Constantine Issighos

For God, Country and Drug Prohibition Constantine Issighos

A retrospective look at the current drug prohibition, the author Constantine Issighos demonstrates the USA's drug policy as being ineffective, destructive and expensive, thus describing an "anatomy of failure." He examines the origins of the drug temperance movement to legislate public morality, which turned into the war on drugs. Yet, despite the ineffectiveness of the USA's policy, drug prohibition continues to cause massive human tragedy in our youth and among Latin America's coca plant growers. The author has witnessed the destructiveness of the DEA's mercenaries, the coca plant eradication and its effects on the life and health of the campesinos. Events described in this book are true stories, but this is not an autobiography of the author's experience as a contrabandist, smuggler, bootlegger, forger and corruptors of officials, per see. Although some details of the author's real life experiences under prohibition are brought forward, those are presented only to support certain important points against the present drug prohibition. The author shows that drug use, distribution, production and policies cannot be examined in isolation from the policies and practices of Drug Prohibition and the War on Drugs. Here the issue of drug prohibition is not treated as an academic subject, but as real life consequences and lessons that needed to be told. The focus of the lessons is simple, for the end of prohibition means the end of drug criminality. Religious puritanical moralists have a perpetual conflict in dealing with human relations that are not "immaculate" acts in any form. The imminent thread is that there is no limit to the moral erosion of humanity where the irrational becomes a routine practice.