What Can an Individual Do?

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

Read an excellent article by the writers of the TV program The Wire here. The only thing they left out is corruption in the justice industry. The writers advocate "jury nullification" as something an individual could do to stop the madness. In the south, juries would often excuse white on black crime and who is to say lying could not be used for good. By the way, Denver voted on a law that would make marijuana arrests a low priority but the cops responded by increasing arrests. Selective law enforcement seems to only go one way.

Republicans ridicule Battleboro Vermont's petition that said Bush and Cheney could be arrested if they showed up in town. They dismiss it as a liberal trick, but I see it as an act of people who see the two party system has failed. I think doing something, (even if it is hopeless) is preferable to doing nothing when one sees an injustice, but that is just me.

By the way, this is what Ralph had to say on the subject of the war on drugs:

Our failed war on drugs is endangering our communities, imperiling police, wasting tens of billions of dollars and, because it is criminalizing what is a health problem instead of rehabilitation for drug addicts, is filling our prisons at $40,000 a prisoner and making the corporate-prison industry even richer. The way to go is to look at drug addiction as a rehabilitation challenge, focus on youngsters in terms of prevention, have community policing where the police work and live in the community, which is the best way to make a community safe, and decriminalize marijuana so we can begin to move this into a rehabilitation-health problem.