![jayaprada:
Source: Presente.org.
From Alternet:
The War on Drugs: Now, after all these years, it even sounds dumb and tiresome. Here we are on our third president who we all know engaged in some illicit recreational substance use and who went on to being, well, president! That’s twenty years of presidents who got high! That’s why it’s so hard to watch President Obama and Eric Holder backstroking onto the National stage wearing their “Tough On Crime” faces and harassing California medical marijuana dispensaries. They should allow Medical Marijuana to be the unthreatening foot in the door that it is, and open the door wider. People know that medicinal weed is not turning patients with various legitimate ailments into raving maniacs, any more than it’s creating mobs overcome by Reefer Madness outside dispensaries. That’s because reefer madness was basically an invention of some ill-informed control freaks. While their successors keep an eye out for the elusive world’s first overdose death from marijuana, they seem to prove that pot can cause some pretty strange behavior by lots of people who don’t smoke it.
[…]As a last resort, now that all else has failed, couldn’t we at least try using some common sense? With almost one in every eight inmates in our overcrowded prisons locked up for marijuana-related convictions, doesn’t it seem unjust that there are huge industries built upon legally manufacturing and selling substances that are proven, statistically, to be more addicting and harmful than pot? When we remember that it costs more to maintain a prison inmate than it does to put someone through college, and that America locks up more of its people than any other country, it’s not hard to see why more people want to be in the prison business. When you factor in the slave labor aspect of what I call the Prison Industrial Complex, what’s revealed is profitable corporate socialism for prison owners. And, how can we overlook the fact that there are individuals in our prisons who can and do obtain drugs behind bars? This brings us to the obvious question: If we can’t thoroughly drug-proof our prisons, how can we convince ourselves that we’ll drug-proof our whole society? [x]
From Salon:
In Mexico, many of the drug war’s dead are innocents. In the six years of drug war that have ravaged the country, more than 60,000 are dead and more than 10,000 are missing. Because only 2 percent of cases are granted judicial review, families of the lost regularly become their own investigators. They find, too often, horrors tied to the authorities themselves.
[…]
The United States spends almost $500 million a year funding Mexico’s war against cartels that sell drugs to American consumers. As the US continues to consume drugs despite attempts at prohibition, unimaginable horror multiplies in Mexico. US and Mexican forces battle against the heavily armed cartels, which are so powerful they have been labeled an insurgency by US State Department officials and journalists alike. While authorities claim to target only drug traffickers, Mexicans say the war has only made the cartels more violent and the state authorities more corrupt. The result is that innocent bystanders are often caught up in the violence, with little or no access to justice.
[..]
The victims speak now through the voices of their survivors. Family members seek answers from locals, whether they are incarcerated cartel members or private investigators, to understand their loved ones’ last minutes. And as they seek justice for the people responsible for their loved ones’ deaths, their quest reaches beyond the murderers and across borders, up to the US and Mexican governments. Their government no longer represents their best interests, nor does its rhetoric reflect the reality of innocence lost. Thus, they have come to the United States to create, as one mother called it, “some citizen diplomacy,” and stand up for the victims. [x]
See more:
5 Surprising Consequences of the War on Drugs
U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels via The New York Times
The cost of the ‘war on drugs’
So who’s winning the war on drugs?](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mc0bvs5puU1qjdk8lo1_500.jpg)
Source: Presente.org.
From Alternet:
The War on Drugs: Now, after all these years, it even sounds dumb and tiresome. Here we are on our third president who we all know engaged in some illicit recreational substance use and who went on to being, well, president! That’s twenty years of presidents who got high! That’s why it’s so hard to watch President Obama and Eric Holder backstroking onto the National stage wearing their “Tough On Crime” faces and harassing California medical marijuana dispensaries. They should allow Medical Marijuana to be the unthreatening foot in the door that it is, and open the door wider. People know that medicinal weed is not turning patients with various legitimate ailments into raving maniacs, any more than it’s creating mobs overcome by Reefer Madness outside dispensaries. That’s because reefer madness was basically an invention of some ill-informed control freaks. While their successors keep an eye out for the elusive world’s first overdose death from marijuana, they seem to prove that pot can cause some pretty strange behavior by lots of people who don’t smoke it.
[…]As a last resort, now that all else has failed, couldn’t we at least try using some common sense? With almost one in every eight inmates in our overcrowded prisons locked up for marijuana-related convictions, doesn’t it seem unjust that there are huge industries built upon legally manufacturing and selling substances that are proven, statistically, to be more addicting and harmful than pot? When we remember that it costs more to maintain a prison inmate than it does to put someone through college, and that America locks up more of its people than any other country, it’s not hard to see why more people want to be in the prison business. When you factor in the slave labor aspect of what I call the Prison Industrial Complex, what’s revealed is profitable corporate socialism for prison owners. And, how can we overlook the fact that there are individuals in our prisons who can and do obtain drugs behind bars? This brings us to the obvious question: If we can’t thoroughly drug-proof our prisons, how can we convince ourselves that we’ll drug-proof our whole society? [x]
From Salon:
In Mexico, many of the drug war’s dead are innocents. In the six years of drug war that have ravaged the country, more than 60,000 are dead and more than 10,000 are missing. Because only 2 percent of cases are granted judicial review, families of the lost regularly become their own investigators. They find, too often, horrors tied to the authorities themselves.
[…]
The United States spends almost $500 million a year funding Mexico’s war against cartels that sell drugs to American consumers. As the US continues to consume drugs despite attempts at prohibition, unimaginable horror multiplies in Mexico. US and Mexican forces battle against the heavily armed cartels, which are so powerful they have been labeled an insurgency by US State Department officials and journalists alike. While authorities claim to target only drug traffickers, Mexicans say the war has only made the cartels more violent and the state authorities more corrupt. The result is that innocent bystanders are often caught up in the violence, with little or no access to justice.
[..]
The victims speak now through the voices of their survivors. Family members seek answers from locals, whether they are incarcerated cartel members or private investigators, to understand their loved ones’ last minutes. And as they seek justice for the people responsible for their loved ones’ deaths, their quest reaches beyond the murderers and across borders, up to the US and Mexican governments. Their government no longer represents their best interests, nor does its rhetoric reflect the reality of innocence lost. Thus, they have come to the United States to create, as one mother called it, “some citizen diplomacy,” and stand up for the victims. [x]
See more:
5 Surprising Consequences of the War on Drugs
U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels via The New York Times
(via maxlibertarios)
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ADDICTION RATE?! YOU CAN’T EVEN PUT A CONCISE MEASUREMENT ON THAT the matter of fact is that drug-related crime has...
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