https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/cc7ca3af-0ace-4b98-b922-0aa8ee1c78d1 Happy 4/20 comrades (I bet you didnt have “Puppet of Karl Marx sparking up on 4/20” on your 2026 bingo card, did you?) Let's briefly talk about capitalism, drugs, and the drug war. Capitalism warps our relationship with substances. It creates the conditions for misuse —like despair, alienation, a future with no hope—and then criminalizes that very same use. It locks people away, eliminates so-called "surplus labor," and profits off their bodies in cages. This alienation—a concept I developed by the way—is the feeling of being disconnected from your work, from your community, from your own humanity. Capitalism reduces you to a cog. And when you feel like a cog, you often look to find ways to escape that feeling. Meanwhile, the system celebrates other addictions. Addictions to power, to wealth, far more destructive than those to substances, aren't criminalized, they're glorified. Those are called "ambition” or success under this system. Let's be clear, criminalization was never about our protection or well-being. Never has been, never will be. The US government has worked with drug traffickers for decades without blinking. The CIA has partnered with everyone from the Kuomintang in Taiwan to Corsican mafia syndicates to Cuban exiles to the Contras in Nicaragua. As Seth Harp covers in his book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, Afghanistan produced 90% of the world's heroin during the global opioid epidemic. Did the US have a problem working with the narco-state governments? Of course not. We created those circumstances and then helped keep them in power. Meanwhile, huge amounts of drugs were being smuggled into the US by military members through bases like Fort Bragg. So often we are behind the same problem we claim to care about, as Harp notes: "You can look at every single region of the world that's a massive drug production center, and in every case, US military intervention preceded the country becoming a narco-state—not the other way around." Does Trump care about that? If he really cared about overdoses, he'd clean up his own military bases. Or he'd also go after the real criminals—families like the Sacklers, who made billions hooking Americans on opioids, had their names plastered on museums and universities, and walked away without a scratch. And where does all the drug money flow? Through New York, Paris, and Dubai to name just a few hot spots, through the big banks, through the same financial institutions politicians swear whose “corruption” they're "fighting.” Funny how no one ever actually cracks down there, isn't it? The capitalists are always the real criminals. But the drug war was never about drugs. John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, admitted it: "The Nixon campaign had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities." They knew they were lying. And think about what this system does to the human psyche. Borders and immigration policies rips families apart. Imperialist wars kill poor black and brown people around the world just trying to survive. (Part 1/2) Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:38:31 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://tankie.tube https://tankie.tube/lazy-static/avatars/3ba3ff73-a8b6-49c9-add8-9653ef090c7f.webp https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/cc7ca3af-0ace-4b98-b922-0aa8ee1c78d1 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://tankie.tube/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.