Black State Legislators Condemn Drug War

First of all, mar1juana has never been documented to kill a single person in the history of the world. That alone puts it in a class far less dangerous than alcohol.

Here are a few quotes...

# The DEA's Administrative Law Judge, Francis Young concluded: "In strict medical terms mar1juana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. For example, eating 10 raw potatoes can result in a toxic response. By comparison, it is physically impossible to eat enough mar1juana to induce death. mar1juana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis mar1juana can be safely used within the supervised routine of medical care.:

Source: US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Agency, "In the Matter of mar1juana Rescheduling Petition," [Docket #86-22], (September 6, 1988), p. 57.
______________________________________________________
# Commissioned by President Nixon in 1972, the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse concluded that "Marihuana's relative potential for harm to the vast majority of individual users and its actual impact on society does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and firmly punish those who use it. This judgment is based on prevalent use patterns, on behavior exhibited by the vast majority of users and on our interpretations of existing medical and scientific data. This position also is consistent with the estimate by law enforcement personnel that the elimination of use is unattainable."

Source: Shafer, Raymond P., et al, Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, Ch. V, (Washington DC: National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, 1972).
____________________________________________________
# When examining the medical affects of mar1juana use, the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse concluded, "A careful search of the literature and testimony of the nation's health officials has not revealed a single human fatality in the United States proven to have resulted solely from ingestion of marihuana. Experiments with the drug in monkeys demonstrated that the dose required for overdose death was enormous and for all practical purposes unachievable by humans smoking marihuana. This is in marked contrast to other substances in common use, most notably alcohol and barbiturate sleeping pills. The WHO reached the same conclusion in 1995.

Source: Shafer, Raymond P., et al, Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, Ch. III, (Washington DC: National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, 1972); Hall, W., Room, R. & Bondy, S., WHO Project on Health Implications of Cannabis Use: A Comparative Appraisal of the Health and Psychological Consequences of Alcohol, Cannabis, Nicotine and Opiate Use, August 28, 1995, (Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, March 1998).
______________________________________________________
# The World Health Organization released a study in March 1998 that states: "there are good reasons for saying that [the risks from cannabis] would be unlikely to seriously [compare to] the public health risks of alcohol and tobacco even if as many people used cannabis as now drink alcohol or smoke tobacco."

Source: Hall, W., Room, R. & Bondy, S., WHO Project on Health Implications of Cannabis Use: A Comparative Appraisal of the Health and Psychological Consequences of Alcohol, Cannabis, Nicotine and Opiate Use, August 28, 1995, (contained in original version, but deleted from official version) (Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, March 1998).
_____________________________________________________
# The authors of a 1998 World Health Organization report comparing mar1juana, alcohol, nicotine and opiates quote the Institute of Medicine's 1982 report stating that there is no evidence that smoking mar1juana "exerts a permanently deleterious effect on the normal cardiovascular system."

Source: Hall, W., Room, R. & Bondy, S., WHO Project on Health Implications of Cannabis Use: A Comparative Appraisal of the Health and Psychological Consequences of Alcohol, Cannabis, Nicotine and Opiate Use, August 28, 1995 (Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, March 1998).
_____________________________________________________
# Since 1969, government-appointed commissions in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, and the Netherlands concluded, after reviewing the scientific evidence, that mar1juana's dangers had previously been greatly exaggerated, and urged lawmakers to drastically reduce or eliminate penalties for mar1juana possession.

Source: Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence, Cannabis (London, England: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1969); Canadian Government Commission of Inquiry, The Non-Medical Use of Drugs (Ottawa, Canada: Information Canada, 1970); The National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, (Nixon-Shafer Report) (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1972); Werkgroep Verdovende Middelen, Background and Risks of Drug Use (The Hague, The Netherlands: Staatsuigeverij, 1972); Senate Standing Committee on Social Welfare, Drug Problems in Australia-An Intoxicated Society (Canberra, Australia: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1977); Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, "The classification of cannabis under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971" (London, England, UK: Home Office, March 2002), available on the web from http://www.drugs.gov.uk/ReportsandPublications/Communities/HO_drugsadvice.pdf ; House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Third Report, "The Government's Drugs Policy: Is It Working?" (London, England, UK: Parliament, May 9, 2002), from the web at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmselect/cmhaff/318/31802.htm and "Cannabis: Our Position for a Canadian Public Policy," report of the Canadian Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs (Ottawa, Canada: Senate of Canada, September 2002).
___________________________________________________--
# UK Home Secretary David Blunkett announced in July 2002 that "We must concentrate our efforts on the drugs that cause the most harm, while sending a credible message to young people. I will therefore ask Parliament to reclassify cannabis from Class B to Class C. I have considered the recommendations of the Home Affairs Committee, and the advice given me by the ACMD medical experts that the current classification of cannabis is disproportionate in relation to the harm that it causes."

Source: "'All Controlled Drugs Harmful, All Will Remain Illegal' - Home Secretary," News Release, Office of the Home Secretary, Government of the United Kingdom, July 10, 2002, from the web at http://213.219.10.30/n_story.asp?item_id=143 last accessed July 31, 2002.
___________________________________________________
# "Our conclusion is that the present law on cannabis produces more harm than it prevents. It is very expensive of the time and resources of the criminal justice system and especially of the police. It inevitably bears more heavily on young people in the streets of inner cities, who are also more likely to be from minority ethnic communities, and as such is inimical to police-community relations. It criminalizes large numbers of otherwise law-abiding, mainly young, people to the detriment of their futures. It has become a proxy for the control of public order; and it inhibits accurate education about the relative risks of different drugs including the risks of cannabis itself."

