In
1969, the federal drug enforcement budget was $65 million.
Last year it was $19.2 billion, greater than a 295-fold increase.
(These figures don't include the state and local costs.)
If the price of coffee, which sold for 25 cents a cup in 1969, had increased at the same rate, coffee would now sell for almost $75 a cup - more with sales tax.
What
have we received for our so-called "investment" of about $1
trillion in the past 30 years? Absolutely nothing.
Nothing except the largest prison-industrial complex in history.
Thanks to our drug war, one out of
every four prisoners in the world sits in a U.S. jail or prison.
=====================
"In the beginning of a change, The
Patriot is a scarce man,
brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join
him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."
Mark Twain
====================
A
friend recently remarked to me, "Alcohol is the original date rape drug"
That's very sadly true.
And it's why I found it hypocritical that the national drug
czar's new ad equating marijuana use with teen pregnancy should debut
during the Super Bowl, in which beer and sex were the dominant
advertising themes.
=====================
By
repealing the 18th ammendment, the government of the United States
openly and freely admitted that they are not perfect and may be wrong
about things. For most Americans, the doctrine of all existence is our
constitution, and that our government is never wrong. I say to them,
look at our 21st ammendment.
====================
The drug war causes a massive amount of deaths, injuries, and related harm each year. Indirectly, due to the violence of organized criminal gangs, widespread corruption, the militarization of society and the crimes of addicts seeking the drugs denied to them by prohibition. Directly, due to deaths by AIDS, overdoses, hepatitis, and other diseases.
The war on
drugs has provided financing to dictators and terrorists alike. It also
has condemned to prison and sometimes to death multitudes of consumers
of substances kept illicit by three international Conventions adopted by
the United Nations in 1961, 1971, and 1988.
=======================
We believe that kingpins are made in the courtroom, not on the street. As long as there is a flourishing black market in banned substances, people will deal in those substances, and as long as a person can take the stand and incriminate others in exchange for his own freedom, petty drug dealers will magically turn into kingpins in the courtroom.
=======================
"When we win, people won't understand
how this drug war could ever have been, or we won't have won."
=======================
"To
stay experimentation in things social and economic is a grave
responsibility. Denial of
the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences to the
nation. It is one of the
happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state
may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social
and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."
-
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
=================
"A
society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose
both, and deserve neither" - Thomas Jefferson
=================
Let's be careful not to polarize our
struggle as "legal vs. illegal"
=================
Prohibition has never been known to make drugs safer.
=================
"At DEA, our mission is to fight drug
trafficking in order to make drug abuse the most expensive, unpleasant,
risky, and disreputable form of recreation a person could have.
Donnie
Marshall - Administrator of the DEA
=================
The
ganja community should not be punished for it's politics.
=================
It's time to end drug prohibition and take
organized criminals out of the recreational drug business
=================
Technically,
the euphoric psychological effects of THC are best described by the word
psychotomimetic.
THC
is the world's most popular illicit chemical, and indeed the fourth most
popular recreational drug, after caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine.
==================
Although
he is rarely stoned at work, Frederick says pot smoking contributes to
his research. His use of marijuana, he says, "comes from my
understanding of consciousness: Humans learn through repetition, and
repetition builds patterns of thinking. THC is a factor in the process
of relaxing those patterns, and it gives you a new way of looking at
things. You break this barrier to pure, flowing creativity - and that's
where I love to be."
==================
Ours
is a society that is uncomfortable with the notion that something can be
gotten for nothing - that a self-indulgent pleasure can be had without
penance. According to Hoover Institution fellow McNamara - whose
doctoral dissertation at Harvard traced the origins of the drug war -
marijuana is viewed by much of the public as "sinful" or
"evil." "It goes back to our puritanical roots in
England. I have heard one promoter of the drug war - which began as a
religious war - say that if you do drugs [like marijuana] you'll lose
your soul," he says. Yet the same society tolerates an
alcohol-consumption level nearly tenfold that of marijuana, a fact that
McNamara bemoans as "sheer hypocrisy. ... Millions and millions of
Americans drink alcohol, including myself, and we get high, we get, er,
'pleasant.' "
==================
Nick
Herbert, a 59-year-old Boulder Creek resident and author of Quantum
Reality, says that although he finds it impossible to write when he's
stoned, he does consider marijuana a "channel to the muse. I go to
the beach and smoke marijuana, look at the ocean and get in touch with
that space [where] there's less censorship of my thoughts. A lot of my
best ideas have come from that experience."
