“Potheads should be taken out and shot.”
– Daryl Gates, chief, L.A. Police Department, 1988
“The government arrests more people for marijuana use each year than for all violent crimes combined.”
– Marijuana Policy Project, MPP.org; 2006
“The founding fathers would be shocked at the excessive bails, fines, and punishments inflicted for violation of our drug laws. People are being jailed for twenty-five years, without the possibility of parole, for having a joint. Their homes and property are being seized because they are growing a plant. Surely this flouts the Eighth Amendment.”
– Why Marijuana Should Be Legal, by Ed Rosenthal & Steve Kubby with S. Newhart; Green-Aid.com/EdRosenthal.htm
Since the marijuana prohibition laws went into effect in 1937, somewhere around 75,000,000 Americans have been charged with marijuana offenses. This has accomplished what? How many billions have been spent on this every year while our schools and environment are neglected?
“Prisoners sentenced for drug offenses constituted the largest group of federal inmates (55 percent) in 2001, down from 60 percent in 1995. On September 30, 2001, the date of the latest available data in the Federal Justice Statistics Program, federal prisons held 78,501 sentenced drug offenders, compared to 52,782 in 1995.”
– Harrison, Paige M. & Allen J. Beck, Ph.D., U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2002; Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, July 2003; Page 11
As I write this there are around 60,000 U.S. citizens serving time in prisons because they have been convicted of breaking cannabis laws. Somewhere around three times that number are being detained as they await their case to be tried in the overcrowded courts. About 20 percent of the people in federal prisons are there on pot convictions.
The laws prohibiting marijuana are different from those that prohibited alcohol. Under alcohol Prohibition those who manufactured or sold alcohol were punished. With marijuana the users as well as the sellers are punished. The similarity between the laws is that they create a situation where gangs and violence take place with a substance that is illegal. Mobsters gained power during alcohol Prohibition.
“I say legalization, not decriminalization… The War on Drugs is an absolute failure.”
– Gary Johnson, Governor of New Mexico, speaking at The Cato Institute, October 1999
“There is no simple profile of a typical cannabis user. It’s been used by millions of people from all walks of life for thousands of years for hundreds of medical, social, and religious reasons, as well as for personal relaxation. Several of our greatest [U.S.] presidents farmed hemp. About one in three American voters say they have tried it.”
– Family Council on Drug Awareness, 2006; FCDA.org
Marijuana laws do not stop anyone who really wants marijuana from obtaining it. What the laws do is drive up the cost of marijuana, help to create a criminal element, and waste billions in tax dollars every year to spy on, to entrap, to carry out surveillance on, to charge, to prosecute, to imprison, and to ruin the lives of millions of U.S. citizens.
“The War on Drugs is inarguably a complete failure, it has failed to stop or even reduce drug use, sales, or trafficking, despite decades of arrests, imprisonment, and billions of tax dollars.”
– Educators for Sensible Drug Policy, EFSP.org
Some who are in favor of decriminalizing marijuana and drugs believe it would be better to put so-called drug “offenders” through drug treatment programs instead of throwing them in prisons with murderers, rapists, armed robbers, swindlers, and child molesters. It would certainly be less expensive to put people through drug treatment programs than to prosecute and jail them. It would even be much less expensive to give them college scholarships.
As long as the laws treat drug addictions as crimes, the laws will continue to fail society and waste tax dollars. And the governments will continue to be corrupted with American drug money in Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Burma, Nigeria, Thailand, and other drug-growing regions.
Many people who do not take drugs have been and are involved in selling drugs because they know they can make money – but if they get caught they can be sent to jail for a long time.
There are also people who make money because of the U.S. drug laws. It is they who work to keep the drug war going by lobbying for passage of stricter drug laws, and opposing any sort of change that would allow for counseling, therapy, and rehabilitation instead of jail and prison. They make money from the drug laws because they make the weaponry and equipment used by the drug enforcement officers, they design and build the prisons, they make the cement and steel used to build the prisons, they represent the drug offenders in court, they are the drug-testing companies, they are the antidrug organizations that are funded by governments and private donations to fuel the War on Drugs, they are the union guards in the prisons, they are the companies supplying food and clothing for prisoners, and they are the corporations that run the prisons under government contracts.
