Amnesiac
October 5th, 2010, 08:13 PM
So, it's pretty well known that the U.S.'s campaign against the illegal drug trade, focusing specifically on marijuana, was all a 30-year failure in the making. The number of Americans in prison on bafflingly minor drug charges has skyrocketed, and the government has dumped billions upon billions of dollars (http://www.drugsense.org/cms/wodclock) every year into an otherwise futile and pointless effort. Case in point: there is no real reason to make marijuana as illegal as it is in the United States. It's not a dangerous substance — it is significantly less harmful than both tobacco and alcohol, both of which can be easily found at almost any grocery store in the country.
As for those who want to continue the War on Drugs to "protect the children":
Despite over $7 billion spent annually towards arresting and prosecuting nearly 800,000 people across the country for marijuana offenses in 2005 (FBI Uniform Crime Reports), the federally-funded Monitoring the Future Survey reports about 85% of high school seniors find marijuana "easy to obtain." That figure has remained virtually unchanged since 1975, never dropping below 82.7% in three decades of national surveys. (http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/data/05data/pr05t13.pdf)
People talk openly about smoking weed on the weekends at my high school. The War on Drugs hasn't done a thing to change that. Do I think people under 21 should be doing drugs at all? No, of course not. But the fact is: they are, and the War on Drugs is just a gigantic waste of money that isn't protecting anyone, especially the young who need that protection. Because of this, we've seen the Mexican border explode into a violent wasteland of death, while illegal drugs continue to flow into the U.S. from the south.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependen ce).svghttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/US_incarceration_timeline.gif
This rant is sponsored by this comment by my biology teacher:
I remember, some stupid liberal said we should legalize [pot]. That's just stupid. It's stupid.
As for those who want to continue the War on Drugs to "protect the children":
Despite over $7 billion spent annually towards arresting and prosecuting nearly 800,000 people across the country for marijuana offenses in 2005 (FBI Uniform Crime Reports), the federally-funded Monitoring the Future Survey reports about 85% of high school seniors find marijuana "easy to obtain." That figure has remained virtually unchanged since 1975, never dropping below 82.7% in three decades of national surveys. (http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/data/05data/pr05t13.pdf)
People talk openly about smoking weed on the weekends at my high school. The War on Drugs hasn't done a thing to change that. Do I think people under 21 should be doing drugs at all? No, of course not. But the fact is: they are, and the War on Drugs is just a gigantic waste of money that isn't protecting anyone, especially the young who need that protection. Because of this, we've seen the Mexican border explode into a violent wasteland of death, while illegal drugs continue to flow into the U.S. from the south.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependen ce).svghttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/US_incarceration_timeline.gif
This rant is sponsored by this comment by my biology teacher:
I remember, some stupid liberal said we should legalize [pot]. That's just stupid. It's stupid.