Fighting The Wrong War On Drugs
Amendment 18 to the US Constitution was ratified in 1919: liquor was prohibited in the United States. In 1933, only 14 years later, Amendment 18 was repealed by the 21st amendment to the US Constitution. Why? Because of the violence? Because of the cost to society? Because of the death? Fast forward to 2012. Almost 100 years later we, the people, led by our politicians, have kept certain other drugs illegal and in doing so have caused the death or personal destruction of the lives of millions of people, both US citizens and those of other countries.
Most recently it is reported in the New York Times that our Drug Enforcement Agency is employing military personnel recently returned from Afghanistan in their war in Honduras. Unidentified planes have been shot down, people killed and the excuses for these actions are just that – excuses. But notice, the DEA is operating as a military force in other countries, simply because the price of cocaine, marijuana or heroin has an artificial price support caused by their illegality.
And then there’s this nugget from the opioids.com timeline, which notes that in 2008, “a report by The Pew Centre, a Washington think-tank, reveals that time over one in 100 adults in the USA is now in jail: some 2,300,000 prisoners, triple the rate in the 1980s. American prisons now hold around a quarter of the world’s inmates. Nearly half of US federal prisoners are imprisoned for non-violent, drug-related “crimes.” Law professor Paul Cassell of the University of Utah comments on the size of the US prison population: “It’s the price of living in the most free society in the world.”
This is the PRICE of being FREE? From another NY Times piece:
But the government has spent $20 billion to $25 billion a year on counternarcotics efforts over the last decade. That is a pretty high price tag for political cover, to stop drugs from becoming a prominent issue on voters’ radar screen. It becomes unacceptably high if you add in the real costs of the drug wars. That includes more than 55,000 Mexicans and tens of thousands of Central Americans killed by drug-fueled violence since Mexico’s departing president, Felipe Calderón, declared war six years ago against the traffickers ferrying drugs across the border.
And the domestic costs are enormous, too. Almost one in five inmates in state prisons and half of those in federal prisons are serving time for drug offenses. In 2010, 1.64 million people were arrested for drug violations. Four out of five arrests were for possession. Nearly half were for possession of often-tiny amounts of marijuana.
What kind of freedom is this? Why are we causing people to die to keep recreational drugs away from them? Even more important: our governments have been making this attempt for 100 years and it hasn’t worked, isn’t working, and is not going to work. So why do we keep doing it? Why do we keep killing people and putting them in jail to stop an activity that is none of the government’s business?
LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization of current and former members of law enforcement agencies, has this to say:
We believe that drug prohibition is the true cause of much of the social and personal damage that has historically been attributed to drug use. It is prohibition that makes these drugs so valuable – while giving criminals a monopoly over their supply. Driven by the huge profits from this monopoly, criminal gangs bribe and kill each other, law enforcers, and children. Their trade is unregulated and they are, therefore, beyond our control.
History has shown that drug prohibition reduces neither use nor abuse. After a rapist is arrested, there are fewer rapes. After a drug dealer is arrested, however, neither the supply nor the demand for drugs is seriously changed. The arrest merely creates a job opening for an endless stream of drug entrepreneurs who will take huge risks for the sake of the enormous profits created by prohibition. Prohibition costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year, yet 40 years and some 40 million arrests later, drugs are cheaper, more potent and far more widely used than at the beginning of this futile crusade.
What more can be said when even law enforcement agents oppose these government policies?
What can be said is who benefits. The Bureaucracy of the DEA, the prison construction and operational ‘industrial’ complex, lawyers, local and state police agencies and those who benefit monetarily from the price of the illegal drugs, which includes money laundering banks, as has been reported previously here and elsewhere. Even worse, the sale of heroin is one of the ways the Taliban gets money to fight our troops in Afghanistan. We are subsidizing our troops enemies by keeping heroin illegal. Is this what we want to be doing? Is this what we want from a “free” society? Or is the word free just something we say in order to make ourselves feel good?
When agents employed by our government are killing people because they are trying to supply a demand for drugs for people’s recreational use, we are being immoral. Perhaps President Obama should apologize for our war on drugs, yet his administration continues the war with a vengeance. More likely it is something the citizens should tell their representatives we do not condone. How many lives do you know that have been ruined by this war? How many have you read about in the paper or seen reported on TV? Isn’t it time we stopped?
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