Target tobacco & alcohol instead of Marijuana
“At the time the drug war in the US was launched, deaths from tobacco there were estimated at about 300,000 a year, with perhaps another 100,000 from alcohol. But these aren’t the drugs the Bush administration targeted. It went after illegal drugs, which (all drugs together) had caused many fewer deaths-3,500 a year.” The administration also targeted Marijuana, which hadn’t caused any known deaths among some 60 million users. In fact, the crackdown exacerbated the drug problem.
Drug use is falling anyway; drug war is fraudulent
“The utterly fraudulent war on drugs in the US, was undertaken at a time when everyone knew that use of every drug-even coffee-was falling among educated whites, and was staying sort of level among minorities. The police obviously find it much easier to make an arrest on the streets of a black ghetto than in a white suburb. By now, a very high percentage of incarceration is drug-related, and it mostly targets little guys, somebody who’s caught peddling dope.
The big guys are largely ignored”. Drug-related crimes, usually pretty trivial ones, are mostly what’s filling up the prisons. I haven’t seen many bankers or executives of chemical corporations in prison. People in the rich suburbs commit plenty of crimes, but they’re not going to prison at anything like the rate of the poor.
Noam Chomsky (1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.
Noam Chomsky, Vancouver, Canada in 2004.
Door Duncan Rawlinson – https://www.flickr.com/photos/thelastminute/97182354/in/set-72057594061270615/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1194102
