If you don't want your tax dollars to go to waste, don't support the Drug War. Doug Fine writes, "American taxpayers shell out five hundred dollars per second to fight the Drug War." Barack Obama said in 2004, "The War on Drugs has been an utter failure." The most recent available statistics show cannabis arrests are at an historic high (never mind the pun). According to the FBI, 853,838 marijuana arrests in 2010 accounted for more than half of the total drug arrests nationwide. And let's not forget law enforcement profiling...New York City and Chicago recently changed their marijuana possession laws so that minorities aren't persecuted for, well, being themselves. These steps taken by local jurisdictions are signs of hope in ending the national Drug War.
The federal government, by "fighting the Drug War," is helping to keep black market prices high, prisons filled, and cartels' pockets full and vastly expanding. I suggest we change our drug policies in order to benefit from billions in taxable legal revenue. California alone spends nine billion dollars a year locking people up. This number would be drastically affected if cannabis wasn't a Schedule I drug. Doug Fine explains why government is resisting drug policy changes, "Follow the money. Federal asset forfeiture alone was worth more than a billion dollars in 2009, according to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, and the state of California took in $28,789,945 in seized property in 2009, according to a state attorney general's report."
This was a very interesting piece of the war on drugs Sam. I agree that the government should not focus on using tax money to deal with the War on Drugs. There is racial profiling occurring everyday in this country with minorities being punished because of their race and they are not given equal chances. Just like you said there should be a change in the drug policies in this country.
ReplyDelete-Corey Gutmann