A startling fact:
The $320 billion annual global drug industry now accounts for 1 percent of all commerce on the planet.
The war on drugs is a failure. All that taxpayer money spent with no real impact on lowering taxpayer consumption. Yet simply adjusting the methodology and basis of our drug scheduling could change it all, using a new set of standards based on empirical data and facts, not misleading rhetoric propping up the status quo. The impact of rescheduling all drugs by sound scientific standards would not just create a better and more sensible drug policy overall, but would shake up our social norms from incarceration and law enforcement to what we can buy at 7-11 and what we teach kids. If we measured all drugs on a scale of lethality, addictiveness and medicinal utility, nicotine and alcohol (both of which are not currently scheduled as drugs and most definitely should be) would score much higher than marijuana in the first two categories and both lack medicinal use. This would upend the entire social scene as one might then need a prescription to buy cigarettes and alcohol but could buy a pack of joints at the local convenience store. But just because a substance/drug is socially normalized doesn't mean it is scientifically safe or beneficial. We need to be able to trust the government to clearly inform us of actual safety and addiction facts, free from the influence of lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry or the prison industrial complex.
Have you done any drugs or known someone who has? Of course. That goes for everybody on the planet. Doing a little extra research on sites like www.erowid.org will give you countless firsthand accounts of drug use of every kind. What you will notice is that the actual experiences and effects of the drugs often have little correlation in the way they are scheduled by the government (or officially presented). To see the government schedule marijuana with heroin a level above opium, morphine and cocaine seems ludicrous. Seeing it two levels above barbiturates and amphetamines? Even more absurd. Not seeing nicotine and alcohol anywhere on the list? Preposterous. No wonder kids don't believe what they're told by anti-drug programs! They know the truth and it doesn't jibe with the official paradigm. Then they don't think anything is correctly scheduled so they wind up experimenting with some pretty bad stuff. Misinformation and propaganda have probably helped kill more people than they've "saved" from drugs.
Just like we need trust in our government, we need trust in our drug scheduling policies. So where is the independent task force to reconsider how drugs are scheduled? Where is the independent task force to rethink how our national drug policy might actually get results and lower usage? And where is the independent task force to rethink how or why we incarcerate people for using drugs? A deeply-in-debt California spends billions of dollars on prisons while housing thousands of non-violent drug offenders, which sensible policy could assuage immensely. Just ceasing to arrest marijuana users would free up huge amounts of space in our overcrowded prison system, which can then be reserved for murderers, rapists and maybe even a banker or two.
But first we must change the discussion from rhetoric to facts, especially in light of this recent AP report. Let science and empirical facts guide law and policy and give people honest reasons why or why not they can or cannot legally use a drug.
One last factoid: In 2002, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft described the size of the U.S. drug market, reporting that Americans spent $62.9 billion on drugs in 2000. More than half ($36.1 billion), was spent on cocaine -- of which an estimated 90 percent transits through Mexico. In 2009, the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center estimated that Mexican and Colombian drug trafficking organizations generated somewhere in the range of $17 billion to $38 billion annually in gross wholesale proceeds from drug sales in the United States. By comparison, Google's worldwide revenue in 2009 was $23.6 billion.
Food for thought...
Lets also end the War on BankRobbers. How many billions have been spent to prosecute these financial crimes? Think of all the money we could give to poor people!
The Cheech and Chong political machine has failed. Find another way to destroy your minds.
Change is coming 2012
"A sizeable portion of the population disagreed with Prohibition. There was widespread contempt for the law, and many people broke it. Mayor La Guardia of New York City said, "It would take a police force of 250,000 to enforce the Prohibition Act, and another 200,000 to police the police." In Texas, just months after Prohibition began, a still was found on the farm of Senator Morris Sheppard, who approved of the Eighteenth Amendment that brought about Prohibition. The demand for alcohol was enormous, but the Eighteenth Amendment had ended the supply. This situation enabled organized crime, and gangsters like Al Capone to make tremendous amounts of money. Without competition from people already in the liquor business, they could charge whatever they wanted for a drink."
http://www.lib.niu.edu/2001/ihy010222.html
* A rather large majority of people will always feel the need to use drugs, such as heroin, opium, nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, sugar, or caffeine.
* Due to Prohibition, the availability of mind-altering drugs has become so universal and unfettered, that in any city of the civilized world, any one of us would be able to procure practically any drug we wish within an hour.
* The massive majority of people who use drugs do so recreationally - getting high at the weekend then up for work on a Monday morning.
* A small minority of people will always experience drug use as problematic.
* Throughout history, the prohibition of any mind-altering substance has always exploded usage rates, overcrowded jails, fueled organized crime, created rampant corruption of law-enforcement - even whole governments, while inducing an incalculable amount of suffering and death.
* It's not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons, but prohibitionists wish to waste hundreds of billions of our money in an utterly futile attempt to keep them off our streets.
* Prohibition kills more people and ruins more lives than the prohibited drugs have ever done.
* The United States jails a larger percentage of it's own citizens than any other country in the world, including those run by the worst totalitarian regimes.
* The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.
- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor, essayist and philologist.
Other than those who have vested financial interests in not seeing the truth –such as the Pharmaceutical, Tobacco, Alcohol, and Prison Industrial Complex/“Treatment” industries, -most people who talk about The War on Drugs agree that it is a failure on every front but what to do…? What can any one person do…?
On the day that I or anyone else who subscribes to my plan takes office in a position with pardon power, THE DRUG WAR IS OVER in that jurisdiction. While a Governor or a President can’t write law or usually even determine what on the books is enforced, pre-emptive online pardons for drug law violations from that day forward will stop it on day one. When coupled with a requirement that any distribution have occurred in warning covered packages while banning advertising promotions, usage will drop, -with a precipitous decline in the murders, corruptions, overdoses, environmental poisonings, funding of terrorist/criminal elements, wrong or “right” house raids, horrific imprisonments and other problems caused by the War on Drugs. -Marc Romain
The War on Drugs, the day it was first unveiled to the people, was on a day that marked the end of many weeks of silence on the president's part during the Iran-Contra Affair. Then, with Nancy seated beside him, Ronald Reagan announced his new war, and said not a whit about his doings re Iran-Contra, which is only natural, as he revealed later-- he claimed he couldn't really remember what he had done in that whole sorry business.
The war began as a cynical diversion from political scandal It is a political scandal that it has continued to this day.
The empirical evidence is there, but no one is listening. People figure "if its illegal, its for a reason. If its legal, its for a reason", and that's it.
They were the same kind of people that argued against giving women the vote, and thought homosexuals should be kept at arms length away from the rest of 'society.'
If you want to end the War on Drugs, then join us and help us to convince more of those people that their assumptions are wrong.