have to add Biden to specify which Old Joe is meant. So, yes, I am indeed talking about Joe Biden.

I don't like him.

Not that I don't like him. He seems like a perfectly affable fellow and completely likable. He was a fine Vice President. Or fine enough, anyway.
But he's way past his expiration date.

And I don't just mean that he's old. He is old (and, god, I am so tired of old, white men in government), but it's that his ideas are old. His ideas are old, but he's still treating them as if they are as new as they were in the 90s. We're past all that, Joe. Get your foot off the step of the progressive bus if you're not going to get on. The rest of us have places to go.

Needless to say, I am unhappy that Joe is who we are left with as the presumptive Democrat nominee. Is this really the best we can do?

No, not really, but "we" forced all of the better candidates out of the race.

This may all sound like I'm a Sanders supporter, but, no, he, too, is way past his expiration date. Sure, I would take Sanders in a heartbeat over Biden, but why is it that old, white farts are what we seem to get stuck with way too often?

And, now, let me return to my initial thought that spawned this post, rather than go off in the myriad directions I'm tempted to go in.
Joe Biden is the fear choice. He's like... I don't know, a safety word. Everyone is convinced that if he had just run in 2016 that we wouldn't have ended up with the orange carrot shit of a #fakepresident that we currently have. [Look, my dog likes carrots. When she eats a lot of them, like she did a few days ago, she gets the carrot shits. They make me think of Trump.] I'm not convinced of that, but I'm not not convinced of that, either. But it doesn't matter.

Look, we are way past making the safe choice. We are in... oh, trouble doesn't cover it. The carrot shit "president" has created global crises in so many areas, and all we have left to fix all of this are bold moves, especially in regards to the environment. And healthcare. And immigration. Fuck, so many things. Biden is not a bold choice. He's the choice that will quit making things worse but won't do anything to make things better. He's the status quo choice. And not even the return to the previous status quo choice, because he's so milk toast that he won't fight the GOP to even get things back to the way they were. He'll try to work with them and compromise based on how things are now, and we'll sit in stasis for at least another four years.

Evidently, we are going to have to be at the actual edge of environmental collapse before people wake the fuck up and realize that everything is about to collapse. Not that we are not already there, but it really has to be slapping people in the face, hard, before they are willing to look at it. The last time we made any significant changes in our approach to the environment happened when there was actual acid coming out of the sky. The ice caps melting is just too far away for people to take it seriously. Maybe when New Orleans and Miami and New York are under water.

Will I vote for Biden? Of course, I will vote for Biden. If he's the option that is not Trump (#fakepresident), I will go with that, because the Democrats don't have an option that dips down into the sewer where the GOP seems to live. And the GOP had to reach into the depths to come up with Trump. What I'm saying is that I can't visually a Democrat option worse than Trump.

Will I be happy to vote for Biden? Only in relation to that he is the better option than Trump. But I won't really be happy. It makes me sad and angry that Biden seems to be what we're going to be stuck with. We really have to do better! But we also have to get Trump out of office and we have to vote out as many Republicans as possible. So it makes me more mad to see people who say they are against Trump talking about how they won't vote for Biden if he's the nominee. I'm sorry, we're way past that. Your protest abstention is how we make Trump a two-term destroyer of the US Constitution.

So man the fuck up and determine to vote for whoever the Democrat nominee is. It's more important to get Trump (#fakepresident) out of the White House than it is for you to hold onto some false moral imperative to only vote for the "progressive" candidate. You do what you can do without whining about what you want to do instead. If you're starving, you don't whine about not getting cake, you ate the fucking stale bread that you're given. Right now, we're all starving. Biden is the stale bread choice, but he's better than nothing.

Hanging Chad

I was thinking today about how, sometimes, the course of history seems to bend around seemingly inconsequential moments. Moments that might even seem consequential at the time but only in the way that a kid thinks any given Christmas is consequential but, then, easily forgotten. So the moments, no matter how anticipated they were, fade into inconsequentialness, and we never think of them again even though they turn out to be pivot points of history.

So... here we are on the brink of environmental devastation... the end of life on Earth in its current incarnation... and I was wondering how we got here.

It's not like this was all of a sudden and we couldn't have made plans long ago about how to deal with it. It's been more like a gas gauge in a car, and we've been choosing to bypass all of the gas stations along the freeway telling ourselves we'll be fine even though the gas stations have been fewer and fewer along our drive...

