I was wrong. I now see the error of my ways. I thought of the war on drugs as pointless and ineffective. I now see it as perfect for what it is intended to do. Look what would happen if
I was wrong. I now see the error of my ways. I thought of the war on drugs as pointless and ineffective. I now see it as perfect for what it is intended to do. Look what would happen if we ended the war.
We have built the world’s largest prison system; we have to keep it and all the people and contractors it employs busy. What would we do with all those people warehoused in prison? Would they join the ranks of the unemployed, or become petty criminals? Of course, they might just rejoin their families and settle into a mundane but legal job.
In addition to prisons we have courts, judges and other employees who depend on the jobs it creates. Without low-level drug users to plea bargain, prosecutors would have to work much harder to maintain their important win/lose ratio. Thousands of defense lawyers depend on the drug trials for easily earned income with no remorse for failure. Otherwise, we might be able to actually have prompt speedy trials for those issues our justice system was designed for.
Police at every level from local departments to FBI have become dependent on the opportunities it provides, advancement, excitement, publicity, overtime, free drugs, bigger budgets and the cash and toys that civil asset forfeiture provides: cars, boats, aircraft, electronics, and weapons.
The small arms industry depends on equipment, gun and ammunition sales to police and organized crime to stay in business and employ thousands of people. Add to that the military equipment industries need to sell helicopters and armored trucks to SWAT teams in every city, village and hamlet. Your police department is just not up to date without its own tank.
The economies of several countries, and counties in the US are dependent on the high prices they get for crops that produce an illegal product. What will they do when cocaine and marijuana bring the same price as oregano and tobacco? Legal drugs would deprive independent vendors of a major source of tax-free income. On the other hand, it appears that some states are finding that taxing marijuana is more cost effective than trying to outlaw it.
All the hoopla about illegal drugs distracts people from the tobacco and alcohol industries, and the pervasive and harmful effects of their products. Constant news coverage of the drug war pushes news about the harmful effects of alcohol and tobacco off the front page. Celebrity scandals about illegal drug usage are almost as interesting as sex. Rehab is so much more newsworthy when it is paralleled with a threat of jail time.
Pharmaceutical companies can justify the high prices of their mass produced product on the comparably high price of street drugs. How could oxycodone compete with legal codeine or even safer, more effective grow-your-own-marijuana? Hundreds of chemists, now busy designing drugs (prescription and illegal) around the controlled substances act would be redundant.
The drug test industry employs thousands. Employers need a simple reason to reject minority applicants — “you failed the drug test.” Because marijuana usage is somewhere between 50 and 80 percent and can be detected for months, this is almost always credible, and impossible to rebut, although often meaningless.
Political contributions from all those with vested interest in the drug war would stop, then what would all the campaign service providers do without the mother’s-milk of politics? War of any kind provides speech material for polidioticians, “We need to work harder, we’re seeing the light the end of the tunnel, can’t stop now.” Gets more votes than, “300 million Americans are quietly behaving themselves.”
In fewer words, the war on drugs has so thoroughly pervaded our culture that we, or at least our ruling class, can’t live without it any more than they could live without their own hypocrisy. It is a small part of the basis of popular politics: keep the public alarmed with an endless series of boogie-men, preferably imaginary, or manufactured as necessary to the needs, of the re-election cycle.
The War on Drugs has taken combat mentality into the streets of America. We need to end the insanity by decriminalizing things that really have no business being crimes in the first place, starting with organic drugs like marijuana.
Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer and safety and freedom advocate who lives in South Kona and writes a monthly column for West Hawaii Today.
