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The War On Drugs & Your Bathroom Closet?

Given that in California things are different, you need to know that you can buy medical marijuana from vending machines and even learn how to buy it online. This development clearly shows that while the "war on drugs" may be worthwhile for the self-righteous and excessively uptight, it is not working any better than Refer Madness worked to prevent the spread of marijuana in the 1960's.

The problem with all of this is that the war on drugs does not work, costs too much, and has expanded the size and scope of government dramatically. It has harmed more people than it has helped.

It simply makes a substance that people, typically very sick people with cancer want to use to ease their pain verboten, or forbidden.

In the same way that Adolph Hitler made a War on Drugs, an integral part of his school of fascist aesthetic realism, we have adopted it as a given in our culture. We tend to forget as this site reminds us that, a precursor to our war on drugs in the "States...[was] Hitler's War on Drugs: Rauschgiftbekämpfung [The Fight Against Drugs] in the Third Reich, itself a long-forgotten importation of American Prohibition wedded to Nazi racial hygiene and a police state apparatus ever-ready to invoke the 'wholesome popular sentiment' expressed in the National Socialist-realist aesthetic to legitimize and enforce the performance principle of German fascism."

Statistics illustrate that "47% of high school students have tried marijuana"; that means almost one out of two kids have used marijuana. Even the plethora of government organizations that control "substance abuse" among teens clearly show a noticeable rise in abuse of all kinds by teenagers; nothing has stopped this increase over the years.

The DEA itself, that bastion of the War on Drugs, has approved a limited clinical trial of Medical Marijuana in where else....California.

So, in the end, we can speculate that Ron Paul , Tucker Carlson and the Libertarians advice on the war on drugs is correct. They all imply that by outlawing things that people can use for medical problems, you create an industry of things people cannot do. By doing that you increase the chances they will actually want to do them for reasons not related to medicine and create a lucrative black market in them. Of course, we will never know the answer to all the obvious questions this position raises unless we begin to change the way we legislate and unless we begin to allow things we once thought were verboten, or at least legalize them.

I know if I ever get glaucoma or MS, I will want medical marijuana; we can argue about the virtues and pitfalls legalizing drugs all we want, but the Cato institute has had it right all along.

The problem with prohibitions of all types, is that they are profitable, and the more profitable they become the more everyone has a vested interest in keeping them in place, even if they have a negative impact on society as a whole, and even if they give the cops permission to go through your bathroom closets.

Comments

Anonymous said…
A simple primer on prohibition is available here:
http://www.vvdailypress.com/news/candy_5497___article.html/

It appears skittles are the new gateway drug of choice in schools.
Brian said…
Alan, that is hillarious!

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