Have you ever driven through west Texas? I have. Granted, it's been a while, but I can't imagine it's changed much. When you drive through west Texas, which is vast, there are signs along the freeway that say things like "Next gas station 48 miles," which may not seem like much, but it's a long way when your gas gauge is riding the empty line.

We're in a car running on fumes and about 20 miles into that 48 mile trip to the next station.

You do the math.

The thing is that the driver of the car has been choosing to drive past gas stations for hundreds of miles. We, as passengers, haven't been paying attention, but the driver has known all along.

See, it's a metaphor.

Scientists and politicians and corporations have known about climate change for decades. It's just the public that hasn't been very aware, and that was all the better for politicians and corporations. Still, with things like acid rain in the 70s and 80s, scientists almost convinced politicians and corporations to do something about the looming threat of environmental catastrophe all the way back in the 80s. Almost. Until corporations really looked into the cost and profit loss of fixing the planet, and they made the decision to fuck the planet and rape it for all it was worth on its way to ruin. By the early 90s, Republicans had us firmly on the path of unnatural disaster and did it gleefully.

But there was still a pivotal moment, a moment that probably seems inconsequential to most of us, right now, but that's only because we're not looking at it through the correct lens.

That moment was Al Gore's loss to Bush for the Presidency in 2000. We could even point, more specifically, to the hanging chad controversy in Florida and the subsequent Supreme Court case that handed the Presidency to Bush in a 5-4 decision. That one moment changed everything and sent us on a path to destruction that we seem unwilling to stop.

Hey, I get it. I was no fan of Gore at the time. He seemed like milk toast to me. And I never liked Bubba Clinton (still don't like him, though I'm a huge fan of his wife). Then, when 9/11 happened, I thought how fortunate we were to have Bush instead of Gore. Yeah, I was young and stupid, and, hey, I grew up in the South and still had some of that stupidity running around in my head.

Let's go back and look at that moment, though, that moment that gave us Bush, and wonder what things would be like if Gore, who WON THE POPULAR VOTE (sound familiar?), had become the President instead.

• Gore was (and is) extremely environmentally minded. He would have put us on a path of environmental reconstruction more than a decade before Obama began making the attempts. (Attempts that Trump (#fakepresident) has completely reversed making things worse than ever.)
• Gore would not have involved us in all of the wars that Cheney put us in. Wars motivated by profit and oil, not delivering democracy or freedom to people.
• I'm just gonna go ahead and say that we would not have suffered the financial crash of 2008 if Gore had been in office. Much of what allowed that to happen can be traced specifically to, well, not exactly Bush, because Bush was too stupid, but to Cheney and his people. Profit at all costs and all of that bullshit.
• Trump (#fakepresident) would not be driving our country and the world out into the middle of the desert right now in a car with no fuel.

I'm not saying everything today would be all sunshine and roses if Gore had been President; after all, there would still have been the scum-of-the-Earth Republicans (especially Newt and Mitch) doing all they can to destroy us all. But I do think things would be... better. And we would at least be on a path of environmental protection rather than one of environmental destruction. And, maybe, yes, MAYBE, the Middle East wouldn't hate us quite as much, because I'm pretty sure Gore's response to 9/11 would have been much more measured than the "bomb the shit out of them" approach the Republicans took.

It's all just something to think about. Hindsight and all of that.

It's also something to think about because I believe we're just a few weeks away from another of those pivot points in history. And, yes, we do see this one coming up as consequential, and that's because IT IS. We can't allow the Boomers another win in November. If they consolidate their power with this upcoming election, that will be the end. Authoritarianism will have taken root firmly in American soil, and there will never be another fair election in the United States again. Not without a rebellion. But, more importantly, it will spell the final doom for the Earth.

Sure, you go on and say that I'm being extreme, but, then, you go read the UN climate report and tell me if you still think that. If you do, you're one of the people in the car running on fumes, passing the last gas station while telling yourself, "We'll be okay." We're not gonna "be okay" folks. It's time to turn this thing around and start fixing the damage that's been done.

