The Trade

The shor portraits the heroin abuse in an ok way. However, the fight against it seems politically motivated. The unsuccessful war against drugs has been ongoing for 40 years still its presented as heroic when poor abusers and their families are teared apart. Smuggling is high as ever. The series shows the problems but the lack of portraying alternative solutions is frustrating.

You are NEVER going to change humans and their vices. I could barely get thru a quarter of this first episode. Season 1. Listening to the narration by the white do-gooder. The drug war demonstrated here is such a waste of effort and money. The crime and violence associated is ridiculous. I don't do drugs, but there should be a controlled way of producing and accessing it. Make it all locally, not imported. There is surely an element of control and greed behind the governments everywhere.

This documentary shows all of the angles of the drug trade via a high quality production. Very impressive.

I have seen a few doco's like this over the years, but this one is as raw as they get. I think drugs will always be part of the world we live in, but how to combat it so less people will die and less people make a living of it has so far been a losing battle. I don't see how humanity will come with a fix for this problem, unless Christ returns or these hard drugs are made legal and are manufactured and supplied in a controlled manner so people can be treated for their addiction/illness. The hard tactics as in jail time and policing it has only cost trillions of dollars and has not stopped people dying, the criminals all the way from those that manufacture, sell and distribute are the winners, including lots of corrupts officials that profit from the drug trade.

Now I am sure there will be lots of people that will say, how can you made drugs legal? Well the trillions of dollars that have been spent on this problem has not slowed this problem down, and will never ever solve this problem. Make it legal, treat it as an illness, manufacture these drugs cleanly, set up clinics where people can get their fix and get counseling, that way adictics won't have to resort to criminal activities, it will take the criminal element out of it.

But as much as I think it could be the way to slow this problem, even fix it in time, there are way to many high up people that profit from this and will oppose anything that could jeopardize their cut of the trade.

Anyway the doco is raw and has some real insight to this drug world. I even go as far to say that young people should sit down with their parents so they can see what happens when you go down the road of drug use.

10 out of 10.

Police idol worship. Even Nazis had their followers. This is like the TV series "Cops" where a bunch of cameramen-groupies follow cops around snooping on people and arresting them on the flimiest of excuses to ruin their lives. The first arrest is for running a stop sign in rural LoserTown, USA. Of course, they're all making overtime, and not sweating their lives trying to take down a major gang leader who can shoot back. In the first arrest, almost a dozen cops converge on a poor addict-mother and threaten to take her children away if she doesn't show them where the $20 smudge of heroin is hidden. She shows them, and they arrest her anyway. Easy-peasy. This is how a police state works.

As the Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman said, "prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse -- for both the addict and the rest of us." He thought it "absolutely disgraceful" for the state (supposedly our "democratic" government) to be in the position of "converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail" (and, I might add, destroying their future prospects for work with a permanent prison record which limits future job prospects, which puts a 2-3% damper on our country's GDP, and creates the biggest prison population in the world.

"Repealing drug prohibition is part of a broader problem of cutting down the scope and power of government and restoring power to the people," Friedman said. It would also lower the cost of health care, denying doctors the "monopoly power to prescribe" which has historically been the purview of its citizenry.

Our western frontiers were conquered by ancestors who self-medicated. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin grew poppy in their gardens. Heroin was over-the-counter until the 1920s, barbituates into the 1950s, codeine until the 1960s. The Afghan opium farmer has more freedom than the average American boomer, dying in agony from bone cancer because he can't reach his doctor to refill his pain medication, or because he can't afford the skyrocketing costs of health care.

The War on Drugs is destroying third world countries with corruption and destroying American freedom with bureaucracy. It must end. That's the inadvertent message of this series.