Drug War Interlude

As you may or may not be aware, I read a fuckton of blogs every day. That's a metric fuckton, not English, in case you were wondering. That's between 200-300 entrees a day. A good majority of them are on the scienceblogs.com header. (I'd highly recommend subscribing to it, tons of good reads.) You may also have noticed my blog list to the side here - all the ones listed are brilliant, BTW. Anyhoo, recently 'DrugMonkey' has been touting the 'effectivness' of the War On Drugs, and this morning I comprised the following response to his latest steaming pile of bullshit "The War on Drugs Didn't Work, Eh?" (Note: I typically agree with DrugMonkey 90% of the time, just especially not on this issue. Typically, it's a great blog and I read it often. I just get livid when people try to justify the present drug war for whatever reason.) Education Yes, Prohibition, Fuck No.

You know, I bet they have reduced rates of civil unrest in China, since they prohibit freedom of speech and firewall the hell of out of their internet. Does this make it right? No. Does the decrease in drug use justify the war on drugs? Hell no. I guess I'm speaking just for pot, since anything harder would require more thought than I am willing to go into right now. I have no new arguments to add here that haven't been reiterated ad nasuem , but I'm coming from a freedom standpoint. Why can I get blacked out drunk on vodka from the grocery store, but I can't catch a smooth buzz from sharing a joint with a few friends? I think as long as booze and tobacco are legal, there isn't an argument on this planet to justify the criminalization of marijuana. On what grounds, exactly, is pot any 'worse' than alcohol? Allow me to play the 'how many people die each year' card, if you will. How many people ended up in jail for marijuana possession in 2006? 829,625? Almost a million people? Really? You explain to me how this is a good thing. It's not keeping criminals off the street. It's not preventing any crime. It's creating a mess and filling our jails with non-violent offenders.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say "Let the punishment fit the crime." If the drug you possess doesn't have the ability to kill, why are people being arrested and charged with hard time? Why sentence patients and providers to decades of jail time? Simply put, why, other than for arbitrary morals, do we legalize one intoxicant and not another?

To what end do we persecute others to feel 'safe'? Do you feel any safer knowing that I could be locked up at any time, simply because of the methods I choose to relax? The next time you drink a beer, image if you could be locked away and have your possessions confiscated for simply winding down.

Yes, tell the teens and everyone the consequences, just as we do for alcohol and tobacco use. Education is what works, not prohibition. IMHO, 'drug use has gone down' does NOT mean the drug war is working. By your logic, the 'War on Terror' must be won, since there has been a steep decline of terrorist attacks on this country since 9/11. It's a good thing we don't have any other problems we could be spending this money on in this country.