Illegal drugs: Why do we continue to spend billions on an approach that is not working; just getting worse and costing more? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

How many more new and bigger jails do we need to build?

    John Stossel, reporting at Reason.com highlights to absurdity "War on Drugs" from a public policy perspective. And what it shows should alarm every American. Prohibition did not work when they tried to ban alcohol and the ban on drugs is not working, by any measure one wishes to apply. Drugs, as defined by those substances that are illegal, are bad. real bad. But the fundamental problem is that the way we have fought against these bad things simply is not working. And the "cure is worse than the disease", in many instances.

    The reason we keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is: MONEY.

    When you read that you probably thought about the conundrum of the Drug Dealer. You know, the guy who can't get a legitimate job, but he can make more money in one night than ten guys can make in a month. But that's not the "money" that really drives the Drug War. The real money is your money. That is, the taxpayers fork out billions of dollars to fight a war that is being lost, more and more every year.

    For example, if drugs were not illegal Beaufort County would not need a new jail. Think about that. Twenty million dollars pulled out of the local economy. What sense does that make?

    It actually makes a lot of sense...to Sheriff Alan Jordan. He justifies spending two million a year in debt payments to build a new jail by saying the current jail is overcrowded. Yet does not give us one example of where that jail has turned around even one convict who has spent time being house, fed, provided medical care and kept warm/cool at taxpayer expense. Have you ever wondered why the High Sheriff - and all the other law enforcement officials who talk about how bad drugs are - does not advocate putting these people in a substance abuse rehab facility rather than in jail? The answer is simple. It would cut his budget drastically. And worst than the amount it would reduce the cost of law enforcement; it would deprive him of a truckload of money he gets to use as a slush fund. What sense does that make?

    But it's not just the Sheriff's Department and local police departments. There are billions of taxpayer dollars spent on "grants" to various recipients to "fight drugs." Billions, year after year. Those people depend on those grants. They live on drug money.

    And more billions are spent on the court system to operate the revolving door at the courthouse through which the same people parade over and over. And drug cases tie up forensic labs that delay justice in murder, assault, rape etc. cases.

    And on top of all that, you have the cost of crimes that are committed to get money to buy drugs, which, because they are illegal, cost multiples of what they would cost if sold like alcohol is sold.

    Stossel writes:

    As Americans obsess over NSA spying, abuse by the IRS and other assaults on our freedom, I can't get my mind off the thousand other ways politicians abuse us.

    In their arrogance, they assume that only they solve social problems. They will solve them by banning this and that, subsidizing groups they deem worthy and setting up massive bureaucracies with a mandate to cure, treat and rescue wayward souls.

    Their programs fail, and so they pass new laws to address the failures. It's one reason that 22 million people now work for government.

    Some of the things they do seem like bigger assaults on our freedom than NSA spying, although we've become accustomed to the older abuses.

    Take the drug war.

    It's true that some Americans destroy their lives and their families' lives by using drugs. Others struggle with addiction. But if illegal drugs are as horrible and addictive as we've been told, how come the government's own statistics say millions try those drugs but only a small percentage continue using?

    Ninety-five percent of those who have tried what we think of as "hard drugs" report not using the substances in the past month.

    Columbia University psychology professor Dr. Carl Hart, author of "High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery," says "hard" drugs are not as dangerous as the media make them out to be. For 15 years, he's studied the effects of marijuana, methamphetamine, crack cocaine and more on users.

    "The data simply shows that the vast majority of people who use these drugs don't go on to become addicted," he said on my show. "In fact, some of these people go on to become president."

    He means Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama. "All those guys used illegal drugs at some point."

    Click here to go to the original source to read the rest of the article.

    Albert Einstein said: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."