Drug Policy, outcomes and effects, summarized and questioned

DRUG POLICY

Of America's 1.7 million prisoners, 1.4 million (80 percent) are incarcerated for drug or alcohol related offenses (alcohol is highly related to violent crime). We have imprisoned our children, turned our country into a gangland, and given up our most precious rights in the name of health! We fight a lost and immoral war instead of teaching our children values. Here are some problems with the policy of war on drugs:

• It cannot be won as a practical matter. It is exactly like Prohibition. It is a victimless crime. Large amounts of profit ensure it can never be stopped.
• It is prohibitively expensive as seen by statistics just for the jailing, let alone the enforcement. It criminalizes many who would not otherwise be, therefore it is a policy that cannot be moral. It is estimated that 78 million U.S. citizens have used illegal drugs. Should they all be barred from public office? Should they all be incarcerated? Laws that criminalize more than every third adult are not a good idea.
• A policy that disproportionately jails so many young black men cannot be moral. It is a racist policy. By pushing the price of drugs, it leads to gangs and the economic collapse of legitimate work and values. It leads to more violent crime as users try to raise the great amounts of money needed for their habits. It destroys an entire segment of society, which should never be tolerated. If these were afluent whites in gangs, the drug laws would be overturned immediately. (Something like the decriminalization of Marijuana). 13 percent of drug users are black and 74 percent of all sentenced to prison for drugs are black. (Scientifc American, August 1999, page 25)
• It causes the US to interfere in, abuse and destroy other countries like Columbia and Mexico, which is clearly immoral.
• It causes US citizens to give up rights which they otherwise would not. It leads to enforcement procedures like the use of informers which has a corrosive effect on the moral fiber of the country. The great money, an estimated 67 billion dollars a year, leads to the inevitable corruption of officials.
• Finally, the drug policy is immoral at its core. Everyone has the innate right to commit suicide. Therefore, any law enacted for safety or to protect the health of the users - like laws against suicide, smoking, alcohol, drugs - has no moral force. They are not permissible. It is simply some busybody telling you what to do. You wouldn't tolerate it from a jerk down the street, so you shouldn't tolerate it from a bunch of jerks down the street; Prudes imposing their rules on people they have no business bothering. Can it be moral to tell someone else how to live, when he is not bothering anybody? It is Big Brother. It is evil. If you are going to tell people how to live, why not be consistent and bring back Prohibition?
  
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• Alcohol is much worse healthwise than most other drugs. If health is the issue, how can it be healthy to have citizens buy drugs from unreliable pushers, or fly-by-night labs, or use common needles? Impure drugs are not healthy. Are jails healthy? Since prisoners get drugs in jail, how have you improved their health? If you balance the supposed hypothetical good (health) from this busybody policy with the evident evil, no sane person could be for it. If you don't want your kids to do drugs, teach them, but do not imprison them; do not take away their rights; do not give up your rights.

Source: http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/law/prison.html