It's time that we got a sensible drug policy.
From this morning's Washington Post:
Marijuana Becomes Focus of Drug War
Less Emphasis on Heroin and Cocaine
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 4, 2005; A01
The focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of federal crime statistics released yesterday.
The study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10 years later. During the same period, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of the total to 45 percent.
Coming in the wake of the focus on crack cocaine in the late 1980s, the increasing emphasis on marijuana enforcement was accompanied by a dramatic rise in overall drug arrests, from fewer than 1.1 million in 1990 to more than 1.5 million a decade later. Eighty percent of that increase came from marijuana arrests, the study found.
The rapid increase has not had a significant impact on prisons, however, because just 6 percent of the arrests resulted in felony convictions, the study found. The most widely quoted household survey on the topic has shown relatively little change in the overall rate of marijuana use over the same time period, experts said.
This is absolutely absurd.
Look at this:
Annual Causes of Death in the United States
Tobacco 435,000
Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity 365,000
Alcohol 85,000
Microbial Agents 75,000
Toxic Agents 55,000
Motor Vehicle Crashes 26,347
Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs 32,000
Suicide 30,622
Incidents Involving Firearms 29,000
Homicide 20,308
Sexual Behaviors 20,000
All Illicit Drug Use, Direct and Indirect 17,000, 5
Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Such As Aspirin 7,600
Marijuana 0
If you want the sources for these statistics, they can be found here.
Marijuana: Zero.
Decriminalize it. Redirect your efforts and resources. Do it now.
There is no reason for this to be criminal. The only reason it's associated with other drugs is due to the irrational criminalization of an herb.
Beyond its clearly safe recreational function, this is a substance which has very real medical uses. Ask patients of Chemo therapy if they agree. Ask AIDS patients if they agree.
We need our government, both parties included, to move away from dogmatic policies based on a perceived public opinion that was shaped by propaganda years ago. We need this to happen, not just with "the War on Drugs," but most domestic and foreign policy.
We need to reassess priorities, premises, and viability.
The amount of benefit gained from the proactive pursuit of marijuana offenders is completely lopsided when compared to the benefit.
Meth is deadly. Abuse of subscription medications is deadly. Heroin is deadly. Marijuana leads to Twinkies and giggling.
Why can't we be sensible about this?
Go read the rest of the story. If you don't want to scroll back up, you can find the link here.
-The Oklahoma Hippy
Pot leads to people listening to Phish, stinking of patchoulii, thinking Noam Chomsky is right, voting for Nader,.....
ReplyDeleteNoam Chomsky is right about a lot of things... I don't stink of patchoulii, and I voted for Dean, and then for Kerry. Nader is an idiot.
ReplyDeleteNone of that had anything to do with pot.
maybe we'll get lucky and pot will be proven to cause impotence and brain damage
ReplyDeleteThe first possession law was in El Paso, TX during the Great Depression. Lots of migrant workers were crossing the borders.
ReplyDeleteMost of them smoked marijuana after the workday for recreation. The city council quickly figured out that if you made it illegal to possess, then you could arrest Mexicans anytime you wanted.
The cotton industry was the next to get in the game. Hemp was starting to become the main material for cloth manufacturers. Hemp yielded 4-5 times the tons per acre that cotton would, and if your timing was good, you could get 2 harvests per season.
Now there was no way they were going to convince congress to outlaw hemp. But, if you called it by its Mexican name, and told them their children were going to smoke it and become homicidal killers and brazen hussies, by God, we have to do something about this plague. It didn’t seem to matter that the only people smoking it were Jazz musicians.
Fast Forward to the Nixon administration. Taking a cue from the El Paso model, the pressed for more enforcement and harsher penalties for marijuana possession because they realized they could arrest those damn hippie kids marching all over the country. That worked.
Then Jimmy Carter floated the idea that it wasn’t such a big deal, but Old Ronnie Ray-gun couldn’t handle that. When he got in, we learned to say know. Dare programs popped up everywhere with their misinformation and Gestapo tactics of trying to drum up arrests by getting kids to narc on their parents.
Bush 41 was like Reagan lite. Just say no… blah blah blah.
Clinton was too self conscious about the issue to do anything to reverse it, because he so desperately wanted to shake the image that he was one of those hippie kids.
Bush 43… we’ll if anyone telling us drugs would ruin our lives was ever more laughable… Oh, and we got that great commercial that came out on like Sept 12, 2001… If you smoke a joint you are funding international terrorism!
What-evah.
We’ve lost the “War on Drugs.” Find people who have a problem with drugs, and treat them for their medical condition. Criminalizing is a waste of time and resources… unless you’re defense contractors who reap billions every year by making the equipment we use in South America to fight the “War on Drugs,”
We know we can never ‘win,’ but that doesn’t matter because we generate profits in perpetuity! Hooray for corporate interests.
-The Oklahoma Hippy