Tom Engelhardt: Rebecca Solnit, One Big Continent of Pain!

It shouldn't surprise you that Illegal Drugs R'Us. In fact, nearly 9% of this country's population above the age of 12 uses them, more than 22 million people, according to the government's 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Nor should it surprise you that the business behind such use is booming on one side of the US border and blowing remarkable numbers of heads off to get its product to market on the other. After all, what businessman, assured that his venture would have a guaranteed 9% market in the US, and that, in the future , those numbers would only rise, wouldn't be eager to plunge in? The nightmare of those dead bodies south of the border and the deadheads north of it is a "problem" that is quickly being militarized as the US employs its experiences in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, still the heroin poppy capital of the world, by the way, to go after the drug trade in Central America and Mexico, drones soaring and guns blasting, only adding to the pyramid of bodies along the way. You might think that the same old militarized same old that had been such a dismal failure in the Greater Middle East might give way to a little new thinking when it came to our "war" on drugs. But not in Washington. Not these days. Fortunately, every now and then, Tom- Dispatch regular Rebecca Solnit has the urge has the urge to write a letter to someone, alive or dead, or in this case, the living, the barely living, and the dead, to offer new ways of thinking about our world, including today about the drug horror show that Americans have become. Too bad our government doesn't call a truce in that "war" for 24 hours, just to give a little new thought to how to proceed. If it won't, the rest of us still should.