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Bogus War On Drugs END THE BOGUS WAR ON DRUGS The war on drugs is bogus and that is why it has failed. The US spends nearly $50 billion annually on the drug war and problems related to drug abuse continue to worsen. It is time that the people of the United States realize and acknowledge what every other industrial nation in the world knows. Drug abuse is an illness, not a crime, and needs to be treated as such. It is a health problem with social and economic consequences. Therefore, the solutions are public health, social services, economic development and tender, supportive time with addicts in our depersonalized society.
Law enforcement should be at the edges of drug control - not at the center. It is time to bring illegal drugs within the law by regulating, taxing and controlling them. Ending the bogus war on drugs will dramatically reduce street crime, violence and homicides related to underground drug dealing.
I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of marijuana but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD. Decriminalization, as my colleagues in the drug-reform movement hasten to inform me, takes the crime out of using drugs but continues to classify possession and use as a public offense, punishable by fines.
Prohibition of alcohol was unsuccessful and ultimately unconstitutional. The prohibition of other drugs rests on an equally wobbly foundation. Not until we choose to frame responsible drug use not an oxymoron as a civil liberty will we be able to recognize the abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it is; a medical, not a criminal, matter.
Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another; Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.
It's not a stretch to conclude that our Draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. We have 5% of the world's population yet we have 25% of the world's prisoners. If we want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save billions of dollars in tax money and on the construction of new facilities, all that is necessary is that we open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, five hundred eighty thousand nine hundred Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to, one million six hundred seventy-eight thousand two hundred prisoners. Our nation is making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. I don't believe that makes anyone feel safer.
Our nation has witnessed the devastating effects of open-air drug markets in residential neighborhoods; children recruited as runners, mules and lookouts; drug dealers and innocent citizens shot dead in firefights between rival traffickers bent on protecting or expanding their markets; dedicated narcotics officers tortured and killed in the line of duty; prisons filled with nonviolent drug offenders; and drug-related foreign policies that foster political instability, wreak health and environmental disasters, and make life even tougher for indigenous subsistence farmers in places such as Latin America and Afghanistan. All because we like our drugs and can't have them without breaking the law.
In declaring a war on drugs, we've declared war on our fellow citizens. War requires "hostiles" enemies we can demonize, fear and loathe. This unfortunate categorization of millions of our citizens justifies treating them as dope fiends, less than human. That grants political license to ban the exchange or purchase of clean needles or to withhold methadone from heroin addicts motivated to kick the addiction.
President Bush has even said no to medical marijuana. Why would he want to "coddle" the enemy? Even if the enemy is a suffering AIDS or cancer patient for whom marijuana promises palliative, if not therapeutic, powers.
As a nation, we're long overdue for a soul-searching, coldly analytical look at both the "drug scene" and the bogus war on drugs. Such candor would reveal the futility of our current policies, exposing the embarrassingly meager return on our massive enforcement investment (about $69 billion a year, according to Jack Cole, founder and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition).
How would "regulated legalization" work? It would:
· Permit private companies to compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package and peddle drugs (with no apologies to my liberal friends).
· Create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to my libertarian and paleo-conservative friends).
· Set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency and purity.
· Ban advertising.
· Impose (with congressional approval) taxes, fees and fines to be used for drug-abuse prevention and treatment and to cover the costs of administering the new regulatory agency.
· Police the industry much as alcoholic-beverage-control agencies keep a watch on bars and liquor stores at the state level. Such reforms would in no way excuse drug users who commit crimes: driving while impaired, providing drugs to minors, stealing an iPod, assaulting one's spouse, abusing one's child. The message is simple. Get loaded, commit a crime, do the time.
These reforms would yield major reductions in a host of predatory street crimes, a disproportionate number of which are committed by users who resort to stealing in order to support their addiction.
Regulated legalization would soon dry up most stockpiles of currently illicit drugs; substances of uneven, often questionable quality (including "bunk," i.e., fakes such as oregano, gypsum, baking powder or even poisons passed off as the genuine article). It would extract from today's drug dealing the obscene profits that attract the needy and the greedy and fuel armed violence. And it would put most of those certifiably frightening crystal meth labs out of business once and for all.
Combined with treatment, education and other public-health programs for drug abusers, regulated legalization would make our cities or towns an infinitely healthier place to live and raise a family.
Some might object that regulated legalization might lead to more users and, more to the point, drug abusers? Probably, though no one knows for sure our leaders are too timid even to broach the subject in polite circles, much less to experiment with new policy models. Most experts predict that we'd see modest increases in use, but negligible increases in abuse.
The demand for illicit drugs is as strong as the nation's thirst for bootleg booze during Prohibition. It's a demand that simply will not dry up. Whether to find God, heighten sex, relieve pain, drown one's sorrows or simply feel good, people throughout the millenniums have turned to mood- and mind-altering substances.
They're not about to stop, no matter what their government says or does. It's time to accept drug use as a right of adult Americans, treat drug abuse as a public-health problem and end the madness of an unwinnable war.
CORPORATE INTEREST IN MAINTAINING THE WAR ON DRUGS
The so-called war on drugs is racist in its origins and is maintained today because of corporate financial interests. Building new prisons is big business and so is maintaining and staffing them and privatizing them will create huge profits but corporate interests in maintaining this bogus war on drugs is much more sinister than that.
If, for example, hemp (a type of marijuana) were legalized the petrochemical industry would suffer major financial losses. Virtually anything made from a hydrocarbon can be made from a carbohydrate. All those plastic products which end up polluting our air, our water, our land and our bodies can be made from hemp. Cannabis Hemp really can provide many of the basic necessities of life: food, shelter, clothing and medicine. All of it is natural; all of it biodegradable and nonpolluting.
