Drugs? Legalize them, so we can control them!

Really, the catastrophic failure in Iraq is small peanuts compared to the failure of our “War on Drugs”. The war on drugs has been going on so long, and has woven its way into things like our foreign policy to such an extent, that there is no longer any clear way to measure the monsterous monetary cost. It is fantastic though and we all know that. The worser part is that the financial cost is nowhere near the thing that makes this so wrong-headed and horrible.
Consider folks:

The United States has the largest prison population in the world, by far. China, Russia and India together have less people in prison than us.

The Economist call for an end to the madness: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13237193&source=hptextfeature

The CIA says that the two most unstable countries in the world right now are Afghanistan and Mexico. That is right, Mexico, over neighbor, over 7,000 people were murdered last year along the US-Mexico border. The drug cartels standing army is larger than the Mexican national army. It is truly amazing but American drug laws are literally tearing apart the governments of countries like Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and many others. 90% of the guns confiscated in Mexico were purchased in the US.

It is far easier for a school kid in the US to buy drugs than booze.
Think about this; we are helping terrorists with our drug laws. The main money maker for the Taliban in Afghanistan is opium.

The budget of the State of Washington is 50% spent on corrections, and we’re broke.
How about this? More people in the US every year die from cigarettes and booze than all illegal street drugs and illegal use of prescription drugs combined.

You would have thought we had learned our lesson. When alcohol was illegal anyone who wanted it could buy it anyway, they just bought it from illegal sources, which made crime syndicates like Al Capone’s very rich and powerful. Capone bought off judges and the law and made them corrupt as well. It isn’t just the tax revenue that is lost, which is huge, it is the loss of control as well. If a drug dealer is doing something illegal anyway, if he is looking at huge jail time anyway, why not sell to kids? Do you think drug dealers are afraid of jail time? Do you think drug dealers are afraid of police? Drug dealers are afraid of one thing only, their friends.

Kids can’t buy booze because there is no money in it. If I am outside a liquor store and a kid wants booze what would I gain by buying it for him? Ten bucks? HA! It is not worth the risk is it?

The really, really sad part of all this is the police actually brag when they drive up the price of street drugs. When a heroin addict needs the shit to keep from going into withdrawal and the price goes up, do they just stop, do they think “hey maybe I will go into de-tox and better my life”? Of course not. They don’t have medical plans, they don’t have choices, they are too far gone for that. They must commit crime to feed the habit, if the price goes up they need to commit more crime. When the police raise the price of drugs they are literally increasing violent crime.

Here is an idea. Let’s get all these young men out of prison and put them to work, our country is in trouble we need to quit screwing around. Let’s make a bunch of tax money off of drugs, and build bridges with it. Let’s look at what Portugal is doing and admit our plan is not working. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/14/portugal/index.html

Let’s admit that just making something like drugs illegal does not make it harder to get. If you doubt this for one minute…try this. Go to downtown Seattle with $100 cash. Try and buy Percodan or Marijuana on the street, see which one you get quicker.

Let’s cut our losses on something that will never work. Let’s admit drugs are no worse than cigarettes or booze, let’s tax it and move on. We have too much work to do, we are in too bad of shape to worry about people getting high in this crazy world. We have the data, clearly what we are doing now doesn’t work and it is time for a change.