I hate to go back and beat dead horses but when even senile idiots like Pat Robertson can see that one of our most costly and nationally debilitating processes is a disaster it’s time for those in more functional positions to get off their butts and do something about it.
I’m speaking, of course, about the war on drugs, one of the most ill conceived operations in the history of our Federal Government. I’ve listened to all the nonsense about how drugs are destroying our youth and how they are being used to finance major crime and terrorist networks and whatever morsel of truth can be found tin these arguments can just as easily be turned around as reason to abandon our entire national drug policy.
The same arguments that were used to establish our national drug policy were used to establish prohibition and they were as fallacious then as they are now. We finally figured that out when it came to booze, when are we going to figure it out in regard to drugs.
I’m not saying that we should legalize all drugs, not right away, at least. What I’m saying is that we should, at least, legalize marijuana, which I can say as a current non-imbiber has very little impact for all the noise that’s made about it. To anyone who has ever used marijuana and also drunk alcohol, if they are honest, they will tell you that booze has a much stronger effect on behavior despite the fact that it remains legal. Why is this?
The answer has nothing to do with the social aspects of drugs but rather the economic ones. There are a lot of people making a lot of money by keeping drugs illegal. We spent over thirty billion dollars of your tax money on the war on drugs in 2011. Thirty billion! That’s money stolen from every other program of the United States government.
We spend 6 times more in jail costs than we do on education. We now have over one million inmates in this country, more than five times more than any other country in the world. We have 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over half of the people in prison are there on drug related charges so the people who own prisons don’t want the drug laws changed. Just in case you didn’t know it, the prison business has been privatized. The government isn’t in the prison business anymore, not in any significant way.
In the last ten years we have built 21 prisons in California and one college. They spend on average $8,667 per college student a year and over $50,000 per inmate. If that doesn’t make prisons big business nothing does. So if we want to legalize drugs, the first thing we have to do is go through the people who run prisons, the people who make billions for no good reason. They don’t want to lose half their population because it means they lose half their money. Besides it’s a lot easier to control a population of stoners than it is to control a population of gang bangers and killers. We also have to fight the DEA which makes its living off the drug wars. Then there’s the bad guys, the drug dealers who don’t want to see it legalized because that would end their business just like ending prohibition ended the money pot for the rum runners.
Over the past forty years we have spent over $1,000,000,000. That’s one trillion bucks fighting the drug war and we have nothing to show for it. The greatest waste in human history. Even drug czar Gil Kerlikowski admits that the war is a failure. “In the grand scheme it has not been successful,” he concedes. What more needs to be said? It’s time we stopped throwing good money after bad, recognize the fact that people want to use drugs, just like people want to drink, gamble and screw, and get on with the legalization process, a process that would have two very beneficial effects. One it would empty half of our prisons of people who are in there for such picayune offenses as simple possession and two it would enable the government to collect taxes on the sale of those drugs which now cost us billions to regulate.
It’s a win/win situation, all we have to do is convince our bribe taking congressmen that it’s better to pass legislation legalizing drugs than it is to get caught on the take and join the drug dealers in jail. Not an easy task when lobbyists for prison owners and the DEA are throwing rewards at them from every direction but it is something that must be done.
Will there still be people turning out illegal drugs like there are still people manufacturing corn; absolutely but like those currently making illegal booze, they will be a miniscule part of the problem.
We have to get out of the drug hole and the only way to do it is to legalize them and make them a source of tax income rather than the enormous burden they currently represent.