September: A Month of Photos

I'm not going to go into a long explanation here; I'm just behind on things. Writing things. Which includes, actually, the blog, even at only two "writing" posts a week. Which is not to say I don't have things to write about, I do. But you'll have to wait till October to read them, even if they'll be "out of date" by the point. Because they won't be, even if they are not things still in the news. I mean, come on, THERE ARE STILL KIDS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS, but the news has completely passed over continuing to talk about it because, I suppose, it's old news at this point. But people OUGHT to be talking about it, because it's a fucking travesty.
Among all of the other travesties.
Like Trump's (#fakepresident) renewed and invigorated attack on the environment and his seeming focused intent on killing us all. Or, at least, everyone who is not the 1%, because, I'm sure, the 1% will be able to buy their way out of any catastrophe. Or they think they'll be able to, anyway. Probably Elon Musk is the only safe one among us, because he'll just fly off to live on Mars. Or something.

Anyway...

September will be a whole month of pictures. Having not set those posts up, as I write this, I'm not saying there will be no words, but there aren't going to be a lot of them. However, I will still be around, and I will respond to comments as needed. Which means I will respond to comments that need responses.

So, you know, enjoy the visual commentary on my life.
Because that's what it is, right.
(Yeah, that's not a question, not even a rhetorical one; it's just a statement.)

Gotterdammerung (an opera review post)

My wife went to the opera, and all I got was this t-shirt...
Okay, well, that's not precisely true since I also went to the opera. In fact, I'm the one who wanted to go to this... exercise in endurance. Seriously, why does your butt hurt from sitting? Isn't that what it's made for?
Okay, maybe not.

But I digress...

For an opera named Twilight of the Gods, there are not a lot of gods in this one. In fact, an appearance by one lone Valkyrie is about as close to a god as we get, and the Valkyries, though immortal (other than Brunnhilde, who is no longer a Valkyrie), are not quite gods. It was kind of weird to not have Wotan show up at all, but he's gone and locked himself up inside of Valhalla -- along with all of the other gods -- and is waiting to burn it all down. Yeah, I'm not going to try to explain how we got to that point; you can go read a plot synopsis if you want to.

I think I should make it clear that Siegfried is an asshole. Sure, he's the greatest hero in the world, but that doesn't make it okay to be a blatant, flaming asshole. Which he is. Seriously. His go-to response to any and every situation, including just meeting someone, is, "Hey, I'm going to fight you!" Occasionally, he'd throw in, "...or we can be friends," but that isn't the norm.

And he's an abuser of women. Not like he beat them up or anything, but he definitely had that "I'm famous, so I can grab 'em by the pussy" attitude. At one point, the Rhinemaidens are trying to warn him that he needs to give up the Ring or he's going to be dead before the end of the day, and his response is, "I'll tell you what: Why don't all three of you have sex with me, then we can talk about the Ring." Of course, when they reject him, his response to that is, "Well, I'm faithful to my wife, anyway." His wife who is not Brunnhilde, because -- remember last post when I said he was stupid? -- he got tricked into drinking a potion that made him forget all about Brunnhilde, so he married someone else, a woman named Gutrune.

Toss into this mix Hagen. Hagen is the son of Alberich via the rape of Gutrune's mother and merely a tool of Alberich to try to reclaim the Ring. Because, evidently, that's the primary purpose of children: to be the tools by which you accomplish your own goals. At least that's what we can learn from Alberich, Mime, and Wotan. Oh, also, Hagen has a thing for his half-sister and keeps trying to put the moves on her.

It's all a very sordid affair and that's before Brunnhilde gets involved.

All of that to say that I didn't feel bad at all for Siegfried for what happens to him. Okay, maybe a little bad, but only because he has a moment of being horrified at what he's done to Brunnhilde once he regains his memory, just before he's... well, that would be telling. The problem is that he's regretful for the unintentional asshole move he made but, apparently, is perfectly okay with all of the other ways he's an asshole. Needless to say, Siegfried is a flawed hero, which is not a bad thing from a story perspective.

A thing I really liked in this production is the handling of the Rhine and the Rhinemaidens. Back in Das Rheingold when we first meet them, they are playing and cavorting in a pristine Rhine river. The world is young! Everything is fresh and good. But, when we find them again, here in Gotterdammerung, the Rhine is clogged with trash and pollution and the maidens seem to spend their time trying to get garbage out of their river. It was a very pointed touch, one I thought was great, especially now as we endure an administration that is doing everything it can to actively destroy the environment.

