Guest Post by John Stossel
Protesters say America’s criminal justice system is unfair.
It is.
Courts are so jammed that innocent people plead guilty to avoid waiting years for a trial. Lawyers help rich people get special treatment. A jail stay is just as likely to teach you crime as it is to help you get a new start. Overcrowded prisons cost a fortune and increase suffering for both prisoners and guards.
There’s one simple solution to most of these problems: End the war on drugs.
Our government has spent trillions of dollars trying to stop drug use.
It hasn’t worked. More people now use more drugs than before the “war” began.
What drug prohibition did do is exactly what alcohol prohibition did a hundred years ago: increase conflict between police and citizens.
“It pitted police against the communities that they serve,” says neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart in my new video. Hart, former chair of Columbia University’s Psychology department, grew up in a tough Miami neighborhood where he watched crack cocaine wreck lives. When he started researching drugs, he assumed that research would confirm the damage drugs did.
But “one problem kept cropping up,” he says in his soon-to-be-released book, “Drug Use For Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear,” “the evidence did not support the hypothesis. No one else’s evidence did either.”
After 20 years of research, he concluded, “I was wrong.” Now, he says, our drug laws do more harm than drugs.
Because drug sales are illegal, profits from selling drugs are huge. Since sellers can’t rely on law enforcement to protect their property, they buy guns and form gangs.
Cigarettes harm people, too, but there are no violent cigarette gangs — no cigarette shootings — even though nicotine is more addictive than heroin, says our government. That’s because tobacco is legal. Likewise, there are no longer violent liquor gangs. They vanished when prohibition ended.
But what about the opioid epidemic? Lots of Americans die from overdoses!
Hart blames the drug war for that, too. Yes, opioids are legal, but their sale is tightly restricted.
“If drugs were over the counter, there would be fewer deaths?” I asked.
“Of course,” he responds. “People die from opioids because they get tainted opioids. … That would go away if we didn’t have this war on drugs. Imagine if the only subject of any conversation about driving automobiles was fatal car crashes. … So it is with the opioid epidemic.”
Drugs do harm many people, but in real life, replies Hart, “I know tons of people who do drugs; they are public officials, captains of industry, and they’re doing well. Drugs, including nicotine and heroin, make people feel better. That’s why they are used.”
President Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. America’s drug war funds a prison-industrial complex. Hart says his years inside the well-funded research side of that complex showed him that any research not in support of the “tough-on-drugs” ideology is routinely dismissed to “keep outrage stoked” and funds coming in.
America locks up more than 2 million Americans. That’s a higher percentage of our citizens, disproportionately black citizens, than any other country in the world.
“In every country with a more permissive drug regime, all outcomes are better,” says Hart. Countries like Switzerland and Portugal, where drugs are decriminalized, “don’t have these problems that we have with drug overdoses.”
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drug use. Instead of punishing drug users, they offer medical help. Deaths from overdoses dropped sharply. In 2017, Portugal had only 4 deaths per million people. The United States had 217 per million.
“In a society, you will have people who misbehave, says Hart. “But that doesn’t mean you should punish all of us because someone can’t handle this activity.”
He’s right. It’s time to end the drug war.
John Stossel is author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.” For other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.
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Just give out 100% pure fentanyl by the pound. Let nature take its course.
Hot doses all around , then tag and bag ! Problem solved !
How will the C_A finance their department without drug sales ?
We want to stop stupid drug stuff, not assist it. Stop giving people with drug problems first class treatment; show video of dreadful drug effects stuff to junior high school kids. When a drug pusher resists arrest, they should have a good chance of receiving serious injury. Put them on the most miserable parchment farm in the state. Liberals are sociopaths and cause more problems than psychopaths.
Parchman, not “Parchment”
lol
https://www.innocenceproject.org/parchman-farm-prison-mississippi-history/
Seattle officials claim the majority of their homeless and nuisance street crimes , petty theft are majority related to illegal drug use . Financially this is a no brained , decriminalize all illegal drug use and allow a state sponsored program to freely distribute all popular narcotics free and unlimited . Yes give away all anyone wants , just sign here and off you go with your hot dose good luck !
Now narcotic squads , SWAT Teams oh and DEA can all be laid off permanently , no more expensive benefits like medical and retirements . Award all government employees permanently laid off a percentage of their pension plan with 90 days to reinvest in a qualified plan or be taxed to hell and back . Welcome to reality ladies and gentlemen $15 bucks per hour or less and go till you drop !
As for guilty pleas from innocent people , if Duke Lacrosse players families did not have $50 grand to pony up for a legal team those young men would have taken a deal get tagged as a sex offender and your home in 6 months or less or wait here in jail till your trial and your looking at 20 years ! How much justice can any middle or poor American family buy ? Once again the vail of qualified immunity must be easier to lift or be removed completely ! The protection of law enforcement and prosecutors violating constitutional rights and criminal codes in performance of their duties must be cut out like a cancer . The ability to lie to a potential suspect should be unlawful .
A warning to all never answer any questions to law enforcement , generally their questions are not designed to help you at all !
Silly, drugs will never be legalized. How can one have a police state without anti-drug laws? How can one support a massive ‘legal’ system without those laws? Most importantly, how can all those clandestine alphabet agencies get their walking monies without those drugs? The drug industry funds a huge bureaucracy that acts as an employment center for everything from judges, parol offices, cops to court employees, police employees and lawyers, et al.
Only drug that may see more legalization is pot and that’s because of the tax revenue. Street pot will continue unabated because it’s cheaper and you don’t need a script.
Two points – years ago, an American colleague lent me his copy of “A Child’s Garden Of Grass”, and one page was headed “The dangers of smoking grass”. The page was blank, except for one line at the bottom reading “getting busted”.
Second, as part of South Africa’s lockdown, the ex-Minister of Health, who is the ‘fuhrer’ of the lockdown, banned cigarette and alcohol sales. The booze prohibition was dropped after two months, but the tobacco is still banned. People smoke, of course – but it’s illegal fags, smuggled over the border and sold at 5-10 times the regular price. And, of course, the State has lost out on the (excessive) ‘sin’ tax that it got from the legal sales!
I’m for letting people be free to do what they want. No harm no foul. The drug war is a joke. If someone drunk or high is making your life miserable, that’s another issue. Where I live meth-heads like to steal anything that’s not bolted down. They either go to prison or disappear. I think this is a nationwide problem.
There are two major impediments to ending the insanity of the drug war. One-the relationship between cartels and government is symbiotic. They desperately need each other. Cartels need government’s enforcement apparatus to ensure the risks remain high enough to keep prices high enough to sustain high profit margins. They also need the cooperation of bribed corrupt government to stifle rival gangs and cartels. OTOH, government needs the cartels to justify the DEA and the entire Police/Prison/Lawyer Industrial Complex. Billions of dollars and government empire are at stake. It is a sinister, cynical relationship.
But Two – Religious conservatives immediately dismiss any discussion of legalizing drugs, period. Try holding a conversation with actual facts and it goes nowhere quickly. Remember, ‘it’s for the children.’ Perhaps crusaders for ‘Truth and the American Way’ can rethink PR strategies and adopt and adapt tactics used by BLM – it works for them.