By Alec Karakatsanis, re-posted from social media.

One thing not getting enough attention now that the U.S. has admitted to exterminating hundreds of elementary school girls is that many very powerful people lied about it.

They knew it was on the target list, they knew they had launched the missiles, they knew the school had been hit multiple times. And they tried to hide it and deflect blame to boost support for the early days of the illegal war.

In any reasonable society—as opposed to a deeply sick one where there is no pretense to caring about truth or accountability or law or justice—a lie of this magnitude would mark the end of a person’s public life and extensive public proceedings to uncover everyone involved and to eradicate the institutional arrangements capable of such crimes and corruption.

It’s similar to the complete rejection of truth and accountability that I have seen in police and prison corruption/violence. In the most fascist corners of our society, the only principle is who has—and is willing to ruthlessly deploy—power over others. Once a society tolerates this kind of thing, it’s like a cancer that spreads and cannot be stopped.

An excerpt from the newsletter of Alec Karakatsanis (May 18, 2023).

Over forty years into the War on Drugs, the following are true:

• The U.S. has spent trillions of dollars; detained tens of millions of people for hundreds of millions of years; separated tens of millions of children from parents; chemically destroyed millions of acres of rainforest and pristine ecosystems in Latin America; killed hundreds of thousands of people; stopped, searched, sexually violated, and arrested hundreds of millions of people; surveilled the communications of billions of people globally; stolen billions of dollars in property from poor people through civil forfeiture; deported hundreds of thousands of people; deprived tens of millions of people of highly effective therapeutic treatments for cancer, mental illness, PTSD, chronic pain, etc.; caused millions of people to become infected with infectious diseases; kicked millions of families out of public housing and public benefits; put tens of millions of poor people into an endless cycle of debt; and cost tens of millions of people their jobs at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy.
• The use of prohibited drugs has increased, prohibited drugs are more potent than ever, and overdose deaths have skyrocketed to their highest levels in U.S. history.  

People in power making drug policy are not universally incompetent. Most of the people crafting U.S. drug policy know the above facts. 

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