FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Joseph Solis-Mullen
Website: solismullen4senate.com
Email: Joseph@solismullen4senate.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/solismullen4senate
U.S. Senate Candidate Joseph Solis-Mullen on the DEA and the
Failed 53-Year-Old War on Drugs: Ann Arbor, Oct. 18
— “Rogers and Slotkin never stumbled on a tax-stuffed bureaucracy they wouldn’t serve on both knees;
the DEA has failed to meet any of its goals or metrics, which makes it perfect in their eyes.” –
ANN ARBOR, MI – October 11, 2024 – At 6:30 p.m. Friday, October 18, Libertarian Party candidate Joseph Solis-Mullen will publicly catalog the failures, waste, corruption, and harm caused by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the 53-year-old War on Drugs at Ann Arbor’s Downtown Library.
Solis-Mullen stands in stark contrast to Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Elissa Slotkin: “They never stumbled on a tax-stuffed bureaucracy they wouldn’t bow down to and serve on both knees,” he said . “They’re the twin offspring of two of the most deceitful, malicious organizations to infest this country: the FBI and CIA. And when they look upon the wide swath of destruction wrought by the DEA, decade after decade, they’re gazing into a mirror image of everything that they admire about perpetual government ‘service.’ It’s who they are.”
Solis-Mullen will take his audience on a Grand Tour of Drug War failures, chaos, and destruction:
- Squandering $6 trillion since 1971 (2020 dollars)
- Failing to make a difference in the availability and price of drugs or the number of users (up slightly)
- Adopting policies that increased the potency and danger of drugs, such as Fentanyl and crack cocaine
- Receiving annual massive infusions of cash to its budget, despite never achieving a single goal or metric
- Magnifying its power and the scope of its 4th Amendment violations (search and seizure of property), including the self-enriching practice of civil asset forfeiture, which is literally a license to steal
- Militarizing its agents into an army of occupation with armaments and weapons of war unleashed on a domestic civilian population forced to pay for its own abuse
- Massively expanding the U.S. prison population at an annual cost of $40,000 to $50,000 per prisoner
- Breaking up families and destroying the lives of people who had nothing to do with drug use
- Inducing drug gangs to recruit and employ children in drug distribution to avoid adult prosecution
- Creating negative externalities (unintended bad consequences) such as the destruction of entire neighborhoods
Solis-Mullen questions the very concept of a “drug crime” as absurd: “Crimes require real victimizers and real victims. That means real people using violence or fraud against real people. The notion of society as a victim is just verbal blather, pure fiction. It’s an excuse to create a tax-stuffed bureaucracy that preys upon us while declaring us to be victims even though nobody has complained. We must stop lying to ourselves. Yes, people make decisions that end badly, but does that mean we should extract $6 trillion from taxpayers to make a problem even worse?”
“My solution,” he says, “is to stop the Drug Ware and eliminate the DEA. They need to find productive jobs that add value instead of making things worse for us all at a very high price.”
Event Link: https://solismullen4senate.com/event/the-war-on-drugs/
# # #Joseph Solis-Mullen is a political scientist, economist, and author of The Fake China Treat and Its Very Real Danger. He is the Ralph Raico Fellow at the Libertarian institute and a professor of history at Spring Arbor University. His work can be found at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Libertarian Institute, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Journal of the American Revolution, and Antiwar.com.