As if that weren't enough the plant itself is easy to grow in temperate as well as tropical climates, and requires the usual amount of fertilizer and water, but no pesticides nor herbicides. A hemp crop is usually harvested in 100-120 days after reaching a height of 4-15 feet, depending on the variety. At that point one can make it into whatever suits their needs.
Hemp as an auto fuel is another potential use. Almost any biomass material can be converted to create methanol or ethanol, and these fuels burn cleanly with less carbon monoxide and higher octane. In fact, the diesel engine was invented to burn fuel from agricultural waste yet ended up burning unrefined petroleum. Hempseed oil can also be refined to produce a type of hemp biofuel. Woody Harrelson just toured with a diesel bus run on hemp biofuel, and a hempcar is touring this summer, demonstrating the environmental benefits of biofuels.
Even though the legalization of hemp would revitalize American agriculture and tremendously reduced our use of fossil fuels, the major corporate interests in this country will not permit its legalization.
F Y I
INFORMATION ABOUT HEMP Hemp is the oldest cultivated fiber plant in the world. The first Gutenberg bible was printed on hemp paper.
Christopher Columbus' sails and ropes were made from hemp.
The first drafts of the Declaration of Independence were printed on hemp paper.
Ben Franklin owned a mill that made hemp paper.
The first American flag was made out of hemp.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew it. In 1794, Washington said, "Make the most of the hemp seed. Sow it everywhere."
Rembrandt and Van Gogh painted on hemp canvas.
In the 1930s, Henry Ford made a car from hemp and other crops "grown from the soil". These days, BMW is reportedly working on its own set of wheels that replaces fiberglass matte with hemp.
The original Levis jeans, made for Sierra Nevada gold rushers, were made of rugged hemp sailcloth. A current vintage line includes 40 percent hemp.
"I feel the industrial hemp crop could very easily be the soybean crop of the new millennium." - Jeffrey W. Gain, USDA
In 1850 the U.S. census recorded 8,327 hemp plantations of 2000 acres or more and an uncalculated number of small hemp farms.
"Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?" - Henry Ford
INDUSTRIAL HEMP
1. One acre of hemp can produce as much usable fiber as 4 acres of trees or two acres of cotton.
2. Hemp paper is longer lasting than wood pulp, stronger, acid-free, and chlorine free. (Chlorine is estimated to cause up to 10% of all Cancers.) Hemp paper can be recycled 7 times, wood pulp 4 times. Hemp fabric requires fewer chemicals than cotton and is stronger and longer lasting.
3. 5-10,000 Cancer related deaths are caused yearly from pesticide use. Cotton uses as much as 40% of all agricultural pesticides. Hemp uses no pesticides and crowds out weeds without herbicides.
4. Cotton has a drinking problem...extensive water subsidies. Hemp requires less water than cotton and grows in cooler climates.
5. Hemp should be worth $500 per acre if used for low end products such as particle board. If higher use products can be developed such as specialty paper and fabrics, the value could be even greater.
6. Hemp is an excellent rotation crop: it crowds out weeds and its deeptap roots break up hard pan soils.
7. Hemp particle board may be up to 2 times stronger than wood particleboard and holds nails better.
8. Low-THC fiber hemp varieties developed by the French and others have been available for over 20 years. It is impossible to get high from fiber hemp. Over 600,000 acres of hemp is grown worldwide with no drug misuse problem.
9. In 1941 Henry Ford built a plastic car made of fiber from hemp and wheat straw. Anything made from a hydrocarbon can be made from a carbohydrate. The 21st century should be the era of the carbohydrate (sustainable agricultural products.) Hemp plastic is biodegradable, synthetic plastic is not.
10. Hemp is the world's most versatile fiber. Almost any product that can be made from wood, cotton, or petroleum (including plastics) can be made from hemp. There are more than 25,000 known uses for hemp!
ACHIEVING A SUSTAINABLE PLANET
* Hemp is among the earth's primary renewable resources: trees cut down to make paper take 50 to 500 years to grow back while hemp can be cultivated in as little as 100 days, and can yield 4 times more paper over a 20 year period.
* Hemp does not require pesticides: while half the pollutants in the U.S. today are sprayed on cotton plants, hemp is naturally mildew resistant, requires no pesticides, and maintains a healthy environment for the surrounding streams, air, flora and fauna.
* Hemp slows ozone depletion: the industrial use of fossil fuels, like petroleum, contributes to global warming by rapidly increasing the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere; however, hemp fuels, derived from the plant itself, maintain the earth's natural O2/CO2 balance.
* Hemp Paper Can Save the Forests! One acre of cannabis hemp, in annual rotation over a twenty year period would produce asmuch pulp for paper as 4.1 acres of trees being cut down over the same twenty year period. And while hemp reaches full growth and can be harvested every year, the trees which are cut down take hundreds of years to return. The process of making paper from hemp uses only 1/5 to 1/7 as much polluting, sulfer-based chemicals and does not require the use of any chlorine bleach.
* Hemp as an Ecological, Renewable Fuel Source. Hemp can also produce 10 times more methanol than corn,. the second best living fuelsource. Hemp as fuel is renewable whereas oil is not.
* Hemp as fuel is environmentally beneficial: It enriches and prevents erosions, it burns clean and sulfur-free while oil's sulfur content causes acid rain.
Thank you, John Murphy "The Corporate-Free Candidate"
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