Editor,
Truth to tell, the drug warrior politicians, officials, media and civilians secretly don’t list victory as an objective in their expensive and oppressive trillion-dollar war.
When they do spout their “zero tolerance/total victory” rhetoric, how many of your readers actually believe them? How many actually believe that this year’s multibillion-dollar drug war budget will be the one that will achieve total victory after decades of billion dollar budgets have totally failed?
Just remember that the drug czars’ and warriors’ jobs depend on the perpetual prosecution of, but never a victory in, the drug war. Also, remember that the politicians depend on the drug war and its rhetoric to scare up votes (by scaring voters). The politicians also rely on the drug war to sustain their constituent industries that depend on the economics of prohibition in order to make generous profits and campaign contributions that keep the drug warrior politicians in power and, therefore, keep themselves in business.
Remember what H.L. Mencken said: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Cannabis has no lethal dose and its pharmacological effects have never caused a single death in over 5,000 years of recorded history.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
The unseen driving force against medical (or unrestricted adult) legalization of cannabis is the fact that cannabis can’t be patented. This precludes the need for big business to be involved and that fact makes cannabis commercially unattractive to the pharmaceutical, tobacco and alcohol industries (lobbies). It seems that if it can’t be profitized successfully the government can’t justify legalization even for the sick and dying.
Furthermore, the war on cannabis drives the war on drugs. Without cannabis prohibition, the drug war would be reduced to a pillow fight. This is the politics and the economics of cannabis prohibition.
Maybe the corrupt politicians and media are required to adhere to the party line of cannabis prohibition because law enforcement, customs, the prison and military industrial complex, the drug testing industry, the “drug treatment” industry, the INS, the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, the politicians themselves et al can’t live without the budget justification, not to mention the invisible profits, bribery, corruption and forfeiture benefits that prohibition affords them.
The drug war also promotes, justifies and perpetuates racist enforcement policies and is diminishing many freedoms and liberties that are supposed to be inalienable according to the constitution and bill of rights.
Myron Von Hollingsworth
Daily Lobo reader
