The American War on Pot Rolls On
By Sherwood Ross
November 7, 2009
Editor’s Note: At a time when American prisons are overflowing and government budgets are busting, authorities across the United States continue to arrest and prosecute hundreds of thousands of people for marijuana possession, sometimes even for small amounts.
In this guest essay, journalist Sherwood Ross examines this excessive use of government power against citizens engaging in personal behavior that many doctors say isn’t as dangerous as drinking alcohol and far less risky than smoking cigarettes:
Seven million Americans have been arrested since 1995 on marijuana charges and 41,000 of them are rotting in federal and state prisons. Thousands of other pot users and sellers are confined in local jails. But the public is starting to rebel against “the preposterous war on pot,” two political scientists say.
People convicted of possessing even one ounce of marijuana can face a mandatory minimum sentence of a year in jail, and having even one plant in your yard is a federal felony,” progressive organizer Jim Hightower and co-author Phillip Frazer point out in the November issue of “The Hightower Lowdown.”
Police arrest someone in America every 36 seconds on marijuana charges, with a record 872,000 arrests made in 2007, “more than for all violent crimes combined,” Hightower and Frazer point out. They note that 89 per cent of all marijuana arrests “are for simple possession of the weed, not for producing or selling it.”
They argue the drug war “is doing far more harm than marijuana itself ever will,” because (1) it diverts hundreds of thousands of police agents from serious crimes “to the pursuit of harmless tokers”; (2) it costs taxpayers at minimum $10 billion a year to catch, prosecute and incarcerate marijuana users and sellers; (3) it enables government to snatch the cars, money, computers and other properties of people caught up in drug raids even if they have had no charges filed against them; and (4) it allows “police agents at all levels to trample our Bill of Rights in their eagerness to nab pot consumers.”
The drug war has also unleashed a torrent of racism in the form of unjust sentencing, which confines crack-cocaine users who are mostly black to prison for longer terms than powder snorters, who are mostly white.
Hightower and Frazer say authorities have perverted the infamous “Patriot Act” of 2001 for use in non-terrorism cases, allowing “sneak-and-peak” search warrants to be used in drug war probes, including pursuit of marijuana users.
The Act’s provisions were supposed to be applied only for suspected terrorist acts. Only three of the Justice Department’s 763 requests for “sneak-and-peak” last year were used for terrorism searches, they report in Lowdown.
By outlawing drugs, Hightower and Frazer contend, Congress has created “a vast, murderous narco-state within Mexico” to satisfy U.S. consumer demand for the drugs. And Plan Colombia, the multi-billion-dollar operation started by Bill Clinton in 2000 to eradicate coca production there, has failed, judging by the 15 percent increase in coca production.
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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/110709c.html