Drug War Mistaken

The following post was composed by LEAP speaker Dean Becker and is cross-posted at Huffington Post.

In the name of all powers that be, let us reconsider our stance regarding the policy of drug prohibition. In this hundred year effort to prevent the use of certain flowers and plant extracts we have empowered criminal elements worldwide to the tune of $400 billion per year. The US has arrested 39 million non-violent drug users at a cost of more than one trillion dollars. Despite the horrors the US inflicts on its own people in the name of drug war, it is the citizens of Mexico that bear the deadliest weight of this prohibition.

Thousands of Mexicans are butchered each year in the name of fighting this first of America's eternal wars; the pipe dream of men who have long since died and whose followers continue their efforts to destroy the law of supply and demand, to stop 100's of millions of users, to prohibit the tens of millions of growers and millions of criminals from seeking their cut of black market profits. America is addicted to drug war.

Some say the fault lies with the American users, that if they were to quit using cocaine, heroin and marijuana that the cartels would wither away. Those who fault the users do not take into account that the US represents only 5% of the earths population so that even if every American quit using these drugs, the Mexican cartels would still have hundreds of millions of customers worldwide and the barbarism would continue to escalate.

Through a willing or silent embrace of prohibition those proponents of eternal drug war are ensuring more death, disease, crime and addiction. Born from racial screeds and amplified by hysteria and propaganda this policy has no basis in science, no medical data to justify its existence and in fact has no relationship with empirical data whatsoever and has no embrace of, nor nexus with, reality itself.

Generations of politicians and law enforcement have prospered from the policy of drug prohibition and dare not allow their stance taken, to be examined in a new light. But for the rest of us, ignorance and superstition may eventually be forgiven, but the horrors the United States has promulgated on this planet in the name of drug war, will never be forgotten.

Those who seek to forestall a reinvestigation of our drug war policy have aligned themselves so as to ensure eternal profits for evil ones who mean to destroy our way of life, our freedoms, our democracy.

Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman once said to drug czar William Bennett: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken? Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore."

Pray that we open our eyes, our hearts and our minds to the horrors we inflict on ourselves via our fear of flowers. How many Mexicans will have to die, before Americans realize they are .. mistaken?

On Sunday, Feb 14 we will interview El Paso City Coucilman Beto Orourke & Students for Sensible Drug Policy board member Michael Blunt on the Drug Truth Network radio programs. Listen live at 6:30 CENTRAL time at http://www.kpft.org or tune in to one of our 72 affiliate stations in the US and Canada or check it out on Monday morning on our website http://www.drugtruth.net.