The War On Drugs...

Is it REALLY Worth It?

First, let us examine the practical side of the war on drugs. For over 50 years the law enforcement of the United States, has, at the federal, state and local levels, waged the so-called "War on Drugs." They’ve arrested tens of thousands of people, from Manuel Noriega to the local high school’s entrepreneurial pot-pusher. Farmer’s fields in Columbia and other countries in South America, have been contaminated by bio-engineered fungi, cooked up in American labs, given a minimal amount of testing (after all, they’re for use over there, not here) and then dropped via airplane. As often as not, the planes miss their target and a field of bananas are decimated by the rapidly mutating fungus, which was designed to only attack coca plants, but is still a living thing that learns to adapt and annihilate whatever grows nearby, be it coca, or bananas or coffee beans.

At home, doors have burst inward under jack-booted feet as H&K MP-5 and M16 machine gun toting drug warriors turn a home and a life upside down because the occupant was suspected of selling drugs. Sometimes they get the right address, and sometimes septuagenarians die of heart attacks because the last thing they expected to interrupt their morning oatmeal was the local SWAT team blowing the hinges off of his front door with a shotgun. Or someone get’s shot by “accident” because the wrong address was assaulted. The local county Drug Task Force likes to send self-congratulatory E-mails to the bureau office, boasting of "successful raids" in which less than half a pound of marijuana was recovered by a team of high-paid cops who are getting overtime for raiding a young couple’s home and ruining their weekend, and maybe their lives. The question ever remains, however. Is this all worth it?

According to studies conducted each year by the University of Michigan of high school seniors about drug use, the rate of use of various drugs has fluctuated as specific substances fall in and out of acceptance. The only constant being marijuana, which enjoys more and more use each year. Despite constant funding increases for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and increasingly larger portions of the budgets of local police departments going towards fighting the drug war, no appreciable impact on drug use has been made. Countless billions of dollars, thousands of murdered police officers, countless corrupted officials, thousands of gunned down gangsters, millions of arrests, jam-packed prisons, hundreds of D.A.R.E. programs and more than three decades later, more kids are smoking pot, dropping acid, taking ecstasy and munching on ‘shrooms than ever before. At what point does anyone bother to stop and ask: Is it all worth it? At what price must the "problem" of drug use be fought?

It’s not as though the drug warriors have come up with new or better ideas during all that time, they’ve just spent more money on the same ineffective approaches. It’s almost as though they’re trying to brew a cup of coffee using lemons, sugar, ice and water. Then they wonder why their coffee tastes like lemonade, instead of looking at the possibility that lemons, water, sugar and ice will never make a cup of coffee, they simply add more lemons, more sugar, more ice and more water to the mix and hope to eventually get a cup of coffee out of it. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Which is also a point I’m trying to make with this post. IT IS INSANE! At some point a rational person has to come along and point out that kicking doors, searching cars, arresting dealers, arresting users, dusting Columbian crops, etc. are never going to solve what they perceive as the "problem" of drug use. It hasn’t so far, and it won’t in the future.

Speaking of which, I have a friend who was part of the drug interdiction program that partook in missions into South America to stop cocaine manufacture at the point of production. He said they would raid the villages like a bunch of special forcers operatives and destroy the equipment used. One time he was hit by shrapnel that years later was causing him issues. The problems caused by it was what prompted his revelation to me. He said, that he took a baby from a mother of one of the drug makers and broke the baby’s back over his leg killing it. That was supposed to show those terrible people that they had the power of life and death even over babies. He said he to this day is haunted by that memory. GOOD! HE SHOULD BE! Anyhow, that was one incident of who knows how many where men are sent in to act like maniacs to stop drug manufacturing.

If police departments hadn’t gotten addicted to asset forfeiture money, more of them would be willing to focus on real crimes, those that leave victims, than on fighting the uphill battle against drug use. The drug war, with its resultant erosion of the Fourth Amendment, has become too profitable for too many police departments. As addictive as heroin is to the user, the guys fighting it have become equally addicted to auctioning off the user’s car, house, computer, etc. And if they can get their hands on the stuff belonging to the guy who sold the user his heroin? Well, the holidays come early that year.

As with anything, the bottom line is money. Drug dealers make money because of the most basic laws of economics. Any Economics 101 student knows that given a constant demand for a product, if the supply is artificially reduced, prices skyrocket. While it’s easy for drug dealers to go around the minor obstacle law enforcement poses to their operation, doing so is time consuming and somewhat risky. The dealer/distributor’s costs in paying for carriers, for bribes to customs officials and for other expenses get passed on to the user. This is why a plant that grows wild on six continents retails for $1,500 or more a pound. If the artificial restriction on supply, the drug war, were removed from the equation, the resulting glut of marijuana on the market would lower prices to the product’s true market value, which is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/1,000^th its black-market value. Or even less if you buy some seeds to grow it at your local Home Depot. With there being no shortage of people willing to pay the black-market’s vastly inflated prices for drugs, drug dealers make an enormous profit. With asset forfeiture laws, there’s no shortage of police departments that want new, expensive toys that are best paid for by auctioning off the aforementioned drug dealer’s yacht, Mercedes, mansion, or anything else they can seize. With there being no shortage of people willing to pay black-market prices for drugs, there will always be another drug dealer to step up and take over the recently arrested drug dealer’s clientele, usually before the cops are even done filling out all the paperwork on the yacht they’ve just stolen. And so on.

