The War on Drugs Is A Failure
Wouldn't you like to see a positive drug story on the news? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition Perhaps? Wouldn't that be interesting? Just for once? - "Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."
-Bill Hicks
On June 18th, 1971 President Richard Nixon coined the phrase “War on Drugs” in his
campaign to put in place a set of policies intended to discourage the distribution, consumption
and production of illegal drugs in the United States and around the world. Since then our
country has spent well over One Trillion dollars in it's efforts to abolish drug users and dealers
alike and has nothing to show for it except debt and the highest incarceration rate in the
world. [1] Whether a person agrees with drug use or not the numbers clearly show that
prohibition cannot work, when there is demand for any substance there will be a supply to
follow.
In 2012 alone the United States government spent an estimated Fifty-One Billion dollars [1] to
fuel the drug war, and incarcerated an average 2.2 Million people, that is 1 in every 108 adults
and one arrest every nineteen seconds [5] , in its efforts to make America drug free. [1] Of
those people incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses an estimated seven-hundred and fifty
thousand alone were charged with marijuana related possessions, and of those over two-
hundred thousand people lost any chance of getting federal financial aid for education. [1]
Some of these numbers might even indicate that the drug war is...