Author
Herbert admits, "I have a kind of contempt for people who smoke
every day. To me, that implies a lack of respect for the drug."
Another user writes: "Moderation is the key. Whether wine tasting,
beer-after-working [or] vegging before the TV, any behavior when taken
to the extreme can interfere with our primary tasks of survival,
procreation and seeking enlightenment."
"For
more than 30 years," author Herbert asserts, "I have used
marijuana for inspiration and connection with people, nature and the
Holy Spirit. ... I suppose alcohol can also put you in touch with that
place, but usually it doesn't."
==================
When
you defeat a thousand opponents, you still have a thousand
opponents.When you change a thousand minds, you have a thousand allies.
-Daniel
Quinn
==================
"Every Fundamentalism is an
intellectual lobotomy." -Weston
LaBarre
==================
"Discovery
consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one
else has thought."
-
Albert Szent-Gyorgi
======================
What is the moral basis for persecuting,
incarcerating and killing a nonviolent segment of society because of
what they choose to ingest?
=================
One
problem, Dr. Grinspoon says, is that "recreational use is too
general a term" for what people do with marijuana. "There are
people who write, and musicians who find it terribly important to their
work, people who believe that some of their best ideas come from smoking
marijuana. It's difficult because we're pigeonholed into the terms
'recreational' use and 'medical' use."
Some
believe the smoke might clear if those who smoked marijuana to get
stoned fought as actively for the reform of marijuana laws as those who
claim hemp will save the world. Americans who think pot smokers are
mostly "aging hippies" might change their minds if they knew
that their bosses, co-workers, dentists, stockbrokers and attorneys
smoke pot, and do fine.
"I
think there's a parallel there to homosexuality," Grinspoon notes
of stereotypes surrounding marijuana users. Being gay, he observes,
became much more acceptable "when professional, working people came
out of the closet. They demonstrated that people can be gay and be
perfectly respectable citizens. That corrected the old, abused
stereotype. Until people are really ready to stand up and be counted,
marijuana will continue to have a stigma."
=====================
Some
argue that one step in the hemp advocacy movement is to overcome the
countercultural stigma associated with marijuana by initiating a wave of
"outings." Americans don't have to be afraid that marijuana
will permeate our society, they say. It already has.
=====================
Mara Lereritt, senior editor for the Arkansas Times, took coming out one step
further when she wrote an op-ed column for her paper last spring titled
"Pot's not so bad":
For the past two decades, I haved smoked,
on average, about a joint a day....
Of
Leveritt's letters of support, two came from federal inmates, both of
whom pointed out that casual users have less to fear than those who
provide the means of their use. "We in prison are paying with our
lives for making it possible for responsible, hardworking Americans such
as yourself to enjoy a harmless recreational high. If more people had
the courage as you have to speak out, many of us could go back to our
lives and children. Thanks for returning the favor," one inmate
wrote.
"It's
the prostitute and the John thing," Leveritt reflects.
"They're in prison and here I am getting off. I believe it's
incumbent on those people who smoke to do something. ... There were some
risks to myself [in coming out] that I was willing to take. If people
could assess those risks for themselves, there are probably a lot of
people who could come out of the smoky closet. And there is a group of
people now who are of a certain age- group and stage of life where they
are productive and established. We can show that we're not just zoned
out somewhere in a room full of smoke unable to focus our eyes. We can
use our reputations and our credibility to make this point for common
sense."
Mark Twain
Donnie Marshall
Dr. Grinspoon
Mara Leveritt