The most interesting aspect of Gotterdammerung is Brunnhilde's persistence in "punishing" Siegfried for the harm he did her even once she realizes it wasn't really his fault. But, then, some of what he did was because of whom he was as a person, which, as I've pointed out, wasn't all that great. So what wrongs does he do to Brunnhilde?
1. He compels her to have sex with him even after she has asked to remain pure. But she's cursed to obey his every order, so she can't actually turn him down when he presses the issue.
2. Once he's forgotten her, he enacts a subterfuge against her and gifts her to another man whom she is also compelled to obey through the curse on her.
3. You can surmise at that point that she has had to have sex with the second man, also against her will, though she would not have been able to actually tell him no. Thanks, Wotan!

The real tragedy in all of this is that Brunnhilde legitimately loves Siegfried. As she tells him, she loved him from before he was born. However, she doesn't let how she feels get in the way of what she feels is justice for his betrayal of her.

It was a good opera. All of them were.
I'd go back and do the 16 hours again. I think that says a lot.

Earth

E for the Earth, if we don't keep it cool,
we'll sink in a watery grave.

A Pocketful of Marbles

Remember marbles?
Not, do you know what is a marble, but do you remember marbles? Like from when you were a kid. Back when marbles were magical and sprang into existence through spontaneous generation and you only acquired new ones by finding them, trading for them, or having some benevolent Being gift some to you. When I was a kid, I did, in fact, have a special bag just for marbles. And acquiring new marbles was always cause for trading with my friends, some of whom also had marble bags though some just had jars.

Marbles were like trophies. When you're a kid, trophies also are like magical totems that come into existence for the sole purpose of being awarded to kids who have risen to the level of trophydom. After all, you can't buy trophies at the store, so they must be special. Unless, you know, there are special trophy stores... which there are... but you don't find that out until you're older. Like that whole Santa Claus thing.

But marbles! Marbles were better than gold. Of course, mostly, you could only trade them for other marbles... unless you had some super-cool marble, and, those, you could trade for almost anything. They were magic baubles. You could do a lot when you were a kid with a pocketful of marbles.
Not so much anymore, probably, but the philosophy is sound.

Because, in the end, marbles are worthless. Just bits of polished glass.

Dazzling, polished glass.

Right now, Republicans, the voters, are being dazzled by these bits of polished glass. GOP congressmen have filled their pockets with marbles and are trading them for your freedom. For our freedom, and you Republicans keep handing us over to them in exchange for shiny baubles that mean nothing.

They offer you a wall to keep out all of those dirty illegals,
and you give them your healthcare.

They offer you a tax break,
but they raise your taxes so that the rich can continue to get richer.

They offer you jobs
but give you a ruined environment.

They offer you guns
but give those to you as mass shootings, because the US is #1 in the world in mass shootings, the GOP is determined to keep us that way. After all, America has to be great at something, right?

They offer you marbles,
and you give them your freedom.

Unless your idea of freedom is the freedom to pay them more money. For everything.
Because that's what the GOP is all about, pricing the poor out of life and making slaves of them. And if you're not super rich, you're the poor. In the Republican world view, there is no middle class, and they're doing everything they can to siphon all of that money up to people who already have too much.

So if you're a Republican or if you vote Republican, especially if you voted for Trump (#fakepresident), I hope you have fun playing with your marbles. Maybe one day you'll open your eyes (or get your heads out of your asses) and see that you gave away everything of value for a few bits empty promises and polished gas.

All Children

All children believe in feeding the hungry.

All children believe in taking care of the sick.

All children believe in clothing the poor.

All children believe in providing homes for the homeless.

All children believe in protecting the Earth.

All children want to save the animals. Especially the cute, furry ones. (Okay, maybe not all children want to save all the bugs, but, still...)

All children believe in the concept of sharing (especially when it means that someone else is going to share with them, but they also believe that they should share even when they don't want to).

I guess this means that all children are liberals.

