RE: Exit Strategies for the War on Drugs, Part I: Framing the Discussion

Excellent article...but all those earnest facts and logical reasoning will go to waste unless you accept that the "drug war" is not an accident.

The people who make these decisions aren't stupid, or misinformed. They're as smart as you and I, and know exactly what they're doing.

They say the drug war costs billions, but the truth is that the people saying that are profiting enormously from the war. (As they do from all the wars they instigate.) When the "government" loses money, it's the taxpayers who foot the bill. But when every offender is who processed through the system has to pay tens of thousands of dollars, the American people don't see a penny of that money.

Probation for a single person in Los Angeles County costs $4,000 for 3 years. Obviously, with all the people on probation, the probationers are paying for the entire probation office and staff.

Asset forfeitures are almost NEVER contested. When they arrest a single offender, they take the person's vehicle, cash, jewelry...and keep it all. Getting it back is a Herculean task, one that the majority of offenders cannot afford (not that a lawyer would be much help).

We all know that the prison system generates a LOT of money for mystery persons out there who are never unmasked...the cronies who get the contracts to supply the prison food, uniforms, security, blankets, phone calls...

Reasonable arguments and civilized attempts don't work when you're facing a greedy tyrant who's gotten accustomed to a steady, lucrative influx of cash and is willing to do whatever it takes to guarantee the permanency of that income. Especially when he's got a wife and kids who are busily snorting through his ill-gotten gains.

If you really, genuinely want to stop the drug war, please concentrate on dismantling the automated system the Bad Guys have set up to milk the people like so many fuel sources in the sci-fi movie "The Matrix."

Here's the system as I've figured it out so far:

1) The school system is designed to weed out only those who will: "sit down, shut up, and do as you're told."
2) The college system has become more of the same.
3) Parents never get to parent their kids.
4) Relationships are strongly discouraged in the academic and corporate world.
5) People do drugs because they're miserable at school, work, and at home.

6) Miserable people make great victims.
7) Strong people make bad victims.

8) The sole purpose (in reality) of the police is to arrest people whose socio-economic status falls below upper-middle class.
9) The sole purpose of the "justice" system is to ensure that the people who are arrested pay the price.
10) Because they have criminalized behavior that is natural to all of us - due to the misery imposed on everyone by the people who make up the rules - everyone is terrified.
This combination doesn't happen this often in nature. This is not an accident.

 Do some deep research~ guaranteeing that people are so miserable, lost, and alone is not as easy as you might think. It takes an intricate bureaucracy staffed with regular people doing all the evil work. This complicated system is not an accident. It is very intentional. And unless we recognize the roots of our problems for exactly what they are, no amount of lobbying and legislating is going to help.  

 In fact, part of the biggest problem is that like many excessively wealthy men that have gone before, our nation's true leaders have begun to think of themselves as God. And instead of Ten Commandments, we now have millions of tiny, complicated, stupid rules to control our behavior, thoughts, and actions.  

But that's another topic~ kind of.