Perhaps those who benefit the most from keeping marijuana and hemp illegal in the U.S. are the petroleum, cotton, corn, plywood, and tree pulp paper industries. They are all making money, but at what cost to society?
“Marijuana legalization would remove this behemoth financial burden from the criminal justice system, freeing up criminal justice resources to target other more serious crimes, and allowing law enforcement to focus on the highest echelons of hard-drug trafficking enterprises rather than on minor marijuana offenders who present no threat to public safety.”
– Keith Stroup, Executive Director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, NORML.org, 2004
As long as these laws prohibiting marijuana exist there will always be marijuana entrepreneurs in every county of the U.S., growing and selling marijuana illegally, tax free.
“The government’s War on Drugs has become a wildfire that threatens to consume those fundamental rights of the individual deliberately enshrined in our Constitution.”
– Chief Judge Burciaga, U.S. v. Boyll (1991) 774 F. Supp. 1333; quoted on JudgesAgainstTheDrugWar.org
“Governance involves choices. Every expansion of government power is a diminution of individual liberty. A balance must be struck between lawlessness and personal freedom. Some restrictions on liberty are necessary in order to have a society that is relatively free from crime and predation. The current obsession is to eliminate illicit drug use. There is no question, however, that under the so-called War on Drugs, personal freedoms and liberties are being trampled. While I may deplore the marketing and use of illicit drugs, as well as the undesirable personal and social problems that flow therefrom, I believe that the pendulum has swung too far in the area of law enforcement and that the assault on our basic liberties and freedoms by government itself has become a far more serious and potentially destructive social problem.”
– People v. Mitchell (1995) 650 N.E.2d 1014; Heiple, Justice, Dissenting; Supreme Court of Illinois; quoted on JudgesAgainstTheDrugWar.org
“If this nation were to win its War on Drugs at the cost of sacrificing its citizens’ constitutional rights, it would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed. It ill behooves a great nation to compromise or sacrifice the freedoms of its citizens as the price of more efficient law enforcement.”
– U.S. v. Layman (1990) 730 F. Supp, 332; Carrigan, District Judge; U.S. District Court, Dist. of Colorado; quoted on JudgesAgainstTheDrugWar.org
U.S. federal government agencies involved in trying to control marijuana:
• Air Force
• Agriculture Department
• Army
• Central Intelligence Agency
• Coast Guard
• Commerce Department
• Customs
• Department of Education
• Department of Health and Welfare
• Department of Transportation
• Drug Enforcement Administration
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Immigration and Naturalization
• Internal Revenue Service
• National Institute of Mental Health
• National Institute on Drug Abuse
• Navy
• Post Office
• Treasury Department
• U.S. Forestry Service
Additionally, the U.S. funds the drug war in other countries. For instance, in 2007 the U.S. gave $69 million to Mexico to help train police and prosecutors. Some members of Congress want to more than double that amount. Drug war funding from the U.S. to Columbia has been in the billions of dollars.
“Police arrested an estimated 755,187 persons for marijuana violations in 2003, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report. The total is the highest ever recorded by the FBI, and comprised 45 percent of all drug arrests in the United States.
Marijuana arrests for 2003 increased 8 percent from the previous year, and have nearly doubled since 1993.
In the past decade, more than 6.5 million Americans have been arrested on marijuana charges, more than the entire populations of Alaska, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming combined.”
– ChangeTheClimate.org
In 2004 there were 772,000 Americans arrested on marijuana charges.
Some say that marijuana needs to be illegal because it is a dangerous drug or a gateway drug. Ask them to support their claims with fact and they will likely come up empty, or they will cite claims that are based on myths, distortions, and/or government lies.
“According to the Canadian Senate’s 2002 study: ‘Cannabis: Our Position for a Canadian Public Policy,’ ‘Cannabis itself is not a cause of other drug use.’ This finding concurs with the conclusions of the U.S. National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine 1999 study, which states that marijuana is not a ‘gateway drug to the extent that it is a cause or even that it is the most significant predictor of serious drug abuse.’”
– Marijuana: Myth vs. Fact, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, NORML.org