war on drugs

a government movement to illegalize many harmless drugs for no particular reason. an average of $20 billion a year is spent putting non violent drug offenders in prison. with a bunch of f-cking harmful drugs such as alcohol and nicotene still legal, it proves that the government doesn’t really guve a sh-t about our safety. with the $20 billion a year we could save by ending the drug war, as well as the taxes the government could make off selling it, we could easily clothe, feed, and shelter the world many times over. only a matter of time before it falls apart.
the government recently announced that they are losing the war on drugs. this says that there is in fact a war, and that they are being beaten by a bunch of druggies! says a lot for drugs, doesn’t it?
a century-long attempt by the american government to suppress the recreational use of narcotics, based for the bulk of its history upon racial prejudice. the first major piece of federal legislation (the harrison act) was p-ssed in 1914, chiefly justified by a fear of east-asian opium. in the subsequent years, marijuana became the primary focus of drug warriors as its use was increasingly -ssociated with mexican immigrants and the (black-dominated) jazz scene. correlating drug use with inner-city crime, richard nixon (and later ronald reagan) explicitly declared war on drug use in the us, and allocated m-ssive spending increases to the -ssociated federal bureaus. while the rhetoric used by george bush, bill clinton, and george w. bush was less harsh, no effort has been made in the past twenty years to rein in federal spending on the drug war; over that span the media spotlight was shifted from inner-city crack abuse to inner-city heroin abuse to youth ecstasy use to rural methamphetamine use in the hopes of maintaining hysteria.

the war on drugs has focused primarily upon two weakly-related goals: the reduction of domestic demand for drugs based upon punitive measures (that is, jail time) and the reduction of foreign supply through crop eradication and the interception of drug shipments (the end goal being to raise us prices by lowering supply). as is borne out by the us government’s own data, both strategies are crippled by deep logical flaws.

the first flaw concerns the economics of black markets: rendering a product illegal does little to raise the cost of its production, but does much to raise its price. profits soar, creating a m-ssive incentive for new players to enter the business at all levels. because drugs are cheap and easy to produce, farmers in poor areas can make better money and grow larger crops than they can with fruits and vegetables. because drugs are cheap and easy to sell, dealers in poor areas can make more than they can working a minimum wage job. the profitability of the drug trade poses another problem as well: any time a major figure is arrested or killed, another person, or worse, several persons, are available to replace them, doing nothing to stem the trade but increasing its violence.

the second flaw is inherent to the logic of the drug warriors’ attempts to restrict supply: in an ordinary market, prices vary consistently with supply, but the illegality of drugs creates a price floor: at high levels of supply prices are artificially held high by the mere fact that drugs are illegal. until a certain threshold of drug interception is reached (roughly 70-80% of incoming shipments) prices will be more or less constant. the us currently estimates it finds 10% of the drugs entering the country.

the drug war does nothing to prevent addiction or lower prices: the national survey on drug use and health has shown an increase in addiction rates over the past thirty years, and a sharp drop in prices. the only success, such as it is, has been a drop in the casual (infrequent and non-dangerous) use of marijuana.

there are of course many disastrous social consequences to the war on drugs, but they are too many and too depressing to discuss here.
“we do know this, that more people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing.”
– william f. buckley, jr.
the most f-cking useless and wasteful government expense. the war on drugs is a f-cking waste its just as bad as prohibtion
legalize it now because the govt would get more money. or is it too f-cking complicated for the f-cking communists(democrats) and the christian morals n-z-s(republicans)
the most pointless and costly governmenal effort of all time before the reagan/bush era debts. costs an average of $75 billion a year, and hasn’t slowed drug-trafficking/use at all since it was implemented. in any case, it’s also unconst-tutional, because what you do in the privacy of your own home is your f-cking buisiness! drugs should be legal for anyone over 21 who wishes to partake of them. if you tax them, you can set up rehab programs with the collected funds! it’s not that complicated. well, i suppose it would be to our current president, who can’t even eat a f-cking pretzel without choking.
boy, this weed sure is good and safe, thanks to government regulation!
a miserable failure in every way. even conservatives are beginning to question its intelligence and effectiveness. like prohibition during the ’20s, the banning of drugs now puts the business into the hands of organized crime.
drugs are by no means great, but there would be far less deaths, murders, and waste of money if most of them were simply legalized or at least decriminalized.
wouldn’t even survive a simple cost/benefit -n-lysis. besides, the legal drugs (alcohol, tobacco, caffeine) are the ones that are being abused more than marijuana, lsd, or cocaine anyway.
the war on drugs costs too much because we are putting otherwise innocent people in prison for even holding trace amounts of drugs which otherwise have no negative side effects if used properly. there is no significant benefit because the taxes just keep rising, the police system discriminates the poor, the prisons are always overcrowded, and drug use is still increasing.
one of biggest conspiracies of our time, in which the united states government declared a “war” against drugs in order to divert the public’s attention from the real issues like violence, poverty, racism, and the inadequate structure under which our country is run.
“instead of a war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.”- tupac

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