Matthew 18:3 "Truly, I tell you," he said, "unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 1)

I grew up in the South. I don't mean the quasi-South like Missouri or Tennessee; I mean the deep South. Louisiana. Even so, I grew up without any idea that race should ever be an issue. I'm not sure why this was so other than that my parents weren't particularly racist. They weren't particularly un-racist, either. For instance, at some point when I was a kid, I remember my dad using the term "porch monkeys," and I had no idea what he was talking about. When I asked, because I couldn't find the monkeys, no one would explain to me what he meant, so, I suppose, he was ashamed enough for having said it (and my mom ashamed of him) that no one would explain it. Later, when someone did finally explain it to me, I still didn't understand. The term just didn't make sense to me; it was years before I understood that it was a racial slur.

The Oscars this year, "the best and whitest," have me thinking a lot about race and how and where I grew up. I am not much a product of my environment. For instance, I don't have an accent. Someone asked me recently about how long it took me to get rid of it after I moved to California, but, see, I never had an accent. And, no, there is no explanation for that, because my family most definitely does have an accent. In fact, I can barely understand my brother anymore.

I went to a desegregated elementary school. Of course, I didn't know that. I'm not sure any of us knew that when we were kids. I don't know for sure if it made a difference, though. The school was mixed, sure, but the classes, on the whole, were not. I never realized that until now in thinking about all of this. Supposedly, the classes were divided based upon ability and, to some extent, I'm sure that's true, because there were a few black kids in my classes, but, mostly, the black kids were in one class, and the white kids were in the other class. I'm pretty sure there were no white kids in any of the "black" classes. The white kids got a white teacher, and the black kids got a black teacher. Except 1st grade: In first grade, both teachers were black, but that was the only black teacher I had until I got to middle school.

The principal, though, was black: Mr. Hudson. I loved Mr. Hudson. By the time I was in first grade, he called me Dr. Leon. I was Dr. Leon to him all the way through 4th grade, my last year at that school. He said it was because of all my brains. Or something like that. He was always very serious with me and would shake my hand when he saw me in the hall. Evidently, race wasn't an issue for him, and he was the first adult male I admired other than my grandfather.

Middle school... I went to an experimental middle school. It was following in the footsteps of the experimental high school I would soon go to. These were some of the first magnet schools in the country and an aberration in Louisiana. I suppose the logic was that if they could get magnet schools to work in Louisiana, which was (and still is) among the worst educated states in the country, then they could get them to work anywhere. And they did work. CPMHS was in the top ten high schools in the country the entire time I was there. In Louisiana.

So, yeah, I had some black teachers in middle school and in high school... but they weren't academic teachers. They were P.E. teachers and an art teacher. The only exception to that was my biology teacher in high school. However, she barely counts, because they let her go half way through the year, because she was not able to handle the academic load of teaching the AP Bio II class. This class was geared toward academic decathlon training, so they had to find someone able to teach that class above all else. Just to be clear, she was not the only teacher let go from Magnet because the teacher couldn't handle the academic load in the advanced classes, and it was her first year teaching.

Also, to be clear, there were some black teachers of academic classes at my high school, but I was in all honors and advanced classes, and they didn't teach any of those.

My high school didn't have the regular team sports associated with high school. No football, no basketball, no baseball. We had what our principal called "Olympic sports": tennis, fencing, track. I only say that to reinforce that this was an academic school. There was testing to get in and you had to maintain a certain GPA to stay there. Each year, we lost about half of the freshman class. As opposed to my elementary school, at which the more advanced classes were more than 90% white, there were plenty of black students at my high school, and they weren't there to play sports. These were smart kids who had done the work to get into a kind of elite school. As I was reminded frequently by my friends at other high schools, we were the "nerd school."

Mostly, though, I want to focus on my elementary school, since it was a typical school in Shreveport. [I would like to think that my high school was more merit-based in its decisions on teacher hiring, and I think that it probably was because of the emphasis on the academic decathlon.] It makes me sad, now, thinking back, that my school got by by following the letter of the law while discarding the spirit of it, and I'm sure that my school was indicative of the "way things were." Probably not just in Louisiana, either. I have to assume that this was the way all schools got around desegregation all through the South. "Sure, we'll have mixed schools, but no one said anything about the classes."

The New Face of Addiction and Why We Need To Stop the War on Drugs

First, let me just say, that I am not "for" drugs. I barely drink (and was well over 30 before I ever had any alcohol at all), have never smoked (anything), and am fairly resistant to taking even painkillers (which my wife thinks is insane). Basically, unless the doctor has told me to take it, I'm not much for putting drugs into my body. I'm part of the "war on drugs" culture that came out of the 80s. You know, that whole egg-frying-in-a-pan-that's-really-your-brain thing.