We’ve got cops redecorating the department with drug money seized from drug dealers that were created by the absurd laws the cops are trying to enforce. At this point, law enforcement is making almost as much money on the drug war as the drug dealers are. The only difference lies in the fact that drug dealers pay their own start-up costs. Taxpayers subsidize law enforcement’s efforts to legally rob the drug dealers and for their efforts they get the prisons they paid for packed to the rafters with non-violent drug offenders, necessitating the early parole of rapists, child molesters, muggers and other violent people that would be better left inside.

Just for whose benefit is the drug war being waged today? You? Me? Please, don’t do me any favors.

So much for the practical downside of the War on Drugs. But in addition to these very real disadvantages, the Drug War also lacks any kind of a philosophical justification. Drug use, drug production and drug distribution are textbook examples of victimless crimes. A creep walks up to a person on the street and hits him on the chin with a right cross. According to the law, a crime has just been committed. In this case, it’s pretty obvious who the victim is, the guy on the receiving end of the right hand.

A drug user seeks out a drug dealer and buys drugs from him. According to the law, a crime was just committed. Since the incident was a simple business transaction where two parties decided to exchange their own personal property for their perceived mutual gain, there’s technically no victim. The drugs were worth more to the drug user than was the money paid for them, and the money is worth more to the dealer than the drugs he traded for it. Both parties walk away without victimizing the other. In a just and rational society, this would not be a crime. In our drug war society, the state somehow becomes the "victim" and both the drug user and the drug dealer have somehow "victimized" it. The whole meaning and philosophy of law has to be corrupted and distorted in order to prosecute drug crimes.

The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!

If this is true, it is a serious fact, and moral duty requires me to call attention of my fellow citizens to it. ~Frederic Bastiat - ”The Law” - 1850

In essence, a victim had to be created out of nothingness to fill the role of complainant against the two halves of the above described business transaction. The reason why our code of laws has to be distorted as such for drug crimes to be prosecuted is because the authors of our philosophy of law, derived ours from English Common Law, which has absolutely no provisions for prosecuting "victimless crimes." The reason being, the sane and rational people from whom the tradition of common law came as well as the authors of our constitution saw no justifiable reason for punishing someone for a crime that leaves no victim. Indeed, there is no justification for it. The war on drugs represents an utter perversion of law. The whole idea behind government was that it was created for the single purpose of protecting its citizens and their property. Read the Declaration of Independence…slowly. Today, in almost every state, one out of every eight prisoners is in prison for a drug offense and will serve, on average, 4.1 years. By way of contrast, a conviction for larceny of property carries a maximum sentence of four years. A few millennia after humankind invented the whole concept of government, its purpose is turned exactly against it’s very purpose. Instead of protecting the rights and property of the citizenry first and foremost, more emphasis is being placed on protecting the citizenry from the imaginary "problem" of drug use; an end the state has no business working toward. As well as many more imaginary crimes as time goes on.

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. ~Ayn Rand

In the control freak’s continuing effort to justify the drug war, an overbroad definition of "harm" has been applied to those close to a drug addict. Prohibitionists argue that drug use "harms" the addict’s family, and "harms" society in general. The former is of no concern to the law and the latter is only true to the extent that it is because of other unjust actions of the “law”. While those close to an addict may be disappointed in him or her, or distraught at their addiction, there’s no harm so long as the addict doesn’t assault or rob them. Since the harm is neither physical nor financial, it’s not really harm in any form the “law” has any business dealing with. Because of the various redistributionist schemes forced upon U.S. taxpayers, an addict who manages to get state-provided care is indeed harming the rest of the taxpayers. Simply ending public funding for rehabilitation services could eliminate that harm. It’s not the anyone’s job to make sure all the rope lying around out there is too short for people to hang themselves with. Nor is it their job to offer to cut those people down once they’ve decided to hang themselves. The fact the control freaks in power have, in recent decades, taken it upon themselves to do these things does nothing to justify some sort of right for their doing so. Instead, the drug war and forfeiture (a nice way of calling thievery something else) are just two examples of ways in which “our” government has totally stepped outside of the bounds of the U.S. Constitution.

As human beings, we own our bodies. We own the labor that we provide with our bodies. We have exclusive rights to any compensation given us for that labor and we may do with that compensation whatever we like so long as we don’t cause another human physical or financial harm. Well, that’s the way it should be. But if you think about what “income tax” really is, it is a slave tax. Because if someone can force you at gunpoint to work for them for on day, you area slave for one day. If they can force you to work for them for four months and you begin to work at the age of 18 and live until you are 80, that means over 20 years of your life you are a slave. If a human decides to spend some of that compensation on substances that temporarily alter how the brain that he or she owns functions, that is his/her right as a human. Any effort undertaken by anyone to interfere with that is done so in strict violation of basic human’s rights. Those rights are as natural a part each human as is the arms, or eyes or feet. They were given by virtue of simply being a sentient life form, and were enumerated by the founders of this nation in the Bill of Rights. Nobody, be it the DEA, the (fill in the blank) Police, the State of (fill in the blank) Highway Patrol, or the choir at St. Mary’s Parish have a right to abridge or interfere with the peaceable exercise of those rights by any individual.

