From The Beachwood Reporter:
The Cook County board president [Toni Preckwinkle] probably is completely accurate in her assertion that the war on drugs is a failure.
World leaders say it, as did Walter Cronkite.
But here's the catch. If all the cokeheads, meth freaks and OxyContin warriors are released from Cook County jail this week, would Chicago be a better place to live? If we don't jail drug offenders for drug use and sale, do we have to keep them high so they won't rob us for a hit on the coke pipe?
Must we christen an official Pot Hilton? Everybody is stoned and room service is mostly Fritos, ding dongs and pizza at 4 a.m.
If the drug culture is flawed only because we apply a harsh and arbitrary judgment of an addiction, maybe the act isn't the problem; maybe we have a nomenclature glitch.
Maybe we solve the burglary problem by demanding burglars must take more than $500 of your stuff before we call it burglary. Below that figure, it's just Misdemeanor Borrowing Your Stuff Out of Your Home when you're not there.
While the War on Drugs is a lost cause, so is the War of Poverty. That's a greater failure.
In either case, people without jobs and without hope will do drugs because they really work, if only for a few hours. Putting druggies in jail might not be a sustainable policy, but filling the streets with stoned punks isn't either. Maybe we should think harder about jobs.
I was originally only going to post only a portion of this but its short and the whole thing needs to be addressed because I think a logical, common, and very flawed argument is being made here. First, I agree that poverty is a serious issue that is related to drugs use in many ways, but addressing jobs will not alleviate the problem when statistics show people in higher income brackets use drugs at comparable rates. Secondly, the call to end the war on drugs is not a call to release all drug related prisoners into the street like in Batman Begins and allow them to freely do lines of blow at the local McDonalds. It is a call to offer better alternatives than simply incarceration, which often leads to a life spent in a vicious cycle imprisonment. Lastly, yes there is a harsh and arbitrary judgment being made but the comparison used above does not fit. The harsh and arbitrary sentencing of drug offenders is vastly skewed towards minorities and has no way of differentiating between those who chronically sell and those whose circumstances don’t warrant the same punishment. Just read the Walter Cronkite article referenced above. The bottom line is that these types of arguments are particularly dangerous because not only are they patently false, they make too much sense to too many people.
-Tim
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