Bill is definitely right that its impossible to talk seriously about the power dynamics of drug prohibition without addressing the power structure of white supremacy.  Certainly in U.S. history, the prohibition of specific drugs has been linked to racism from the outlawing of the ceremonial use of peyote, to the anti-Chinese racism linked to the prohibition of opium, to the demonization of African-Americans and Chicanos that drove marijuana prohibition.  And racism in this country has always been linked to economic issues -- the control of land and the exploitation of cheap or free labor.

 The persecution of the counter-culture was linked to the fact that these predominantly white young people were seen as race and class traitors, rejecting the culture of affluence and exploitation they were born into.  

Certainly, the drug war today can't be understood without looking at the reality of the prison-industrial complex.  And Angela Davis has demonstrated convincingly in her work in recent years that the contemporary prison system, which had its origins in the post-Civil War south where it was used as a means of controling the recently "emancipated" Black population, represents a continuation of slavery.

We also have to take into account the role of the CIA and other "intelligence" agencies in introducing heroin and crack into poor communities of color in the U.S. as a means of control and as a means of criminalizing poverty.  As Ani DiFranco says, "The old dog's got a new trick, its called criminalize the symptoms while you spread the disease."

My friend John Schuchardt, one of the founders of the radical Catholic Plowshares movement, has said that it is impossible to understand any power structures in this country without acknowledging that this country's wealth was built primarily through the forced labor of kidnapped African slaves and through genocide against the Native American population.  Certainly the prohibition of some drugs and the introduction and promotion of others is linked to this same history.

Going back further, we can see that drug prohibition has always been about the destruction of indigenous, land based cultures.  In medieval and early modern Europe drug prohibition took the form of witch burnings -- the execution of people, mostly women, who performed rituals linked to the cycle of the seasons using consciousness-altering plants.   This represented a genocide against the tribal peoples whose cultures and religions pre-dated the forced imposition of creativity by the Roman empire and its successors. (See Terrence McKenna's Food of the Gods)   Modern western anarchism traces its roots back to some of those who resisted the religious, economic, and technological impositions of empires.   Alchemy represented the last publicly practiced strain of European traditional magick (though in much of Europe the old ways have been maintained through secretive matrilineal oral traditions,) and in the seventeenth century the defense of alchemy, along with the defense of common lands, spiritual autonomy, and local sovereignty, gave rise to radical movements such as the Diggers and the Levelers who influenced later Left libertarian movements.

Byron, Shelly, and other British Romantics who later championed both nature-based spirituality and Left politics were all opium enthusiaists.

Its no mistake that the Greenwich Village intellectual culture of the 1920's and 1930's that gave rise to the emergence of contemporary North American anarchism was also fascinated by mescaline and peyote.

Of course we can also link the persecution of drug users to the central ideology of monotheism which posits a single truth, a single true consciousness, a single totalizing reality -- all of which are undermined by the ritual use of psychedellics.  Gary Snyder and Ed Abbey, both heirs to the Kropotkin-Prudhon-Goldman anarchist tradition both made compelling cases that the imposition of monotheism represented the beginning of totalitarianism.

Aright, enough disjointed rambing for now . . .