How the drug war hurts everyone
From Wall Street to Oakland, recent events prove the campaign isn’t just futile. It’s a deadly waste of resourses
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/12/how_the_drug_war_hurts_everyone/singleton/
It seems I haven’t commented here much on my feelings on our so-called ‘war on drugs’. I believe it is a total travesty against our society, doubled or quadrupled by the knowledge of how wasted the whole alcohol prohibition effort was. Of course, given the oligarchic-al hold on our society and the _billions_ of taxpayer dollars pissed away I suppose it should come as no surprise that no matter that our society is growing to see the war on drugs as an inherently bad thing that it continues to escalate.
I have read comments that the overall cost to society of legalising drugs (I would legalise them all) would exceed the current cost to our society of the existing war on drugs, but I find the arguments unpersuasive. Yes, without a doubt more people would indulge in drugs and without a doubt more people would become addicted (just like with ready access to alcohol and legalised gambling those with weaknesses are more easily ensnared), but that discounts the 25% of the entire world’s prison population being US citizens (with the US, btw, having less than 5% of the world’s population), not to mention the massive drain on our society spending the billions in totally unproductive (beyond enriching the oligarchy, of course; always have to toss in that caveat) activity. If drugs were legal their profit margins would drop to the typical 10% or so that pharmaceutical companies get for non-patented products, which naturally means that crime related to drugs would essentially vanish overnight. That, of course, would put a massive crimp into the cash flow of some major corporations getting fat off our prison population (see here for instance).
I am really getting against the idea of government privatisation. Sure the government is a fucked up wasteful organisation but at least we can see who is doing what. With this privatisation crap we got no idea who is taking our tax dollars and the value we get in return.