The war on drugs simply must be stopped. Not only can it not be won by the tactics and methods currently being used to fight it, but it should not be "won" in the first place. Its very goals are inconsistent with the functioning of a free, just and peaceable society. The inherently arbitrary nature of the drug war further illustrates its unjustness. While the state forcefully and violently abridges a person’s right to smoke marijuana, snort cocaine, and shoot heroin, they condone a person’s right to drink alcohol, a substance every bit as psychoactive as and far more addictive than marijuana. And when was the last time you ever had someone smoking marijuana act violently towards you or someone else? Alcohol seems to bring out the worse in people if they consume too much.

So, when anyone says we cannot tolerate recreational drug use in our society, we must all respectfully disagree. People have used psychoactive substances from the very moment those substances’ psychoactive properties were discovered. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of that use is and has been responsible. If beer companies can tell us to "Drink responsibly," then it must be reasonably assumed other addictive and psychoactive substances can too be used responsibly. If you use it irresponsibly and die from it, that isn’t the rest of society’s fault or responsibility. If I know you, I will be sad that you decided to do what you did, but don’t expect me to tell everyone else they don’t have the right to use it if they so desire.

Sure, some of us believe our society could be improved if we simply convinced everyone to do something more productive with his or her time and energy than smoking dope or snorting coke. There are also those who believe the emotional and spiritual health of our entire society would be upgraded if everyone chose to listen to gospel music rather than some kind of rap. Similarly, there are those who believe our society would be better served if more people watched operas and plays rather than football or fake wrestling. The difference is, our society for some reason tolerates “law enforcement” kicking in people’s doors and arresting them for using drugs. They would not, however, tolerate the local church choir stopping by, smashing their rap CDs and then busting into "I’ll Fly Away" Neither would we tolerate the local community theatre group from dropping in on Thursdays to turn off what you are listening and then present something they have been working on.

Further, we must be wary of any call for society to be intolerant of any non-violent behavior. It wasn’t long ago when popular opinion stated that same sex relations must not be tolerated in our society. It wasn’t long before that having blacks eating at the same lunch counter as white people wasn’t tolerated in our society. Over the years our society has grown and evolved beyond those unjust prejudices. Hopefully, someday soon, our society will evolve beyond needlessly wasting law enforcement resources and pointlessly persecuting non-violent individuals in the name of the "War on Drugs."

Please, please, please, do not take this post as one of me saying that drug use is a good idea. I think our bodies are pretty important and the way they operate works pretty good with a decent diet of good food. I’m not for recreational drugs, or even prescription drugs. I see them all as DETRIMENTAL to our health. I tried MJ a couple times when I was in my early 20’s. I didn’t like the fact I really didn’t have control over myself and that was the end of that. The point of this is this..

OUR BODIES OUR CHOICE. That is what FREEDOM is. No one should have the right to make a non violent activity where there actually is no victim a crime. And when it comes to children getting hold of it…that’s the parents responsibility to teach them that it really isn’t a good choice and that it will have repercussions on your life. If someone gives a child drugs or alcohol they should be held responsible because I do see the child as a victim.

Parents need to hold themselves responsible for teaching their children that guns are dangerous tools, that drugs are not something to play with, that matches can burn down a house, and that playing in the street in the middle of rush hour is not a good idea. Quit thinking that you have the right to blame me for what you didn’t do with your children. All four of mine were homeschooled and not brainwashed in a government school that doesn’t even teach critical thinking anymore.

A friend of mine who was an alcoholic died in his early 60’s because of it. Drugs, prescription or illegal can do the same thing. I’m convinced that George Floyd didn’t die from Derek Chauvin being on his neck. He died of FENTYNAL overdose. Of course the “official” story jumped around, because they didn’t want to upset anyone else with the TRUTH. FACT is, it was his CHOICE. Kind of like why the National Guard was called out to protect the jurors…IF THEY HAD CAME BACK WITH A GUILTY VERDICT!

What else can I say? It needs to stop! The lies need to stop. The control freaks need to leave us all alone. And the control freaks only way to control us through their enforcers needs to stop. If you are an enforcers, use some common sense and don’t give us “it’s the law” BS. It was the law to round up “undesirables” and put them on boxcars during the purges in Germany, but the “I was just doing my job” defense didn’t hold up at the trials.

This came into my Email box from Lew Rockwell on the 10th of January 2024. I figured since it goes along with this post I would add a link to it here. This “War on Drugs” really is nothing but a WAR ON OUR RIGHTS and a result of the LAW ENFORCEMENT GROWTH INDUSTRY. This kind of insanity, has GOT TO STOP!

40 Years in Jail for a Marijuana Offense

By Jacob G. Hornberger