We do have choices

[Asgaya Dihi]

It's my belief that the drug war is the largest problem that we face in the world today, it's not just the users who are affected but it finances crime and war throughout the world and we're fighting that today. It's connected to poverty, domestic violence, our budget problems and international relations. I can't think of a single choice that's more directly affected a larger number of lives worldwide than the choice of "let's have a drug war".

One of the main things that seems to keep this drug war going is the idea that we don't have options, that they are too dangerous to be legal. They are too dangerous to stay illegal, not the other way around, and we do have options. This is likely to be long but I'll try to explain best I can.

Automatic weapons aren't illegal in the US, they are regulated. Collectors can own them if they go through the right process and movie studios use them all the time. Same with explosives, they are used in everything from mining to road and tunnel work to construction. Legal doesn't mean free use, it means controlled and regulated instead of only in the hands of criminals.

Smoking kills more people than any drug other than alcohol that I can find, and although most people don't realize it nicotine is more addictive than heroin with almost as bad a withdrawal. Sources for both of those.
http://drugwarfacts.org/addictiv.htm
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/death/drug-death.htm

In spite of the addictive potential and the withdrawal smoking has been reduced by over 50% in recent years with no prison, no need for huge fines and treatment, none of the costs associated with the drug war. All we did was stop romanticizing the stuff and change the way we looked at it. It no longer made you grown up and sexy, it just made you smell like an ashtray. It was done just with education and regulation, both of which are lacking in our current approach to drugs.

Heroin can be treated the same way, and it has been. If that can be regulated with success, anything can be. In our own nation before prohibition took such firm hold we regulated with good success. As the programs were shut down they were met with comments such as these from local officials. "Various officials were also interviewed. Federal District Judge Jack again affirmed his high opinion of the clinic. He warned that he would vigorously oppose any steps taken toward a discontinuance of the clinic, because from his own knowledge it had lessened crime in the city. The city judge was even more outspoken than the federal judge in his praise of Dr. Butler.* He particularly favored care of the incurable addict which enabled him to work and not be a charge on the city. Both the chief of police and sheriff said that crimes which might be resorted to to pay for illicit drugs had lessened since the inauguration of the clinic. The U.S. marshal was of the same opinion."

Details on a current program of the sort which is restricted only to current addicts and shows outstanding results can be found at the following link, as well as the source for the above quote about the Shreveport LA clinic which ran from 1919 to 1923.
http://www.dpft.org/heroin.htm

Who says legal even has to allow advertising, or lawsuits in case someone does something stupid? How to regulate is all our choice, where there is a potential problem we can find ways around them or at least try to, such as the above example. The debate shouldn't be about free use vs what we have now, it should be about the real problems that we face now and how we can dig our way out. Just to remind everyone where we stand at the moment, this is a quick recap of our "progress" so far since the early 1970's.

Our drug war has been a total and crippling failure. What we're doing now doesn't work, not only doesn't it work but it does more harm than we had before. Since 1972 we've increased the size of our prisons and jails by about 6 times in size. At the time we were just an average nation in those terms, today we're the single most imprisoned nation in the world with #2 not even being close to us. Chart showing the growth of the system (jail and prison) between 1925 and 2002 is about 1/4 way down the following document.
http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/pub9036.pdf

A comparison of the United States and the rest of the world is in the following document, and it's not pretty. We're not only the most imprisoned nation in the world in terms of our own people with #2 not being even close, but we lock our own up at a rate 5 to 8 times higher than the nations most comparable to us in other respects. This one is more current than the last, but still a couple of years old. We're still growing as of the last one, so there's likely more today.
http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/1044.pdf

That growth hasn't been even among us, due to things such as safe school zones and three strikes laws currently one in eight young black men between 25 and 29 years of age are behind bars, today. We now lock up our black population at a rate several times higher than South Africa did at the height of oppression. That leaves a hell of a lot of single mothers behind with few options to raise their kids, and it turns kids who made mistakes in judgment into hardened criminals after a few years on the inside.
http://www.prisonsucks.com/

They tell us that use is down, if it is it isn't by a lot and it's spread among new drugs that didn't even exist in the 70's such as crack, or newly popular ones such as X. Since we depend on self reporting in surveys and it seems likely in todays world we'd easier admit to doing it in college than last week I'd suspect the trend lines might more closely resemble the trend lines for lifetime use. Lifetime use is up with most drugs. Death rates for cocaine have climbed by 7 times since the 70's with a similar climb in other hard drugs as well. Even if we grant possible lower current use, combine the death rates with higher lifetime use and that still means more people now know what drugs feel like than ever, and more die from it. Lifetime use and cocaine death rates sourced here, lots more at the site if you dig for it.
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/death/cdc/cocaine-yr.htm
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/nsduh/ever-used.htm

Just to cap off this success story we're actually financing the people we're fighting in Afghanistan, the ones we're trying to stop from taking over the system in Columbia, and so on. It's a 400 billion dollar a year international industry, or roughly 8% of all international trade. That was referenced in a letter to Kofi Annan of the United Nations on June 6, 1998 and signed by over 350 persons, many of them past Presidents, cabinet ministers, and Nobel Laureates from around the world. You can read it at the following.
http://www.dpft.org/voices.htm

Now since we've crippled ourselves with prison growth and decimated our own neighborhoods, since we've increased death rates instead of dropping them, and since we're financing the same enemies we're fighting in a market that didn't even exist before you'd hope there wasn't a better option and we just didn't know better, but that's not true either. We do have other choices, and we always have. Isn't it about time to explore some of them, or at least stop putting roadblocks in front of nations that do want to?

[Mythsaje]

1. The drug war has never been about anything

but getting Americans accustomed to the idea that civil liberties can be bent, stretched, folded, and spindled for the ILLUSION of greater security. Drugs are a "terrible threat" and only by setting aside certain fundamental rights can we end this scourge.

Republicans and Democrats have handed us this shit repeatedly. And yet, for all the billions spent, and all the people thrown in prison, they've barely made a dent in the problem.

They can't even keep drugs out of the prisons. How the FUCK do they expect to keep them off the streets?

edited for clarity