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U.S.
should change tactics in war on drugs Drugs are, as my sixth grade D.A.R.E. recollection serves, anything consumed besides food that affects your body. This includes items as various as marijuana, Prozac, penicillin and nicotine. Most drugs are available to the average college student for some amount of money and phone calls. But if you’ve caught the “news” lately you’re probably aware that we’re losing the “War on Drugs.” Since it follows that drugs are winning the war, maybe we should shake things up before we lose to an inanimate object. After all, since our U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft lost to a dead man for senatorial race, it would be oh so embarrassing to follow that with a loss to plant derivatives. Alcohol, which destroys a myriad of lives on the highways each year, and nicotine, with tobacco-smoking deaths approaching 500,000 a year, are not only acceptable drugs, legally and morally, but are worthy of advertisement in our society. Has anyone asked why of all known recreational drugs these two are singled out as the best for our society? Psychedelic mushrooms, cacti and marijuana have been revered for thousands of years but are now illegal. It’s simply ludicrous to make a part of nature illegal, and to the more religious among us, the equivalent to saying the creator made a mistake. We did try drug prohibition once before during the 1920s and 1930s and even devoted two constitutional amendments to the question of the legality of alcohol. Despite all the great speeches and laws, alcohol never left the shores of America. Instead, organized gangs created a network of speakeasies and guarded them to the point of violence. But, our leaders would tell us things are different today. There are street gangs with their drug dens fighting turf wars. On the other hand, drug war tactics have succeeded in keeping the price of drugs at high enough levels that many people who become addicted are forced into theft to support their addiction. Consider for a moment if cigarette smoking became illegal and the black market price was $30 a pack. I’m not a big fan of addiction, but pricing addicts out of the market only makes them desperate. If we are truly afraid of these drug gangs then let us deliver the deathblow and take away their means of support. Instead of a few hundred drug dens in a city, the Dutch solution of regulated drug bars could reduce that number to ten. If we are really so scared of the desperate addict, then we should provide cheaper and cleaner drugs so the addicts won’t hurt themselves or others because of their own weaknesses. These are real world practical solutions that are working in many of the smaller European countries like the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland. A scarier premise is that our government is fulfilling its true purpose in the war on drugs. This explains their refusal to change, in light of the publicly announced failure of the drug war. Claiming to be fighting against drugs, the federal government has militarized sections of our local police, which are mainly paid for by confiscation of drug users’ property. The war on drugs has caused nearly an entire generation of adolescent minority males to enter the criminal justice system as either drug users or gang members. I don’t deny that some adolescent minority males use drugs and belong to gangs, but maybe these are thoughts to ponder around the keg at the frat house. Many suggest the marijuana should be legalized, but allowing the government to make this decision rejects the central premise of American freedom, which is that you are free to do whatever you like, hurting no one (but yourself). I reject any government’s authority to make decisions for me. I choose my drugs. I choose my religion. I choose my enemies. Attempts by this or any other government to enforce these or other decisions on you exemplifies the acts of tyrants, and removes whatever legitimacy they might have had. If we are only free to do what they tell us to do, are we, in fact, free? Chris
Dobson is a senior history major from Arlington. |
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