It is a very unfortunate fact that many otherwise savvy and socially aware Brunonians tend to assume that drug policy is a relatively minor issue in politics. The disturbing truth is that our drug laws, and the institutions that carry out the intent of those laws, constitute nothing less than a campaign of fear, corruption, violence and mind-control -- it is a war after all. With citizens' tax dollars, these massive infrastructures -- which include prisons, police officers, propaganda programs, the military, the Drug Enforcement Administration and so on -- are given the task of stamping out the consumption of drugs.
Yet, for more than 40 years now, the war on drugs has failed in its mission. We are currently in the longest and most destructive war in American history, and yet no one seems to want to talk about it.
For those of you who aren't familiar with our current federal drug policies, the basic idea is pretty simple. The government uses five "schedules" to classify drugs according to three properties -- "potential for abuse," "accepted medical use" and potential to lead to "psychological or physical dependence." Schedule I drugs, for example, are deemed by the DEA and the Food and Drug Administration to have a high potential for abuse, no accepted medical value and a high potential for dependence. This most serious category currently includes drugs like marijuana, LSD, psilocybin and MDMA.
However, concerning the four drugs I just mentioned, legitimate research conducted by third-parties and the government itself has consistently shown this classification system to be utterly spurious. According to a 2010 British study published in the Lancet, these particular substances are actually some of the least harmful of all recreational drugs. Their impact on society and potential for addiction is miniscule compared with alcohol and tobacco -- which, of course, are entirely legal.
On top of that, more evidence confirming the medical benefits of Schedule I drugs surfaces every day. The American College of Physicians recently published a paper (PDF) in which they recommend further research on marijuana for the treatment of nausea, glaucoma, neurological disorders and pain. LSD and psilocybin have proven effective in treating cluster headaches, a condition that affects one in 1,000 people and is so painful it has earned the nickname "suicide headache." Research has also shown that MDMA can effectively treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
The real knife in the back is that this blatantly inaccurate system of classification is the legal justification for the state's use of violence against its own people. According to 2011 statistics, more than half of all federal prisoners are serving sentences for drug-related offenses. This, in addition to the fact that the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other country and that a disproportionate number of these prisoners are black or Hispanic, provides sufficient grounds for charging the U.S. with crimes against humanity.
Particularly sickening is the fact that this prison-industrial complex is completely subsidized by John Q. Taxpayer. Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates that state and federal governments spend more than $46 billion a year fighting the war on drugs.
And let's not forget the obvious detail that making drugs illegal doesn't get rid of drugs. Outlawing them simply creates an extremely lucrative black market, since criminal gangs derive the exclusive right to deal. The profitability of selling illegal drugs acts like a magnet that uproots hundreds of thousands of teens from their communities every year and lures them into a life of crime. And the violence created by our drug laws is certainly not entirely contained within our borders. Drug cartels in Latin America, fueled by our guns and our money, have murdered thousands of innocent people and continue to destabilize the region in their quest to supply our demand for illegal drugs.
To solve the problem, our government doles out more of your hard-earned cash in the form of "aid" -- that is, weaponry and combat training -- to these countries, enabling the U.S. to fight a proxy war, thus exporting the externalities created by this thriving industry of violence.
Even if we won this war on drugs, it still demonstrates what hypocrites we really are. Think about it for a second -- what liberty is more fundamental than the right to explore and experiment with one's own consciousness? If, while under the influence of drugs, I steal a car or assault someone, I'm going to be punished for that wrongdoing regardless. What, then, are the grounds for making drug use itself a crime? If the logic is that it's the state's duty to shape the moral conscience and worldview of its citizenry -- well then, hello, 1984.
I want to support President Obama, but as long as he continues to enable these atrocities, he's a coward in my book. And on this issue Republicans really display their talent for doublespeak -- I thought conservatives liked individual freedom, small government and fiscal responsibility? As we listen to criticism of governments like Syria for enacting violent and persecutory campaigns against its own citizens, we ought to pause and reflect on our own crimes against humanity.
Jared Moffat '13 is a philosophy concentrator from Jackson, Miss. He can be contacted at jared_moffat@brown.edu.
This post originally appeared in the Brown Daily Herald.
Yet no politicians, other than Ron Paul & Gary Johnson, will risk their asses by coming out to support it. Unless the states can carry the torch, & defy the feds, I'm afraid we will have the drugwar, aka `Prohibition-II' forever.
Again, Dr. Paul is your man. Unfortunately, the establishment would rather you dismiss this man lest their little game have it's cover blown.
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Sure he has, champ.
And--LSD is 'proven effective' in treating cluster headaches---seriously? And this is based on what? A couple of self medicating/self reporting people and one small study which by the way was uncontrolled and unblind! Not saying these drugs shouldn't be studied but to say it's 'proven effective' is wrong and very misleading. Same with the MDMA, the link you provided only mentions one study consisting of 20 people.....so to claim it's an 'effective treatment' is BS.
Portugal decriminalized all drugs, yet didn't experience the apocalypse or even any of the "expected" usage spikes: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080
Treat people like people until they actually violate another's rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Education will cut drug use far faster than incarceration.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/08/news/08iht-poppy.t.html
"Australia, which started its commercial opium poppy industry in 1970, is already the world's largest legal producer of morphine, codeine and other painkilling extracts from the poppy plant. "
Even though our founding fathers encouraged everyone in our new nation to grow hemp and they even used cannabis as a medicine it was demonized and then taxed and regulated out of domestic production by the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Hemp is still a valuable commodity crop and cannabis is still an effective medicine. Cannabis, especially hemp, never should have been included in Schedule 1 of the CSA in the first place.
tobacco kills 400,000 Americans a year.
Marijuana 0
all other illegal narcotics- around 20,000.
I get that people die when they ingest to much of all sorts of things, buy why should we spend 46 billion a year trying to stop them to no effect, when we can end most of the related problems with legalization.
And stop with the "oh god, how we gona pull that off" crap. We sell booze, it kills 100,000 people a year(before road deaths) and we can sell it just fine.
And leading a horse to water and making it drink has nothing to do with its intelligence. Horses are infinitely better than any human about regulating its hydration.
If you could go to your local drug or liquor store to buy products infused with cocaine, cannabis and opium the far more dangerous concentrated drugs would cease to exist. The only reason we have crack cocaine is because they took it out of Coke Cola. Drugs use and abuse are always a medical issue. The real problems are caused by the criminalization of drugs. We should have leaned that lesson from the prohibition of alcohol.
Like most of the drug prohibitions, the prohibition of cannabis is based upon lies to protect the profitability of the moneyed interests. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was pushed through congress to protect the financial interest of the forest products paper industry which would have lost market share to hemp paper after the invention of the Decordicator which mechanically separates the long bast fibers from the short fiber pulp in the hemp stalks. The real reason that cannabis was taxed and regulated out of domestic production was to protect the moneyed interests of an elite few. The modern Republican't Party would be proud of this masterful misdirection.