It's Time To End The War On Drugs

In case no one has noticed, the war on drugs was lost almost before it began, but it has been an extremely expensive war even so. Apparently we learned nothing from prohibition.

As with prohibition, the war on drugs has created a whole new way to make gazillions for organized crime, not to mention criminal lawyers and prison corporations who love nothing better than recidivism.

As with prohibition, ordinary, work-a-day citizens have been turned into criminals where no tendency toward a criminal life-style was evident. Lives have been ruined; the lives of people at a young age, unfortunately. If parents want to assure themselves that their kids will, at least, experiment with drugs, they should be thankful to the drug warriors, because making drugs illegal assured that very thing. Once a society makes a substance illegal, it has lost all control over it and the profit motive is there for others to sell said substance.

Courts across America are jammed up. A big part of the problem is drug related crime.

The last time I checked the statistics, it costs tax payers an average of $47,000 per year to incarcerate one individual. The vast majority of Americans are lucky if they make that much in a year. Of course, the amount varies from state to state just as the cost of living does, but is anyone really interested in spending anywhere near that much money to incarcerate a person who prefers cannabis in the evenings to a glass of wine or a few beers?

Legalize it and tax it, but please don't give the market to the tobacco industry. They have already proved to everyone that they have no integrity. If anyone can find a way to make cannabis truly addictive, it would be the same people who took an already dangerous, addictive drug, nicotine, and manipulated the content in cigarettes in order to hopelessly addict even more people, while lying for decades about their knowledge of the addictiveness of nicotine, which is, by the way, worse than addiction to the many illegal drugs.

Time To Restore The Fourth Amendment

Whenever there is any kind of war, civil rights watchers had better be on their toes. Even a cursory knowledge of history tells us that. The 4th Amendment began being shredded in earnest when the war on drugs was declared. Today I'm not sure that it actually exists anymore except on paper (no matter what they say on Law and Order.). It is time that we restore it completely. I wonder if there are any statistics on how many doors have been kicked in and people at the address killed because the police had the wrong address while trying to make a drug bust? We have all heard on the news (usually local) that it has happened, probably more times than the police want to count, that's for sure. How many cops have been killed by new organized crime created by these new prohibition law?. How much time is wasted by police doing paperwork on a cannabis case while people are being raped, murdered and robbed on the streets of America? I've spoken to countless cops in many cites over the years who wish the government would legalize cannabis.

Too many people have died, too many lives have been ruined by this senseless war, probably far more than would have been lost to or ruined by the drugs themselves. Perhaps we should stop declaring war on inanimate objects or highly charged emotional states. It doesn't make any sense and it never did. Declaring war on a plant that grows just about anywhere anything else will grow has got to be one of the most incredibly stupid things I have ever heard.

So who was behind some of the most incredibly stupid laws ever written? The cotton industry for one, who didn't want to have to compete with the much stronger, durable fiber, hemp. It is still illegal to this day to grow hemp in America. Of course that was ages ago. The lobbyists who really wanted cannabis outlawed belonged to the alcohol industry. ( Since Holland de-criminalized cannabis years ago, the biggest drug problem in the Netherlands is still alcohol.)

Nevertheless, if we insist on continuing these ridiculous policies, everyone from the president, his staff and cabinet, members of congress, to the bail out babies on Wall Street should have to submit to the piss police. After all, if people who flip burgers need to be clean and sober to do their jobs, surely the highest ranking officials of the nation and the irreplaceable thieves on Wall Street certainly do. Oh, by the way, lets test for alcohol too. After all alcohol is more of a problem when it comes to exercising good judgment. Even hangovers from alcohol impair a person's judgment. Can't test for alcohol, you say? Maybe not, but since the liver cannot completely metabolize alcohol, it leaves another quite toxic substance in the system for quite some time. As a matter of fact it is the substance that causes hangovers; acetaldahyde.

Time for the insanity to end.

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.