Um Paraíso Artificial

«The trade in such drugs usually results in some form of monopoly which not only centralizes the drug traffic, but also restructures much of the affiliated social and economic terrain in the process. In particular two major effects are the creation of mass markets and the generation of enormous, in fact unprecedented, cashflows. The existence of monopoly results in the concentrated accumulation of vast pools of wealth. The accumulations of wealth created by a succession of historic drug trades have been among the primary foundations of global capitalism and the modern nation-state itself. Indeed, it may be argued that the entire rise of the west, from 1500 to 1900, depended on a series of drug trades."

(...)"the image of the "opium empire," a metaphor first offered by Joseph Conrad. It takes up the early history of opium and other "traditional drugs" such as tobacco and sugar and develops the paradigm of commercialized drug trades and ties that to the growth of European colonialism in the Americas and Asia . . ."(...)

". . . links between drug trades, European colonial expansion,the creation of the global capitalist system and the creation of the modern state. Drug trades destabilized existing societies not merely because they destroyed individual human beings but also, and perhaps more importantly, because they have the power to undercut the existing political economy of any state. They have created new forms of capital; and they have redistributed wealth in radically new ways."(...)

"Opium thus created a succession of new political and economic orders in Asia during the past two centuries. These included the state of the East India Company itself, the new Malay polities ofisland Southeast Asia, the colonial states of nineteenth-century Southeast Asia and the warlord regimes of post-Qing China as well as the Guomindang and communist states that arose out of that milieu. At the same time, the economies of the entire region were radically reoriented, or perhaps "re-occidented" would be a more appropriate word. India's opium production was brought under western control while China's domestic economy was opened to the west. Southeast Asiawas first opened to western traders and then to western control. With the migration of Chinese labor, Southeast Asian economies were transformed into commodity-producing regimes focused on exporting to the industrializing western Powers. Underlying all of this, opium rearranged the domestic economies and pushed them down the path of mass consumption, which together with mass production, typified the"modern" economic order. It is possible to suggest a hypothesis that mass consumption, as it exists in modern society, began with drug addiction. And, beyond that, addiction began with a drug-as-commodity. Something was necessary to prime the pump, as it were, to initiate the cycles of production, consumption and accumulation that we identify with capitalism. Opium was the catalyst of the consumer market, the money economy and even of capitalist production itself in nineteenth-century Asia. (...)

Opium was the tool of the capitalist classes in transforming the peasantry and in monetizing their subsistence lifestyles. Opium created pools of capital and fed the institutions that accumulated it: the banking and financial systems, the insurance systems and the transportation and information infrastructures. Those structures and that economy have, in large part, been inherited by the successor nations of the region today.»

- Carl A. Tracki, "Opium, Empire and the Global Economy"

Para digestivo, recomendo uma passagem de olhos pelo World Drug Report das Nações Unidas ( convém recordar que relatórios são a única especialidade efectiva -se bem que igualmente inconsequente - daquela patética organização).

Depois, ficar a saber que, como vaticinado nos últimos meses, a colheita de ópio deste ano no Afeganistão vai bater todos os recordes.

Finalmente, calcular a quantidade de óbitos, zombificações, catástrofes familiares, crime de vária ordem, doença, tragédia, escravatura, ruína fisica, mental e moral, etc, etc, que o tráfico/comércio ilícito de estupefacientes já provocou. E talvez chegar à conclusão que o verdadeiro terrorismo tem a forma de anestesia e grassa endemicamente no melhor dos mundos.

O inferno é o principal negócio do Paraíso.