Balko on the Drug War : Dispatches from the Culture Wars

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Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)

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Balko on the Drug War

Posted on: May 24, 2006 9:11 AM, by Ed Brayton

This post by Radley Balko is a must read about drug war. Not only is it a massive failure, it's costing us untold billions of dollars and destroying countless lives. The numbers are staggering. 55% of all Federal prison inmates are there on drug charges, their number quadrupling between 1986 and 1999, and half of those are there solely on possession, not trafficking. And that's not including state prisons, with a much higher population and about the same percentages. There are more non-violent offenders in prison today than the populations of Alaska and Wyoming combined, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars per year to warehouse them. But despite this massive increase in incarceration, the government's own data shows that recreational drug use has increased over that same time. Drug use will never, ever stop. It is as old as humanity itself. And it's about time we treated addiction as a health problem, not a felony.

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Our war on drugs is also responsible for the formation and development of the drug cartels of South America that rival governments in their wealth and power.

Posted by: Mark Paris | May 24, 2006 9:22 AM

I heard someone say that prisoners now outnumber farmers in the US.

Posted by: Raging Bee | May 24, 2006 9:26 AM

I heard someone say that prisoners now outnumber farmers in the US.

Start jailing the Farmers!!! It will bring the drug arrests in to a happy medium!!

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | May 24, 2006 10:13 AM

I agree completely. I think drug use is a personal choice just as smoking and drinking are. There is one very major caveat to that however - your right to consume intoxicating substances ends at the point that you are impinging on other's rights. The perfect example is drinking and driving. You do have a right to drink but, you do NOT have a right to drink and drive. Likewise with smoking, you have a right to smoke in your own air but you do NOT have a right to pollute the air of others with your smoke. The same can be said for any other types of drugs - so long as you are not infringing on other's rights, you should have the right to take recreational drugs.

Now, with that said, there are some genuinely dangerous drugs that will physically addict you very powerfully and can and will kill you with only a bit of an overdose. I personally think one is a fool if they take such drugs but, hey, more air for me as far as I am concerned.

To that end, I do think that recreational drugs should be carefully regulated and monitored - some very strictly in the case of the really dangerous ones. I also think that ALL pertinent information about the very real dangers of some of these drugs would need to be heavily publicized to make sure the public is well informed about what they are choosing to put into their bodies.

The benefits?

We would, over night, simultaneously halve the prison population and put the very dangerous and violent drug cartels out of business. We would effectively shut down a whole black market from the street pusher on up to the drug cartel leaders.

We would open up a whole new revenue stream for the government in the form of taxes.

We would greatly lessen the burden on law enforcement so that they could concentrate on real crime such as rape, murder, assault, etc.

We would save billions of dollars on wasted "War on Drugs" efforts and wasted law enforcement efforts.

Posted by: VisualFX | May 24, 2006 1:25 PM

We would save billions of dollars on wasted "War on Drugs" efforts and wasted law enforcement efforts.

Police departments make millions a piece through property forfeiture. That's what keeps this "war" going more than anything.

Posted by: beervolcano | May 24, 2006 4:24 PM

Plus, a new study demonstrates that marijuana isn't isn't even that bad for you anyways. Clearly, drug policy is another area where we would all benefit from lawmakers basing their decisions to a greater extent on sound science.

Posted by: Nick Anthis | May 24, 2006 7:08 PM

Marijuana is not only not that bad for you, it is not even itself the subject matter of a prohibitionary law. Nope. No law has been passed stating that Marijuana is illegal. The decision to make its possession an offence is a purely non-elected behind closed doors burocratic one of mandating, without oversight or being required to produce any actual, like, 'evidence', that it is a member of Schedule 1 drugs. The only law there is simply prohibits Schedule 1 and makes no mention of what drugs should be there or what justification there should be for putting them there beyond "no medical value". Apparently our leaders do not believe there is such a thing as "recreational value". Or "Personal Responsibility".

Lately they are also trying to conflate "aiding the Terrorists" in that they believe drug money flows that way. Well, maybe it does, but its for sure there is no such relationship for a person growing their own plant or two - indeed there is an anti-relationship. But these no-money 'offenders' get worse treatment than simple possession of bought drugs that might indeed have meant some cash went abroad.

Want a full blown rant? just ask. Tough to stop this short.

Posted by: lanwolf | May 24, 2006 9:39 PM