November's Lowdown

November 2009, Volume 11, Number 11

Edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer

Time to stop America's preposterous war on pot

The "Drug War" is doing far more harm than marijuana itself ever will

You might remember Robert McNamara's stunning mea culpa, delivered a quarter century after his Vietnam War policies sent some 50,000 Americans (and even more horrendous numbers of Vietnamese) to their deaths in that disastrous war. In his 1995 memoir, the man who had been a cold, calculating secretary of defense for both Kennedy and Johnson belatedly confessed that he and other top officials had long known that the war was an unwinnable, ideologically driven mistake. "We were wrong," he wrote, almost tearfully begging in print for public forgiveness. "We were terribly wrong."

Yes, they were, and so are today's leaders (from the White House to nearly all local governments), who are keeping us mired in the longest, most costly, and most futile war in U.S. history: the drug war. As one adamant opponent of this ongoing madness put it, "I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the War on Drugs is a failure. Americans are paying too high a price in lives and liberty for a failing War on Drugs, about which our leaders have lost all sense of proportion."

That was no ex-hippie stoner expressing himself through a haze of herbal smoke. It was America's "Uncle Walter," the journalistic icon Walter Cronkite, calling earlier this year for a new truthfulness and sanity in American drug policy.

The drug war is rife with major failures and absurdities, including the rise of a vast, murderous narco-state within Mexico, caused by U.S. consumer demand for drugs outlawed by our government; Plan Colombia, a secretive, multibillion-dollar U.S. military operation started by Bill Clinton in 2000 to eradicate coca production in that country, which now produces 15% more coca than it did before the plan was launched; the racist and grossly unjust sentencing disparity, established by lawmakers in the 1980s, between crack-cocaine users (mostly black) and powder snorters (mostly white); and the ridiculous refusal by pious federal authorities to allow our farmers to grow hemp--a useful, profitable, sustainable, and historic crop (see Lowdown, May 1999).


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The REAL Reason Marijuana Remains Illegal

Doubtless it's all well and good to oppose our inane "drug war", but as long as we keep doing governance as we do, it's not likely to change. The article, just fine as far as it goes, fails in at least one important respect. It fails to cite MOTIVE for this chronic stupidity. In other words, it fails to expose those moneyed interests who are the REAL force behind keeping the policies as they are and are most fundamentally responsible for continuation of this injustice. Let's hear more from Lowdown about who it is that stands to gain the most by keeping laws as they are, or should I say, who stands to lose the most if full decriminalization occurs. Follow the money.
-- sef

-- posted by electrosef at 5:59pm, December 20, 2009
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More on grass

Having said what I previously said in my post, let me add that smoking is generally bad for the lungs, no matter what is in the pipe. I just heard a lecture this morning in which it was confidently pointed out that smoking marijuana chronically carries with it the risk of a virulent form of emphysema. Having emphysema is a bad way to spend your last years on earth----very bad. So, the issue of "what price you pay to smoke weed" is nothing to ignore in any intellectually honest discussion.

Nonetheless, the GUVMENT has no business wasting our money chasing grass users and driving up the price of the product with all of the consequences thereby generated. If adults want to ruin their lungs (no matter what the agent used) it is a personal decision they must make in light of reproducible facts. Period.

-- posted by jtlmd at 11:30am, December 15, 2009
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Grass

A very insightful review Jim. I was not a partaker of Hippie Lettuce in my days at UT with you, preferring grain alcohol products, but I must say the record is pretty clear: we have been really DUMB about this "herbal product"...I say legalize it in the USA tomorrow, tax the hell out of it in every state, put the Mexican drug guys (and other suppliers) out of business.

Keep up the good work.

James T. Lee, MD
Saint Paul, MN

-- posted by jtlmd at 11:25am, December 14, 2009
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Why do we have a war on drugs?

Why do we have a War on Drugs?
Probably due to H. L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism:
"The haunting fear that somebody, somewhere may be happy."

ALOHA - Venlig Hilsen - CIAO - Salutations - SALUDOS - Med Hilsener - SALUT - Arriverdeci - SHALOM

-- posted by RoboRoy at 10:03am, November 19, 2009
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