Reply #51: agree. remove the financial incentive

[RainDog]

for drugs that cause addictions. engage in needle exchange for addicts and make treatment accessible at the same place that people would get their drug. adult remedial education to provide other skills. deal with the issues that give rise to addiction in the first place - heal the sick, when it is within our power to do so.

I also agree that the issue of marijuana and the issue of hard drugs are two different things. That's why it's so bizarre that marijuana is scheduled in a way that's so whacked compared to other substances. this scheduling undermines efforts to disassociate a relatively harmless substance from harmless ones. It sends the wrong message; it's not just that the information is inaccurate.

But I honestly have to question the bait and switch of federal agencies that claim they are entirely anti-substance abuse then make money from importing just such substances. It's to the benefit of the profit margin to keep drugs illegal when certain agencies make money from this practice. Four tons of cocaine is a lot. Maybe that was for the Wall Street financiers. I hear that's their drug of choice. I wonder how many of them ever face any consequence...at all...for anything.

Matt Taibbi's recent article on OWS got to the heart of the drug war, too.

What happened at UC Davis was the inevitable result of our failure to make sure our government stayed in the business of defending our principles. When we stopped insisting on that relationship with our government, they became something separate from us.

And we are stuck now with this fundamental conflict, whereby most of us are insisting that the law should apply equally to everyone, while the people running this country for years now have been operating according to the completely opposite principle that different people have different rights, and who deserves what protections is a completely subjective matter, determined by those in power, on a case-by-case basis.

Not to belabor the point, but the person who commits fraud to obtain food stamps goes to jail, while the banker who commits fraud for a million-dollar bonus does not. Or if you accept aid in the form of Section-8 housing, the state may insist on its right to conduct warrantless "compliance check" searches of your home at any time – but if you take billions in bailout aid, you do not even have to open your books to the taxpayer who is the de facto owner of your company.

The state wants to retain the power to make these subjective decisions, because being allowed to selectively enforce the law effectively means they have despotic power. And who wants to lose that?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/uc-davis-pepper-spray-incident-reveals-weakness-up-top-20111122#ixzz1ecwbsAgL

The war on drugs was pivotal to militarizing the police and giving the govt despotic power.

1. Mandatory Minimum Sentencing

2. Drug Courts

3. Drug Testing

4. No-Knock Warrants

5. Restrictions on Speech

6. Property Seizure

The issue is of concern for both left and right.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, denounced compulsory urinalysis of Customs Service employees "in the front line" of the War on Drugs as an "invasion of their privacy and an affront to their dignity." In another case, Justice John Paul Stevens lamented that "this Court has become a loyal foot soldier" in the War on Drugs. For his part, Justice Thurgood Marshall was moved to remind the Court that there is "no drug exception" to the Constitution.

But these have been futile dissents. In a rare majority opinion, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit declared that

he drug crisis does not license the aggrandizement of governmental power in lieu of civil liberties. Despite the devastation wrought by drug trafficking in communities nationwide, we cannot suspend the precious rights guaranteed by the Constitution in an effort to fight the "War on Drugs."

In that observation, the court echoed a ringing dissent of the chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court:

If the zeal to eliminate drugs leads this state and nation to forsake its ancient heritage of constitutional liberty, then we will have suffered a far greater injury than drugs ever inflict upon us. Drugs injure some of us. The loss of liberty injures us all.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-180es.html

And, since the war on drugs is waged most often on minorities, Taibbi's recognition of despotic power should be changed a little bit to note this despotic power is used most often to target specific ethnic groups.