The War on Drugs is lost

The War on Drugs is an utter and farcical failure. It was doomed from the start because it was developed counter to the scientific evidence available at the time and was conceived of as a political tool against President Richard Nixon’s enemies. Since it kicked off in 1972, the country has spent $1 trillion on this failed policy, 37 million people have been arrested for drugs ( 10 million for marijuana ) yet more people use drugs than ever before, illegal drugs are readily available in practically every community, most of the violence associated with drugs is due to their illegality, and foreign drug cartels routinely bring illegal drugs across our national borders in amounts that police are incapable of slowing down. When it comes to the War on Drugs we’re flushing money down the toilet.

...The original criminalization of marijuana in the 1930s was in part a move to send Mexicans back to Mexico during the Great Depression. The 1972 declaration of the War on Drugs was aimed at blacks and hippies. The consequences of the war have been devastating on those communities while not stopping drug use. Police have fought the drug war more vigorously in black and Hispanic communities than in affluent white neighborhoods. And even when middle-class whites get arrested, due to being able to afford more competent defense and disparities in sentencing, they don’t go to jail in nearly the numbers as others.

Police are addicted to drug money

Police know the War on Drugs is lost, but it is so profitable they won’t tell the truth. Police get federal money, foundation money and forfeiture money for pursuing the failed drug war. It behooves them to pump up the statistics on their anti-drug efforts because they get paid. Recently, in Bay City, a lawyer complained that the city should save the cost of participating in the Bay Area Narcotics Enforcement Team. The ensuing discussion revealed that the federal government gave Bay City police a $60,000 grant to participate in the drug enforcement team. In Detroit, Mayor Dave Bing recently announced that police could use more than $2 million in drug forfeiture money to purchase crime-fighting technology that the city could not otherwise afford.

In an atmosphere where education dollars are hard to come by, where budget cuts threaten the existence of social services, where health care costs have nearly paralyzed the nation, anti-drug money still flows without impediment into dark coffers across the nation.

In a Dec. 5 press release, California’s Union of Medical Marijuana Patients revealed that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is “about to award an exclusive license to Kannalife Sciences, Inc. of New York to develop medical therapeutics based on the chemistry of cannabis.”

There’s big money to be made, and the folks who handle big money want to keep it for themselves. In 2005, Milton Friedman and 500 economists supported a Harvard study showing that legal taxed and regulated marijuana would produce annual savings and tax revenues of $10-$14 billion for the United States. California pot sales alone already are an estimated billion-dollar industry. It’s not like we couldn’t use that kind of money in Michigan.

Full article here

http://www.420magazine.com/2012/01/war-on-the-war-on-drugs/