legalize it all
thoroughly disgusted and saddened after leaving hill's blog about a horrible side affect of the war on some drugs, my position on legalizing drugs has once again been validated.here in america, we like to scream to the rafters about how awful illicit drug use is, "but illicit street drugs kill people! drug dealers kill people!" we tend to collectively leave the debate there as we nod along in agreement and not even think of all of the other levels involved.
i've yet to understand how legalized drug dealers, working in every city, on every street corner where a drug store stands in america, can get away with what they do. how many people develop drug addictions after being prescribed pain medications? how many legal drugs have exactly the same effect as the illicit street varietals do? how many people are killed annually or harmed or permanently altered by something that a doctor has prescribed to them? i really don't see much difference, except that one is supposedly more controlled than the other. we are a nation of people taking various drugs to alter our reality. i don't care if you're getting fucked up on oxycontin or heroin, same high - same difference.
chew on this - the national household survey on drug abuse reports that
•Approximately 4 million Americans said they were currently using prescription drugs for non-medical purposes in a 1999 report.
(i can only imagine that this number is up, almost 10 years later.)
•Commonly prescribed pain medications that can become addictive include: codeine, oxycodone, and sleep disorder drugs.
•Prescription drugs are the most common form of drug abuse among older people.
•Fastest growing group of new prescription drug abusers are 12- to 17-year-olds and 18- to 25-year-olds.
the one thing that the war on some drugs isn't concerned with is why so many americans are dissatisfied with their lives and are turning to medications to quiet the inner roar that is clearly beginning for attention. how much is the u.s. presently spending on the war on some drugs? 12.7 BILLION dollars, up %34.4 since 2001. as if this weren't enough,
i read things like this: herbicides have been sprayed on columbian coca fields in an effort to kill the basis of cocaine. danger! danger! trouble is, this poison is also being sprayed on food, which is either destroying the crops or contaminating them. children are running about in these poison fields playing - breathing it in, soaking it through their skin. the farmers are also being contaminated, and tracking this stuff home with them. all so some over-consuming individual can escape their reality.
the criminal injustice system is completely whacked with their bogus three strikes you're out laws. there are cases of people serving longer sentences for being busted with pot than for murder.
in 2000, guess who announced that they would be sending the taliban $43 million dollars in aid for their agreeing to ban the growing of poppy for production of heroin and opium? our tax dollars hard at work. and yes, the same taliban that merely months later was so terrible that they had to be brought down.
and how many have been trapped in the tangled web that hill describes in her blog? even if it is just one person, it is one person too many. three children have lost their father. a man has been brutally tortured and murdered in a case of mistaken identity. another recent example is the 88 year old woman who was shot and killed in atlanta by undercover police officers after they broke into her home, at night, to supposedly issue an arrest warrant. she was a "drug dealer" too - though they couldn't seem to come up with all the coke that was supposed to be there after the fact. and this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
the drug war is a bust. even DARE failed!
i have an idea. legalize it all. let's take all of that drug war money and design some treatment programs for people that want to kick their habits - ones that don't require a waiting period to get into, that are accessible to anyone that may want to try. let's instead get to the root of why so many people prefer to be wasted, why people are abusing drugs in the first place. i'm not ignorant enough to believe that many people aren't going to die if street drugs are legalized. they most likely will - but it will be a personal descent - and at least it won't be at the hands of some renegade "policing" outfits, in the name of a war that cannot ever be "won."
don't worry, i'll save my cannabis/hemp praising for a different post. cannabis/hemp has to be the most ridiculous thing ever to outlaw. ever. infinity.
this used to play in my head when i'd bartend (sometimes i'd even sing it), now i just hear it when i drive past walgreens pharmacy:
Labels: the war on some drugs
posted by supergirlest @ Monday, December 04, 2006
