Beware people suddenly admitting the War on Drugs is failing…
Shane June 10th, 2008
There is always, always, always a motive behind anything political.
Lately there are a lot of articles like this popping up, where influential and/or political people admit that the War on Drugs is failing. Pot smokers everywhere rejoice every time someone says it.
Why is this idea suddenly gaining political favor?
I would say, the answer lies in our history - prohibition. This article explains it pretty clearly.
Prohibition was not repealed because the government suddenly realized that people should have the freedom to drink alcohol, or that the legal measures taken to keep people from drinking were ineffective, or even because social pressures finally swayed politicians to make changes that the public wanted.
The government needed more money. As the linked article states:
Prior to the creation in 1913 of the national income tax, about a third of Uncle Sam’s annual revenue came from liquor taxes…By 1920, the income tax supplied two-thirds of Uncle Sam’s revenues and nine times more revenue than was then supplied by liquor taxes and customs duties combined.
The government didn’t need liquor tax revenue “once a new and much more intoxicating source of revenue was discovered, the cost to politicians of pandering to the puritans and other anti-liquor lobbies dramatically fell.”
Once the Great Depression hit, and didn’t appear to be ending anytime soon, the government needed revenue and so… Prohibition is repealed.
That being said, I would say Marijuana should be decriminalized. I would call myself a Libertarian, and I think the War on Drugs in crazy. In Ron Paul’s book ‘The Revolution, A Manifesto’ he cites evidence pointing to the criminalization of marijuana being racially motivated. He states that the ‘expert’ that testified (just one person) at the time admitted later that he had no evidence that marijuana was dangerous. The problem is that the government will make it completely legal, and then tax the shit out of it. 10 years after it is legalized, it will be more expensive than it is now, with a ton of the revenue from the sale of it going to make government budgets ever bigger.
The answer: decriminalize, but don’t legalize.
Disclaimer: Author has not smoked pot in 15 years, is completely out of the loop, and was never really much ‘in the loop’ at any point.
Most importantly though, beware politicians saying to legalize drugs. Are they realizing the War on Drugs didn’t work, or are they looking for future revenue?
- Politics
- Comments(13)
I am wary of anything a politician says. They are junkies, addicted votes.
This type of people is always harmful.We have to careful about this type of people.
Interesting article. The heavy tops always seem to cause some controversy around election time.
I agree that the war is failing and there needs to be some revamping done. Rather than spend extraordinary amounts on incarcerating non violent drug users, these people need help, not shoved in a jail cell. I imagine in the future people will realize this and hopefully change will come. I would hope that people would start to see how our governments programs are failing.
lol. yeah, thats true. One must not always believe to these politicians as one can make their own judgement and make a decision. Nice article. Keep the good work.
If they made it an instant death penalty if people were caught selling this junk then I doubt you wold see much of a drug problem anymore
It does make you wonder what direction they are heading with the topic. I don’t see them legalizing it any time soon, but you never know.
The war on drugs is an excuse for your government to take away our freedoms in the name of safety. They can search our pockets, our cars, and our houses on a whim, and whose to say if they find any “contraband” that it won’t be fabricated. If you take drugs detrimentally, you are harming only yourself, and so it’s no place for the state to interfere. The liberties set forth in our Constitution leave no place for drugs to be illegal (unless it’s a drug that makes you go crazy and kill all your neighbors).
The real war that we should be fighting, is the one against Ritalin and other psycho-tropic drugs being given to million of school children. It’s going to mess up their minds later, and there’s no reason for it, besides lining the pockets of the manufacturers of such drugs.
I am a huge proponent of legalizing marijuana, and have been for the past ten years or so. Treat it and tax it the same way we do alcohol. No one has ever OD’ed on marijuana, and as long as the laws in place against those who choose to use it are geared toward not harming others (driving under the influence, etc), then I just don’t see a problem.
FYI, I am a huge Ron Paul fan. I have not read his manifesto, so thanks for reminding me to pick it up!
The war on drugs has definitely been a failure. Drug use has not declined due to prohibition and it NEVER will. The only thing that the war on drugs has done is put the production of drugs in the hands of criminals. Criminal networks that distribute these products appear as a result of demand for the products, and jailing five or ten or a million of these “criminals” will only create a market for more criminals to move in.
Do you honestly think that a person smoking marijuana on their free time is a criminal? Do you think they should go to jail? What about someone who is passionate about gardening and marijuana and chooses to grow it for themselves? Who are they harming?
The answer is nobody, and filling prisons with non-violent “Offenders” of an arbitrary law is not an effective solution.
Tell me one way that the war on drugs has been effective?
More people die each year from alcohol than every single illegal drug combined. More people die from tobacco each year than every single illegal drug combined. And guess what? More people die of prescribed pharmaceuticals than EVERY ILLEGAL DRUG COMBINED.
Most of the time, these pharmaceuticals are just corporate spin-offs of illegal drugs. We feed amphetamines to our children to help with ADD. Yet any person who takes amphetamines recreationally is immediately classified as a meth addict.
We indoctrinate our children to view drugs and drug users as immoral criminals - yet North America consumes more drugs than anywhere else in the world.
Billy’s parents would flip if they found out he was smoking marijuana, but they go out on weekends to drink themselves stupid, and they smoke cigarettes daily.
Billy will never overdose on marijuana. He will not become physically addicted to it. (And if he becomes psychologically addicted, it is not a problem with the drug, but with billy himself - or his parents) There are no withdrawal symptoms from it and it will not cause him to become aggressive or abusive. It will certainly not impair his driving as much as alcohol, and it won’t damage his liver. It has not yet been definitively proven to be cancerous - although both alcohol and tobacco have been. Even if there is a correlation between lung cancer and smoking marijuana, this problem would be eliminated if Billy decided to consume the THC orally (ex. In brownies)
Yet Billy’s parents are legally allowed to drink themselves into a stupor and smoke their lungs away.
Billy shouldn’t be consuming drugs at all until he is an adult, but If he was my son, I would much prefer him to be smoking weed than drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes.
So how can any of this make sense? It just doesn’t.
remember wag the dog? i love this movie, (played by dustin hoffman, robert de niro, anne heche)… the main plot is when a spin-doctor and a movie producer join efforts to fabricate a war to cover up a sex scandal involving the president of the united states. i think it perfectly explains your post here… that we should not always eat everything that is being fed to us…
Is it a positive news?I can’t understand the summary.
This sure is a tough one. Strangely enough I have been thinking about it a bit lately and just by chance stumbled upon this. Basically, if a government wants to control a drug they cannot make it illegal, as then it will be controlled by criminals. I had a friend who died in front of my eyes from heroine. It was not the heroine that killed her, it was the glass it was laced with that shredded her veins. If heroine was legal in some shape or form, that would never happened.