Source: Police Foundation of the United Kingdom, "Drugs and the Law: Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971", April 4, 2000. The Police Foundation, based in London, England, is a nonprofit organization presided over by Charles, Crown Prince of Wales, which promotes research, debate and publication to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of policing in the UK.

 

Unfortunately, you also have people guilty of real crimes (rape, assault, robbery, etc.) being released from prison on parole in order to make room in the jails for all the drug "criminals."

BTW, if the law WERE applied equally, the drug war would end almost overnight since middle class white people would not stand for the tactics in common use in the drug war.

 

The War on Drugs: One of America’s Greatest Failures. Now’s the time to admit we were wrong.

by Corey Owens

www.OpEdNews.com


It is relatively easy to make claims that the United States government is waging war on its own people. It was claimed during Prohibition, the Vietnam War, and now the War on Terror. However, it is in most all instances a significantly more difficult endeavor to “prove” that we are the victims. But as with most rules the exception begs one to reconsider the rule itself. The War on Drugs – forgotten by most during this time of wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, terror, and poverty – is wasting more time, energy, and money today than it ever has before. With the founding of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968 began what may prove to be the most protracted and expensive war upon which this country has ever embarked. While the medical mar1juana initiatives passed by several states might give one faith in the democratic process they are a far cry from what is needed and sufficiently justified at this juncture: an end to the War on Drugs.


The War on Drugs, officially declared by President Nixon in 1971, was the brainchild of a crafty Nixon campaign aide who realized that public sentiment was moving away from acceptance of drug use as a backlash to the 1960s counterculture. Just one year prior to Nixon’s declaration, only 16.3% of federal prison inmates were there on drug charges, most of them violent offenders or involved in mid-level distribution or production. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), by 1998 nearly 59% of the federal prison population was incarcerated on drug charges. It might be hoped that since the federal anti-drug budget has increased from $.1 billion in 1970 to $17.7 billion in 2000 that the increase in drug-related sentences is a reflection of major success in combating the abuse of illegal drugs. Unfortunately, this couldn’t be much further from the truth. While federal survey results do reflect a general decrease in drug use (14.1% of the general population in 1979 to 6.2% in 1998) two factors discourage celebrating this decrease as a success. First, most estimates (including those made by the ONDCP) suggest that any decrease in use has been mostly among casual mar1juana users fearful of arrest and prosecution, while the number of hardcore users of opiates, methamphetamine, and cocaine seem to have increased steadily over the past thirty years. Second, as the National Research Council pointed out in a 2001 report, the increasing stigma against drug use has likely resulted in far fewer survey respondents admitting to any drug use, let alone hardcore use.

The report concludes that better indicators of drug use trends are “overdose deaths and emergency room mentions of drugs. These numbers have escalated consistently since the 1980s, and both are at record highs.” With more deaths resulting from hardcore drug use one might expect that the ONDCP would be working diligently to encourage education and treatment. And one would be wrong. In 2002 the ONDCP reported that 32.5% of the federal anti-drug budget went to treatment and education, down from 58% in 1970. Even more discouraging, a study by the Rand Corporation in 2000 offered a seething indictment of the ONDCP’s accounting practices, accusing that the reported education and treatment budgets are inflated by as much as 20%. These numbers are especially disturbing considering the cost-effectiveness of education and treatment. According to a report from the Drug Policy Research Center, “domestic enforcement costs 4 times as much as treatment for a given amount of user reduction, 7 times as much for consumption reduction, and 15 times as much for societal cost reduction.”


Instead of allocating funds to programs that work (treatment programs, preventative education, addiction counseling, etc.) the federal government has seen it fit to pump billions of dollars into a system of enforcement that has done less than nothing. Not only has hardcore use increased since 1968, the War on Drugs has spurred a general distrust of the police and courts in many communities. This distrust is not unfounded. For one, Whites comprise nearly three-quarters of drug users in the United States, but make up only 21% of imprisoned drug offenders at the state level. The racial disparities are evident at all stages of the enforcement system, ranging from arrest and conviction rates to length of sentences and time served. The statistics that consider income level are equally staggering. The privileges stemming from being White and wealthy are seldom more apparent than when observing the workings of the War on Drugs.
President Abraham Lincoln once famously stated that “prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.” More than thirty years later the United States has little to show for the tens of billions of dollars it has spent combating the use illegal narcotics. It is time to acknowledge the facts: America is waging war on its own citizens. The War on Drugs is a war on racial minorities, the impoverished, civil liberties, and common sense. Ultimately, the War on Drugs is a war on all of us. The War on Drugs was a mistake in 1971 and it’s a mistake now. It’s time to admit we were wrong.

Corey Owens is a student of Rhetoric and Power at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. He is currently working as an intern with the ACLU’s National Field Office in Washington, D.C.

This article is copyright by Corey Owens (coreyowens@truman.edu), originally published by opednews.com. Permission is granted to forward this or to place it on a website as long as the article is included intact, including this statement.

http://www.opednews.com/2005_1_3/owensCorey010205_war_ono_drugs.htm