"The politics of prohibition has driven the price of marijuana to $2,500 a pound in Milwaukee and made cocaine five times more valuable than gold per ounce. It is folly for a government to defy human nature; it is lunacy to think that people will not run the risk for such artificially high profits. However, this country is locking up drug dealers in such huge numbers that the federal system, must in effect, build one new prison every month to keep up with the flood of convicted drug offenders."
"These prisons require about 350 full time staff: guards, administrators, hospital attendants. Within the next dozen years, the federal Bureau of Prisons must essentially double in size, from 110 prisons to well over 200. It costs $25,000 to feed, house and watch over each federal inmate and 70% of federal prisoners are imprisoned for drug offenses. Multiply the consistency of this expensive, wasteful equation times 50 states. Nationwide there is one prison guard to every three prisoners, while by contrast, the average teacher has over thirty students. The average prison guard makes more money than the average teacher".
"Hard liners in the war on drugs, including the "Drug Czar", General Barry McCaffrey, are like the generals and colonels during the latter part of the Viet Nam war, clamoring for more divisions, more aircraft, more artillery, more ammunition. But this current, and most virulent phase of the drug war is already costing local, state, and federal governments approximately $29 billion per year. And with all this expense, there has been no tangible effect except for the furtherance of violence and the fear that America will resemble a vast concentration camp in the near future."
"In addition to eroding our rights and liberties and criminalizing millions of Americans, the drug war has placed a third of all young African-American men between the ages of 19 and 29, either in prison or on supervised release. It also promotes an insidious system of informants and has made personal betrayal a federal model:
"It is common for federal prosecutors to threaten drug defendants with mandatory sentences unless they incriminate other. Many defendants decide to inform on their associates and friends in an effort to get a lighter prison sentence. This practice frays bonds of personal trust and corrodes the community cohesion that might otherwise act as a buffer to violence." From the report of the National Criminal Justice Commission, 1996"
In other words, we have turned the United States into all of the things we abhorred about Russia, Cuba and Nazi Germany. The Drug Awareness and Resistance Education Program, D.A.R.E., routinely teaches children to inform on friends and parents for suspected drug use, even if they put mommy and daddy in jail or prison, destroying careers, marriages and family. Not only that, the D.A.R.E. program and its progeny, at the cost of $500 million a year, simply does not work.
"Take California for example, where, conservatively speaking, $1.6 billion has been spent over four years on prevention education in the schools. What have we bought with $1.6 billion? Programs that do not prevent adolescent substance abuse." Joel H. Brown, Ph.D, M.S.W. |
