Nice piece of writing Lawman.

Is the consensus among the commenters that marijuana be legalized & taxed just as alcohol? Both Federal & State regulations & taxes?

I could support that. Bob Barr will this go into the next Libertarian Platform? How many votes would this gather for you?

Too little too late Bob. The Libertarian Party (with a bit of my money I am proud to say), targeted your race with wonderful ads showing a dying old woman who was denied her medical marijuana because of laws that you supported and voted for. You were generally considered one of the biggest anti drug nuts – yes, I certainly mean nuts – in the Congress.

Easy to support freedom when you can’t vote for it anymore isn’t it Mr. Barr. While real patriots like Ron Paul keep getting elected and have never once waivered from his pro-freedom stance in any vote he has ever taken.

Of course freedom is the right answer. It always has been. Some people just seem to take a really long time to get that.

Any time you have laws on the books that are causing a nonviolent US citizen to be arrested every 17 seconds for drug charges and those laws have been in effect for almost 100 years and the goals of those laws are not being accomplished AT ALL. Then it’s time for the citizens to say enough is enough and look for better ways of dealing with that particular problem.

Americans are winners, we hate to lose but we keep letting our political representatives get us involved in wars that they have no intention of letting us win. The drug war is a real war and it is an unnecessarily harmful, completely unwinnable, and wasteful war. It is in fact a war against a certain large percentage of our own population that chooses to different degrees and with a wide range or results, to put a wide variety of different substances in their body and for a wide variety of reasons. It’s being fought in our communities with real guns, teargas, dogs and virtually every other tool of war available.

The goals of the drug war are to “reduce drug related death, disease, crime and drug use”. It has accomplished NONE of those goals after almost 100 years of prohibition policy, over 1 trillion tax dollars wasted, ever tougher criminal penalties, arresting millions of Americans and all the other effort and resources that have been put into it.

On top of that in the case of marijuana which accounts for roughly half of all drug arrests, that drug never was a serious threat to society, families, or individuals and it never will be. Because of that bad law being implemented based on lies by a few people that stood to gain financially from marijuana’s prohibition and them intentionally deceiving lawmakers, literally millions of Americans that choose to use that plant for ANY purpose are criminalized needlessly. In the US we arrest someone on a marijuana charge every 38 seconds.

Because of our prohibition policy bad laws have been put on the books that make it illegal for IV drug users to obtain clean needles. This results in AIDS and hepatitis being spread unnecessarily into our non drug using society on a huge scale.

Now take a look at the way the Swiss have dealt with their heroin problem. You can watch a lot about this in the video titled “Jack Cole Interview” on the JSK site. In Switzerland they set up government run clinics where heroin addicts can go and get pharmaceutical grade heroin. If you don’t have the money to pay for the drug it’s free. That instantly put every illegal heroin dealer in that country out of business… they can’t compete with free. Anyone that wants heroin can go into a government run clinic up to 3 times a day and inject it. There are medical personnel on hand and anyone that wants to kick their habit is given counseling and help toward that goal. The results are that there has not been a single heroin overdose there in more than 13 years. Switzerland has the lowest AIDS and Hepatitis infection in all of Europe. Crime fell by 60% because no one is stealing or prostituting their self to pay for their heroin and after a 10 year study, they documented that there has been an 82% decline in new heroin users. Now please tell me why our drug war seems like a better policy than that. No one went to jail and no one got killed. This program is also far less expensive than what we are doing and far less harmful.

Drug addiction of all types should be handled as a medical problem not a criminal problem. If a person kills or drives when they are too intoxicated to do so or breaks any legitimate law, we already have laws on the books to deal with those problems and if a real danger to society is recognized like it was with drunk driving, then those laws certainly should be adjusted accordingly. Trying to lock up every drug user or eradicate every plant that produces illegal drugs from planet earth are completely unattainable goals. We simply cannot afford to lock up every drug user and even if we could the vast majority go back to using drugs when they are released. Some countries even went so far as to execute drug users and even that has not succeeded. At some point we have to realize that a certain percentage of people are always going to use drugs and implement policy that minimizes the harms without devastating society.

Most drugs are made from weeds that without prohibition would be of far less financial value. According to a fairly recent documentary by Walter Cronkite, all the plants needed to supply an entire year’s worth of the heroin consumed in the US could be grown on about 50 square miles almost anywhere on earth and the entire years worth of heroin could be transported in a single cargo plane. Doesn’t it make more sense to have doctors treat the addicts than to try and stop the heroin production? It has to because law enforcement has only been able to prevent the production or transportation of about 10% of the heroin according to their own statistics.

Despite the drug war and all the money and efforts that have been put into it, drugs today are more potent, more readily available and often less expensive than they were when Richard Nixon started the modern war on drugs.

If you can show me ANYTHING that the drug war has accomplished when it comes to reducing drug related death, disease, crime or addiction that has significantly improved any drug related area over a long period of time I’d appreciate you telling me what it is.

Let’s compare the results of two roughly comparable major cities which both have a drug problem. The cities are New York, and Liverpool, England.

In New York, heroin and cocaine addicts suffer from tremendous medical problems. In Liverpool, England, most heroin and cocaine addicts suffer few medical problems. In New York, most drug addicts are unemployed criminals. In Liverpool, most drug addicts are gainfully employed taxpayers. In New York, crime committed by drug addicts is a major problem. In Liverpool, it is a very minor problem. In New York, drug addicts often have their children taken away and live under miserable conditions. In Liverpool, most addicts live with their families in stable homes and manage to raise healthy, well-adjusted children. In New York, thousands of babies are permanently damaged every year by their mother’s drug use. In Liverpool, health authorities report no cases of harm to infants as a result of their mother’s drug use. In New York, sixty percent of all intravenous drug users are infected with AIDS, and they are a major cause of the spread of AIDS. In Liverpool, only one percent of the intravenous drug users are infected with AIDS and they are a very minor source of infection for the rest of the population. In the United States, drug use is illegal and the police hunt down drug users to throw them in prison. Four thousand people died from illegal drugs in the US last year and we now have more than 600,000 people in prison on drug charges. In Liverpool, England, the police do not arrest drug users any more. Instead, health care workers seek them out and encourage them to come in for counseling and medical treatment. Both counseling and medical treatment are provided on demand. The medical treatment often includes maintenance doses of narcotics under the management of a physician. Liverpool, England, has adopted the same approach as the Netherlands and has had substantially the same results. They both chose decriminalization.
Sources for this article date back to December 27, 1992. Although the information is somewhat behind the times, the message remains the same.

The Constitutional right to freedom of religion, free speech, a free press, to keep and bear arms, to be secure in your person, house, papers and effects against unreasonable search and seizure, to life, liberty and property, to be protected from having your property taken by the government without due process of law and without just compensation, to confront the witnesses against you, to be protected from excessive bail, excessive fines, cruel and unusual punishment, to vote and others have been denied to millions of Americans in the name of the drug war.

More information about drug laws from Just Say Know:
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