Our View-Battling marijuana sends our money up in smoke

Legalize marijuana! That was the college student mantra during the 1960s and 70s, but it was for prurient reasons back then. Now, the call should be for a multiplicity of social, legal, political and medical reasons to remove the weed from the nation’s War on Drugs agenda.

This isn’t some wild-eyed Daily Forty-Niner proposal to lift the “evil weed” from the Drug Enforcement Agency’s play list. It’s just that it’s time to end the same policy that promoted alcoholism and gangland activities when the Volstead Act led to a constitutional amendment in 1919.

The U.S. prohibition on booze didn’t serve any purpose but to expand the use of alcohol as a recreational sport. The 18th Amendment was one of those unpopular laws that only enticed Americans to drink more; the forbidden fruit syndrome. “Tell them they can’t have it and they want it even more,” was what the government realized during the 13 years the law was enforced.

In many ways the War on Drugs is similarly a complete and utter failure. This claim isn’t purely from a standpoint of pot advocates in the U.S. Former presidents of Brazil, Columbia and Mexico are blasting the U.S. policy for “pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point,” according to a Wall Street Journal article.

They have formed a commission recommending, among other measures, for all Latin American and U.S. governments to decriminalize marijuana.

The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy reports that “the U.S.-style antidrug strategy was putting the region’s fragile democratic institutions at risk and corrupting ‘judicial systems, governments, the political system and especially the police forces.'”

The report comes at a time when Mexico, the key transportation point for marijuana and cocaine smuggling, is rife with extreme criminal violence between warring narco-trafficking cartels. The war has essentially turned drug-related violent crime into a global cottage industry.

Those who promote the U.S. drug war’s benefits use scare tactics, claiming drugs are used to finance terrorism. The battle against drug smuggling “creates the drug-terror link,” according to a report on drugpolicy.org. “Just as liquor bootleggers waged deadly turf battles during alcohol prohibition, drug gangs wage deadly turf battles under today’s drug prohibition.”

The study indicates that drug smuggling groups like Afghanistan’s Taliban “profit from the opium trade not because of drug prohibition, “but in spite of it.”

In the U.S. in 2007, 872,720 of the nearly 2 million drug arrests were for marijuana, according to FBI crime statistics. More than 775,000 of those arrests were for simple marijuana possession.

The drug war has numerous racial implications as well. According to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, blacks comprise 38 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 59 percent of all drug convictions, even though blacks only make up 12 percent of the total population and 13 percent of drug users.

In a 2000 report “Justice on Trial: Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System,” “Black and Hispanic Americans, and other minority groups as well, are victimized by disproportionate targeting and unfair treatment by police and other front-line law enforcement officials; by racially skewed charging and plea bargaining decisions of prosecutors…”

The War on Drugs is a farce that continues to fray the fabric of society. The Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that the U.S. spends approximately $600 per second to combat drugs, with nearly $7 billion spent so far this year.

That money would be better spent on healthcare, employment development, or any other problems resulting in our current economic crisis.

Spending billions to do away with pot is only sending our tax dollars up in smoke.