A post submitted by CGI member, Morgan...

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By Ben Bartee

History will look unkindly, as it should, on the engineers of millions of Americans’ spiritual and physical imprisonment.

The United States, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, houses 25% of the world’s prison population. The US government imprisons more of its citizenry than does the Communist Party of China — even though the CCP rules over 4 times as many subjects.

One in five US prisoners are serving time for nonviolent drug offenses.

One nationally televised teleprompter speech later, the War on Drugs was on. But what does it achieve? What entities promote it and how do they benefit?

The Drug War serves a critical and multifaceted importance to the American Empire.

First, the standard benefit from the government’s purview is more funding, more government jobs to hand out, and more economic power. Once an emerging federal bureaucracy is fully formed and its funding mechanisms well-oiled, extricating it becomes exponentially more difficult by the year.

Local economies grow around the public sector industry. Those jobs become indispensable aspects of the overall fiscal health of the communities. The bureaucracies burrow into the tissue of society so that removing them without inflicting massive pain on the entire system becomes impossible.

Cancer works the same way.

That means federal goons on the streets and in the office by the truckload: more DEA, more FBI, more DOJ lawyers, more federal judges, more parole officers, and more IRS staff. These are secure, relatively high-paying jobs for workers with few marketable skills (i.e. law enforcement officers and office clerks).

Newly-minted federal employees become dues-paying public sector union members. They go on to lobby the government to maintain their mission in perpetuity so as to secure their long-term financial viability. Brand-new drug laws refresh the ranks of the federal goon squad, increasing its political sway.

In this way, the institutional power of federal bureaucracy festers. Power consolidation being the overriding goal, exploring new niche markets like drug law enforcement is an effective strategy to achieve growth. That is the first and most obvious federal incentive for the Drug War.

Second, other nightmarish power consolidation tactics explain the Drug War as well.

They are, for example, the pharmaceutical corporations’ economic interest in forever postponing the legalization of their competition, the emerging prison-industrial complex, and the slave labor it provides for corporations.

The owner class no longer need pay even a minimum of $7 an hour; non-unionized prison laborers will work for 33 cents an hour in hellish conditions and no 401(k).

Third and finally, the Drug War serves a more insidious function than those which underpin its economic attraction for the ruling class.

This ulterior motive for the Drug War is difficult to pinpoint and even more difficult to explain.

Anyone who has experimented with his or her consciousness, though, will intuit the War’s significance in this less obvious regard.

Graham Hancock and others have dubbed it the War on Consciousness.

The oligarchs understand that drugs – those of the psychedelic persuasion in particular – offer users the remarkable capacity to spotlight the laughable presuppositions on which their power is erected and maintained.

There is no “there” there. The unimpressive pettiness and jealousy with which political actors safeguard their power are laid bare by the awesome power of psychedelic drugs.

On therapeutic dosages of psilocybin, the insignificant nature of state red tape becomes palpable. We all become, for the duration of our journeys, Franz Kafka, dumbfounded by the officiousness of bureaucratic lunacy.

The thin air out of which government conjures its alleged authority appears more utterly substance-free than ever to the first-time user. The shaky foundations on which government’s claim to authority are founded and the questionable means by which it executes its rule become conceptually digestible.

In short, psychedelic adventurers discover that the emperor has no clothes.