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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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US: Big Brother: Americas Real Dependence Problem
Gard E Binney The Ecologist
Sunday 02 Dec 2001 As reported in the UK Observer, the British government has decided to abandon the costly and futile hunt for cannabis smugglers and dealers. Perhaps taking its cue from the Brits, a county in northern California has legalised the growing of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Though this decision will no doubt be challenged by state and federal governments, who prompted by a self-serving pharmaceutical lobby frown upon such frivolous practices as selfmedication, it represents a tiny crack in the solid wall of official obfuscation. According to the latest census, there are now about 280 million legal residents in the US, a mere 1 per cent of whom are gainfully employed in farming, fishing and forestry. Coincidentally, this is about the same number of Americans - 2.3 million - currently incarcerated in federal or state prisons, by far the largest 'criminal class' of any industrialised society. The majority of these prisoners are so-called minorities, who collectively make up more than one-third of the population. And almost half of these alleged miscreants are non-violent drug offenders, victims of mandatory sentencing laws. To their credit, many judges took early retirement rather than allowing themselves to be stripped of their judicial discretion. The so-called 'War on Drugs' has now been waged for almost 30 years - twice as long as Prohibition, the failed attempt at dissuading denizens of the Land of the Free from imbibing alcohol. When this disastrous experiment was finally abandoned in 1933, it had created a subculture of bootleggers and Mafiosi, whose descendants control powerful crime syndicates in major US cities. But Uncle Sam does not get a cut of the profits from growing pot or smuggling coke, so has no incentive to legalise them. Attesting to the failure of the self-defeating war on drugs is the fact that, while its budget has increased twenty-fold, from $75 million in 1973 to $1.5 billion last year, the number of drug addicts has doubled, and US taxpayers have shelled out a total of $185 billion to no avail. As any student of economics knows, if the demand for a product is constant, but the supply is curtailed, the price of the product will rise. Elementary, you say? Of course - but try to get that through the heads of all the Watsons in Washington, who are more concerned with moralistic grand-standing then with the law of supply and demand. For a member of Congress to suggest that marijuana should be legalised - like the much more lethal tobacco plant - would be political suicide. No, much safer to vote for ever bigger drugbusting budgets in a futile attempt at intercepting the avalanche of drugs streaming across the Mexican border and the Caribbean - even though it is estimated that only 11-12 per cent is confiscated. Besides, thousands of law enforcement officers now depend for their livelihood on this misappropriation of tax dollars, orchestrated by a presidential appointee with the impressive, if unofficial, title 'Drug Czar'. It was recently reported that several competing law enforcement agencies, in their quest for bigger budgets and drug busts, employed drug-dealing snitches to report on competing gangs in exchange for lenient treatment, should they ever themselves be caught in flagrante delecto. To suggest that you can cure Americans' drug addiction by incarcerating them is analogous to locking up diabetics to deprive them of sugar. But perhaps the most insidious aspect of this sordid saga is that it is counter-productive, Those who grow, process, and deliver the drugs to eagerly awaiting customers norte de la fronte are not greatly affected by interceptions; they just raise their price accordingly. But for the addicts, the higher street price increases the necessity to steal or commit other crimes. In addition to breeding crime at home, the War on Drugs contributes to corruption and civil unrest in drug-producing and trafficking countries such as Colombia, Peru and Mexico. One of president Clinton's last executive acts was granting the Colombian government a 'loan' of $1.3 billion, with which to continue its decades long fight against the FARC, the insurgent political party which now occupies an estimated quarter of the country's territory, and which finances its purchase of high-tech weapons with drug money. On a positive note, both California's and New Mexico's legislatures are now considering substituting treatment of addiction for incarceration. As the governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, phrased it: 'We need to address the problem of drug abuse... as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice issue. The 'Drug War' should... be replaced by a common sense humanitarian approach! Not only is this approach more effective; it is also cheaper. By reducing the demand, supply-side economics soon take care of the rest of the Keynesian equation: the artificially inflated prices collapse, and profits dry up. Hopefully some day all Americans will face up to the truth: the solution to their drug problem lies within the US borders - not beyond them. if the same amount of money and effort had been expended on fighting terrorism or environmental pollution, as is now being spent on a futile attempt at preventing people from polluting themselves, all of society would have benefited.
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