BUT!

We have the wrong idea about addiction and what it means, and the way we've been warring against drugs for the past few decades obviously hasn't worked. Of course, most people, especially old, rich, white dudes in politics strongly believe in doing the same thing over and over and over and over with the hope that, at some point, it will suddenly work. Einstein's definition of insanity.

For a long time, we've know that some personalities are more prone to addiction than others, you know, weak people. At least that's how we've always termed it culturally. Weak people are poor people, usually minorities, who are unable to enrich themselves, living destitute lives hooked on drugs and alcohol. If only they were better, stronger people, they wouldn't have problems with the drugs.

But that's all wrong, and that's not what it means when we say that some personalities are more prone to addiction than others. [For a discussion of personality, you can take a look at my "Exploring Personality" series.] Now, I'm not going to get all clinical, and I'm not going to cite a bunch of studies and include a lot of links that no one is going to look at anyway. This is going to be a very general overview of some recent studies and what I think they mean. So, sure, the conclusions are my own, but I think they are valid.

One thing we know is that some people are more prone to addiction than others, but let me re-frame that statement:
Under the right conditions, all people are prone to addiction. Some people are more prone, but all people are susceptible. And it doesn't even have to do with the actual drugs.

See, if you put a rat, alone, in a small cage with nothing in it but the rat, well, it doesn't make the rat happy. If you hang a bottle of water on one side of the cage and a bottle of drug-spiked water on the other side of the cage, guess which water the rat will drink. It doesn't take long before you have one addicted little rat. And I hear you thinking, "But that's just a rat..."
Wait! There's more!

If you have another cage, a large, comfortable cage full of fun, little rat toys and a whole community of rats and you have the same two bottles of water, guess what happens. The rats almost never become addicted. Some of them, sometimes, will sample the drug water, evidently just for the experience of it, but it doesn't become a cage full of drug-addicted rats. It's kind of the definition of recreational drug use. All of them try it but, mostly, they just ignore it.

What you can take from this is how rats react to their environments. Rats in a negative environment -- alone in a cramped little cage with no stimulation -- will becomes addicts if given accessibility to drugs. Rats in a positive environment -- plenty of social opportunity and things to keep them busy -- will almost never become addicts even with easy access to drugs. The reality of the situation is that it's not the drugs that are the problem; it's the environment.

Now, if you take an addicted rat, and not just an addicted rat, a heavily addicted rat, and take him out of his cramped, little cage and put him in the other cage, the one with all the rat friends and toys, a very unexpected thing happens: The rat kicks its addiction. It almost immediate, in fact. Some of them have to deal with withdrawal symptoms, but, pretty much, they just stop the drugs. Even though the drugs are right there in front of them, they give them up. Not some of the rats. All of the rats.

Because the addiction stems from the poor environment and the brain's search for (for lack of a better all-encompassing term) stimulation, not the drugs. The drugs are just the tool the brain uses to deal with what is, basically, a trap. But you take away the trap and you give the rat freedom and options and a social environment and you take away the "need" for the drug and the brain just says, "That's enough."

Do you know what this tells me? It tells me that people with addiction problems are suffering from the same condition as the rat in the tiny cage. They feel trapped and the drugs are the way they cope. We've been trying to solve the problem by taking away the drugged water supply, but the problem is that there are too many bottles of drugged water for us to ever get rid of them all. You take one down, and someone else comes by and hangs another in the same spot. Or we take the person out of the tiny cage and put him in a slightly better cage with only plain water to drink (rehab) until he breaks the addiction but, after that, we drop him right back into the cage he was in before. It's nearly impossible to break the addiction cycle with these methods.

You know what would break the cycle and cause people to just drop their addictions? If we took the billions and billions of dollars we spend on the "war  on drugs" and used it to help build better environments for the people struggling with addiction. Which includes helping them to find some purpose and work they find meaningful. They'll give up the drugs on their own that way.

We will never win the war on drugs by trying to bring down drug dealers and take down drug lords in other countries. There's too much money to be made. The only way to break the cycle is to remove the need the for the addiction.