Pubdate: Wed, 22 Aug 2012
Source: Daily Camera (Boulder, CO)
Copyright: 2012 The Daily Camera.
Contact:  http://www.dailycamera.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/103
Author: Paul Dougan

LEGALIZE IT, AND JUST SAY 'NO' TO FASCISM

On this fall's ballot, Amendment 64 would legalize marijuana use for
Colorado adults. Most Americans are confused about drug laws,
believing they're in place to protect public health, children's in
particular. We need a paradigm shift in our understanding: the main
purpose of our drug laws is the persecution of minorities.

America's first drug-prohibition laws, against opium, were enacted to
persecute Chinese in America. The history of marijuana prohibition
tells the same tale: the victims have been, among others,
African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Filipino-Americans,
Native-Americans and Punjabi-Americans. Further, America's drug
warriors have been vehement bigots. Harry J. Anslinger, the longtime
head of the Bureau of Narcotics, infamously said, "There are 100,000
total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics,
Filipinos and entertainers. . . . the primary reason to outlaw
marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races."

White House tapes show that in 1972 President Nixon adamantly refused
the recommendation of his own Schafer Commission to legalize marijuana
largely because, Common Sense Drug Policy reports, "the President
believed many of the myths about marijuana and tied it very closely to
. . . blacks, Jews and the counterculture." Yes, since the late
sixties, pot prohibition has also targeted that new ethnic kid on the
block, Hippie-America. Likewise, modern crack laws target inner-city
blacks. That drug laws punish minorities is not an accidental
byproduct: it's usually their raison d'etre.

Yes, drug abuse is unhealthy, sometimes fatal, but usually
prohibition only makes things worse. Reporter Daniel Baum's "Smoke
and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure" explains
that late in the Vietnam War, the U.S. military started drug testing
troops headed home; a soldier failing a marijuana test couldn't leave
Vietnam. Instead of stopping drug use, the policy led to soldiers
trying heroin, which drug tests didn't detect; this created our Sam
Stone's, returning GI's addicted to heroin.

And of course, as with alcohol during Prohibition, the illegalization
of a substance drives it into an underground economy dominated by gangsters.

And the pillar of the public-health argument (Gateway, i.e., pot
smoking will lead to harder drugs) is preposterous. It's a
cause-effect fallacy which assumes that marijuana smokers become
"bored" with marijuana; if that's true, explain the continuing
popularity of pot. Also, Gateway implies ever increasing heroin use as
pot smokers "graduate." Baum, however, shows that heroin-use rates
have generally flattened over the last decades, and they follow the
price of heroin, not the number of pot smokers.

Protect the kids? First, the best defense against youth drug abuse
isn't blanket illegalization: it's honest drug education. Yet, today's
standard fare, DARE, promotes Gateway and parrots the most hysterical
anti-marijuana "facts" such as the allegedly scientific study showing
pot smoking makes young men grow breasts.

Also, intelligent drug education distinguishes between use and
abuse--not everyone who consumes alcohol, for instance, is an
alcoholic. Yet War on Drugs propaganda automatically deems any and all
marijuana use "drug abuse."

Kids are smart; when they're lied to, they eventually figure it out --
and then we've lost our credibility, our control.

More importantly, as a nation, how is it we've come to the conclusion
that the way to protect public health is to jail masses of people, to
create what one former Drug Czar calls "an American gulag?"

Who are we? What kind of society will we live in? There are two basic
choices.

The first is the War on Drugs model. With its persecution of
minorities, its hysterical demagoguery based in bigotry and
scapegoating, its inclination towards incarceration and its tendency
towards a police state, it leads to American fascism.

The other path leads to the social equality and personal freedom
America has long promised. If drug prohibition masks racial and ethnic
persecution, struggles against such laws are struggles for civil
rights. When you see Amendment 64 on the ballot, ask yourself, Which
path will America take?
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MAP posted-by: Matt