Johnsenclan

Don’t freak out, I’m not trying to tell you heroin and cocaine should be sold in every 7-11, but everyone should ready this six page article by Ben Wallace-Wells from Rolling Stone about the war on drugs.

This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth, sensing a piñata, swung to hit it and missed.

He documents how the federal government has spent about $500 billion combating illicit drugs over the past 35 years. Nearly 500,000 people sit in jail or prison for drug crimes, “a twelvefold increase since 1980,” Wallace-Wells writes. For all the money the government has spent and all the people it’s jailed, it’s still failed to make a long-term impact on the availability of drugs. The militarized drug-control techniques favored by the Bush administration, he reports, have increased violence and political corruption abroad, violated human rights, and destabilized several Latin American nations.

I’m not in favor of making all drugs legal, but it does seem a little rediculous to have people that were caught with marijuana to take up the same amount of space in a prison cell as someone that murdered another person. There are countries with more reasonable drug laws, and as a civilization they haven’t fallen apart.

Tags: interesting links, politics