By Mark David Blum, Esq.

Using a whopping fifteen BILLION of our tax dollars, the White House, through the Defense Department has awarded Blackwater a brand new contract. Having been expelled from Iraq and finding themselves suddenly without a major theater of operations, Blackwater has contracted with our government to engage in a new war; the War on Drugs.

Let us remember folks; you cannot go to war against inanimate objects. When we say war on rocking chairs or drugs or cigarettes or poverty, what we are really talking about is the lives of American citizens. Americans citizens are the users, sellers, distributers, producers, and transporters of drugs. The War against Drugs is a War against lifestyle choices of American Citizens. It is a holy war, a crusade by do-gooders who insist that others live by some unknown creed laid down by some mythical flying spaghetti monster. “Thou Shalt Not Do Drugs upon Pain of Imprisonment.”

Over the years, I have written extensively on the subject of the mismatch of using the criminal justice system as a solution to the nation’s drug problem. It a dance now thirty five years old and the river of blood and bodies grows along with the problem. Here it is: Arresting a Drug Dealer does NOT stop demand or supply of drugs. All it does is create a job opening. This is your nation’s policy on drugs. Prohibition does not work. Every time you arrest a ‘drug dealer’, though you shut down a drug network, you also create job openings for a new one. Since the employment scene in the drug market is not one regulated by government but instead run by organized crime, whenever police goes out and sweeps clean a street, there is always a subsequent and lasting rush of violence and death.

Vendettas last forever. The innocent are dying in the crossfire.

Now comes Blackwater armed with $15 Billion of your money. Blackwater: the company to which the United States Senate gave blanket and absolute immunity for all operations in the theater. This is the same company that shot up a town square in Iraq and murdered at least 14 uninvolved civilians. The F.B.I. can do nothing to these conscience-less killers. As much as the Iraqi government wants to prosecute and sue Blackwater, they cannot. This taxpayer funded mercenary force operates without rules. Let us also not forget that Blackwater’s disobeyance of an order not to enter Fallujah led to those four burning bodies and the birth of the Iraqi insurrection.

Blackwater is not an arm of the government and are not government agents. This means the Constitution that shrouds every American with safeguards against government oppression has no meaning. Blackwater is not subject to constitutional limitations. They are not police and hence are not supervised. As a profit making corporation, Blackwater has no incentive to be sensitive to American civil rights or human rights to counterbalance the goal of winning this ‘War’. To them, the ends justify the means; regardless of who they kill or the civil strife they cause.

Now our Imperial President and his Kleptocracy have turned their mercenary forces against the public at large. Twenty percent of Americans use drugs of one kind or another. I ask you: When is the cycle of violence and addiction to the drug war going to stop? How many more dead and wounded children will it take before people sit down and finally put and end to this game. The only ones profiting are the criminals and the cops and the prison industry. Now Blackwater has a stake in maintaining the conflict.

The horror of Blackwater joining an epidemic of burgeoning violence is the real cancer killing our society. Like hopeless addicts; folks keep engaging in the same behavior, despite knowing how bad and ineffective it is, and how doing so is going to kill … and despite that, nobody seems to care and we want it all the more.

Given the nature of the beast and business; those in the profit making end of the drug industry will find a way to mount a response to Blackwater. Each side is going to escalate the arms race and with neither side playing by the rules, the body count is going to grow.

With every death on either side, someone new will step in and fill the void. It is that simple. Do you get it now? Once shots are fired, they fire in two directions and then on more occasions and then it becomes intergenerational. The cycle only worsens until election time when our elected ones want their jobs back. With Blackwater engaged, the backsplash will be a coalescing of the “enemy” against the government and its mercenaries. Fifteen Billion dollars worth of American blood is about to flow for another generation.

Simply put, how it is that despite everything, despite Blackwater or Black Tar, there is nobody out there today who if they want any particular drug, not only can get it easily, but probably has some already. If we cannot keep drugs and CELLPHONES out of our supermax prisons, how are we ever going to keep them out of a free society? An aggressive policy of arresting entire generations from a particular neighborhood does not reduce in any way, anybody’s ability to get any drug they want.

I wholly support good policing. Blackwater’s presence will just escalate the violence on a grand scale. I just wish my tax dollars were being used to fight crime … not create it.

As a juror of mine famously once said; "A Government that declares War on its own People has no legitimacy." When you think Blackwater, think of why our Founders made sure the Second most important American absolute right is to keep and bear arms. "The full armaments available to any soldier" was the original intent. This was not to hunt deer but as a last line of defense against a corrupt and immoral government.