DEA Declares War On Water

A friend posted a report that the DEA continues to regard marijuana as a dangerous drug requiring a high level of illegality. A lengthy series of interesting comments followed. I'm really not feeling well enough to repost them, so anyone reading this blog will have to do without them. Nevertheless, the discussion was interesting enough that I also commented.

My post: The government's position is, and has been since its inception, irrational and self-destructive. John Erlichman has stated that:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Other former members of the Nixon administration have insisted that this must have been a satirical, non-factual statement. This is almost irrelevant. The effects of the war on drugs have been essentially identical to conducting a decades long assault on American society.

An enemy nation would be hard pressed to plan a more effective method of destabilizing and damaging the United States economically, socially, and morally. I sincerely doubt they could effectively implement such a plan.

When the war on drugs was first announced, I was still a student. At that time many of us immediately responded, "Isn't this just Prohibition all over again? Wasn't that a miserable failure? Isn't this just going to make gangs more powerful and hurt the people it is supposed to protect?"

In Washington, and sadly much of America, the obvious is irrelevant.

(For the record, I don't use marijuana. I don't even use it medically.)