Republican Doublespeak About Supporting the Troops
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The war in Iraq is coming home in cruel and painful ways. It’s almost impossible to find even a tarnished silver lining amidst the suffering, but Tony Newman of the Drug Policy Alliance raises the interesting possibility that something good might come out of it -- if our elected officials are forced to rethink our nation’s disastrous war on drugs.More and more soldiers coming home from Iraq are developing mental health problems (a recent study by the Army’s Surgeon General put the number at 30 percent). Already nearly 25,000 Iraq and Afghanistan vets have been diagnosed with psychological ailments. Because of the nature of the fighting in Iraq -- constant threats, hard to discern enemy, ambiguous goals -- experts expect that number to continue to rise. And soldiers suffering from such problems are known to have higher rates of substance abuse.
So how will we respond when the young men and women we sent to stamp out Saddam’s WMD...uh, I mean, bring democracy to the people of Iraq... start getting busted for taking to drugs to deal with their troubles?
Will we “stay the course” and do what we’ve being doing for decades (a failed strategy that has our prisons bursting at the seams, with around half-a-million people doing time on drug charges)? Or will we finally come to our senses and start dealing with nonviolent drug use as a medical problem not a criminal one?
Will the Bush administration really “support our troops” -- or is that just a feel-good slogan to trot out at campaign rallies? _Arianna Huffington
