Or
How to continue destroying the poor and middle class
Before you read this diary, check out this clock. http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm
Our current administration and congress, have deemed that marijuana is the leading drug to cause societal problems in our culture. Now I for one am not an advocate of legalizing marijuana for anything other than medical use, but I do know this, it is not the major societal danger that this administration would have us believe. I have been in recovery from Addiction and Alcoholism for almost 18 years and I feel like I might have some expertise in arena. Recovery and the fact I worked in Treatment and Prevention for 10 years, just might make me someone that the people who fund all this Enforcement at the expense of treatment and prevention, just might want to listen to, or at least someone like me who has worked in the trenches of drug use/abuse and addiction.
Susanhu, posted an excellent meth diary and I hope to expand and expound what she has pointed out, that meth is and has become a medusa in our society and when one head is cut off, ten more take its place. I hope that what you read here will make you immediately write your congressman and ask them to increase funding for prevention and treatment to combat this debilitating disease called addiction.
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A report by the U.S. Center on Substance Abuse Prevention stated that “alternatives programming appears to be most effective among those youth at greatest risk for substance abuse and related problems.” According to the report, alternatives are defined as, “those that provide targeted populations with activities that are free of alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs.”
Source: Maria Carmona and Kathryn Stewart, “A Review of Alternative Activities and Alternatives Programs in Youth-Oriented Prevention” (CSAP Technical Report 13), National Center for the Advancement of Prevention, under contract for the US Dept. of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, 1996, pp. 3, 20.
Bold added by me.
Here is a link to a National Review article written by Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley concerning the War on Drugs and what it is taking out of our society. I rarely have any agreement with a conservative concerning social issues, yet there are points that make one think there may be some rationality in his thought process. nationalreview.com
Things being as they are, and people as they are, there is no way to prevent somebody, somewhere, from concluding that “NATIONAL REVIEW favors drugs.” We don’t; we deplore their use; we urge the stiffest feasible sentences against anyone convicted of selling a drug to a minor. But that said, it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states. We all agree on movement toward legalization, even though we may differ on just how far. nationalreview.com
I don’t know if I support legalization, as much as I support decriminalization and treatment for those who continue to abuse and use mind altering substances. I still support severe legal penalties for anyone who sells drugs to a minor and penalties for anyone who sells drugs that can be harmful <warning to Pharma>to an adult.
There are many who subscribe to the notion that the US Government is involved in the Drug Trade and that it uses the War on Drugs to move our society into more restrictive and police like state. Here is a link to a web site that subscribes to that theory, with many links to substantiate their claim.
Here is an essay by an author who finds that this War on Drugs has decayed our civil liberties to a point of being merely a shell of their former protections. When is the good of a society, become bad for individual liberty?
And this, one former police chief’s take on the War on Drugs.
Think of this war’s real casualties: tens of thousands of otherwise innocent Americans incarcerated, many for 20 years, some for life; families ripped apart; drug traffickers and blameless bystanders shot dead on city streets; narcotics officers assassinated here and abroad, with prosecutors, judges, and elected officials in Latin America gunned down for their courageous stands against the cartels; and all those dollars spent on federal, state, and local cops, courts, prosecutors, prisons, probation, parole, and pee-in-the-bottle programs. Even federal aid to bribe distant nations to stop feeding our habit.
Some of the more important issues as garnered by Andrew Somers
The Issues: The War On Drugs represents complex controversies that are difficult to fully define in a few sentences, but some of the key points are:
- Civil Rights: Does a person have the right to use a recreational substance?
- Criminal Issues: Do recreational substances cause crimes (other than use?)
- Effectiveness Of Prohibition: Do prohibition laws work?
- Funding for Treatment: Is treatment more cost effective than prohibition in curbing recreational substance abuse?
- Education: Is recreational substance related education being addressed in an effective way?
- Law Enforcement: Have drug enforcement tactics resulted in police abuses? Has corruption in police departments increased as a result of the drug war?
- Taxes and Spending: Are tax dollars being spent most effectively with current government policies?
How have these key points impacted the US as a society, has it made life safer for any of us, all of, some us, only you can answer those points for yourself and your communities. As for me, I lived in San Diego County for almost 25 years and I know first hand that the war on drugs there is a miserable failure.
In one period from 1985 to 1987, San Diego was the reputed meth capital of the world, with more meth labs per square mile than any other place on earth. There was at least one lab explosion a month with the responding haz mat teams to clean up and at least one death per week associated with meth use. I think it was in 1993, there was a bust in a local school, in the north county of San Diego. The young man was charged with not only selling meth, but with murder, as his product had eaten through the sinus and other protective membranes into the brains of two young girls that had bought his product. His lab that he created not only used ephedrine, but drano and other catalyst chemicals to speed up the meth producing process. That young man received 25 yrs to life in Folsom Prison. What a loss for all the families involved.
I spent many years working to bring prevention/treatment to the forefront of the County Board of Supervisors, in their funding priorities. When times were tough, prevention/treatment were usually the first to bear the axe. While Enforcement usually went unscathed or found some Fed money to ramp up the War on Drugs.
I believe we have lost this War on Drugs, that all this money could be better spent on treatment/prevention and other methods of intervention into the lives of people who consciously choose to use mind altering substances in their lives. I always called it better living through Chemistry, unfortunately it was not better living, it was a nightmare and as a person in recovery, I can only hope that one day soon, our government will recognize that it too is a part of this nightmare. I hope that soon they understand that if they are not a part of the solution, then they definitely are part of the problem.
I currently reside in Kansas, where the legislature has decreed that all medicines that contain ephedrine or psuedo-ephedrine will be locked behind a counter and no more than three packages can be sold to an individual at one time. Will it help, I don’t know, but it can’t hurt either.
There was recently a lab busted near my home in the small town >11,000, where I live. This lab was producing more than 5 lbs of meth a day, before it was busted and taken down. When the police and haz mat team finally did their inventory and let us know what this lab had to make its product, many in our community were shocked at the relative ease with which the manufacturer’s were able to gain these products.
That many of them are products used by regular individuals in our everyday lives just never occurred to many who live in my community. There was a huge uproar to make sure the penalties for manufacturing were upheld, that these people need to go to prison for a long time. Fortunately for the users of this person’s product, the judges in our county find that treatment is a viable option to incarceration.
You see this manufacturer, kept very good records of his customers and there was in fact a nice sweep throughout our county and many otherwise undetected users of meth were caught up in the drug sweeps that put many of them in treatment. If more judges believed that treatment does in fact reduce use, that prevention does in fact reduce new users, then the War on Drugs could be won and our civil rights, our society would become more civil and out lives would be less in jeopardy by the powers that be in our government.
I can only pray that you will make the effort to contact your congress people and let them know that you find the War on Drugs as it is being fought today, is a waste of taxpayers money. That treatment and prevention should have the majority of money so its benefits will clearly outshine the benefits that Enforcement has failed to achieve. By treating active addicts, presenting prevention tools and policies to the non using public, I believe we can reduce drug use and its associated problems by more than 30% in the first full year where treatment and prevention gains the majority of War on Drugs dollars.
