Drug money...

Forget, for the moment, the 46 billion dollars more that Bush wants to fight his ill-considered war in Iraq. Tied to that proposal is a "request" for 1.4 billion to fight the "War on Drugs," the lion's share of which will go to Mexico, 550 million.

The American government has been fighting, and I use the term loosely, the WOD for as long as I can remember, certainly before long I smoked my first doobie more moons ago than I care to remember. If America is (finally) upset about how much money and how many lives have been wasted in Iraq imagine how much more incensed they must be at the even larger sum in blood and treasure, that has been wasted in the War on Drugs.

At least one would think so...

But I can sit down and smoke a relatively harmless, yet highly illegal substance with a good (conservative) friend of mine and we can argue point and counterpoint about the War on Terror till the troops come home, neither of us ever really snapping to the fact that we have a common enemy, our own government would bust BOTH of us, regardless of whether we think W is the Anti-Christ or simply the village idiot, the chief irony being that conservatives are supposedly all about taking personal responsibility...

At least that's what they tell us. Truth is, we're free to do whatever we want to do as long as they approve of it... first.

And what do you think happens to the money that's sent to Mexico and Central and South America? Sure, some of it is spent eradicating crops set by farmers who aren't in on the criminal game, giving them little choice but to join up with the criminal factions simply to make a living by producing what to them is merely a marketable crop. But I think we can rest assured that a large portion, if not most, of the money goes to the ones who know how to game the system, and inevitably, those will be the criminal element. With the end result that very little progress is made in the government's War on Drugs.

Imagine, for a moment, if tobacco was made illegal (and don't laugh, because, well, would you really put it past this current pack of yahoos?) and suddenly farmers in Virginia are criminals, and millions of smokers are jonesing BAD.

Next thing you know the government is busting illegal growers and smugglers with pipe tobacco, and the only place those jonesing smokers can go for their fix is, you guessed it, their friendly neighborhood... criminals. And the price of your illegal tobacco? Well, since the suppliers now have to factor the cost of guns, guards and high-tech smuggling techniques, the price will skyrocket. That 5 dollar pack that Texas smokers now complain 
about would go to, well, around 500.

All of which would go to the criminal element, the very people you most DON'T want involved in a product people like. Crack whores? Hell, make way for cigar whores...

Which of course, is exactly what has happened to the price of marijuana over my lifetime. What I used to buy for 10 dollars would now cost me well over $400, dang near as much as gold. And where is the sense in that?

This is so basic I almost hate to say it, but the amount we spend on "fighting" the "war on drugs", added to the amount of taxes pot smokers would GLADLY pay, could change the nation. (Just as the amount we could save by fighting a more sane "war on terror" would cure cancer, homelessness and well, take your choice of curable ills, but we're forgetting that for the nonce.)

At the bottom line, who profits from the War on Drugs? Criminals and the people who make military hardware.

Let's all recite the lesson we should have learned during the prohibition of alcohol... YOU CANNOT LEGISLATE PUBLIC MORALITY!!!

So what's my solution? Legalize it, regulate it and tax it, just like tobacco, alcohol, and firearms. For more information contact the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), the Drug Truth Network, or Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). The latter is an organization of law enforcement officials who have realized what a sham the War on Drugs is.

Disclaimer: this post was NOT written "under the influence", but in a freest of all possible Americas (and isn't that what we all really want?), it would be.