Lawyers, guns and money: Three reasons to end the drug war

[babylonsister]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-odea7-2009jun07,0,7758687.story


Lawyers, guns and money: Three reasons to end the drug war
Legalizing marijuana would add to state coffers, empty prisons and reduce violence.
By Brian O'Dea
June 7, 2009

snip//

Take away the currency of illegal drugs and you take away the guns, the violence and the associated corruption.

Columnist Steve Lopez wrote about a judge in this newspaper: "I'm sitting in Costa Mesa with a silver-haired gent who once ran for Congress as a Republican and used to lock up drug dealers as a federal prosecutor, a man who served as an Orange County judge for 25 years. And what are we talking about? He's begging me to tell you we need to legalize drugs in America."

Another Republican, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said in early May that he was willing to at least begin a debate on our policies about marijuana. Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) calculates that taxing marijuana use alone would bring in $1 billion a year in cash-strapped California.

Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, in whose jurisdiction I was sentenced to 10 years in prison, supports legalizing marijuana and other illicit drugs. "It's time to accept drug use as a right of adult Americans, treat drug abuse as a public health problem and end the madness of an unwinnable war," he wrote in these pages in 2005.

Stamper is an advisory board member of LEAP -- Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

According to LEAP, "After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled, making building prisons the fastest-growing industry in the United States." More than 2.2 million of our citizens are incarcerated on drug charges, and every year we arrest 1.9 million more, guaranteeing those prisons will be busting at their seams. Every year, the war on drugs cost U.S. taxpayers $69 billion.

It is time we stopped treating drug addiction, a medical condition, with law enforcement. It's time to repatriate the vast quantities of money that are being hidden, removed from the country and going untaxed, and it's time we keep those same vast sums from funding violent crime. It's time to end modern prohibition. It didn't work for alcohol; it isn't working for drugs.

[konnichi wa]

1. Neither law enforcement or major drug kingpins want to end the WOD

The cartels would lose their enormous profit potential and the cops & prosecutors would have to get real jobs.

[babylonsister]

2. And that's precisely why it should end. nt

[Raster]

4. Word! Beautifully succinct. The *war on drugs* and the American penal system are now "for-profit"

enterprises. Both have strong support structures, even lobbyists to Congress.
No one profiting from the war on drugs wants this to end. The candy is just too sweet.

[reggie the dog]

6. plenty of law enforcement wants to end the drug war

so long as the funding that was used to fight drugs does not dry up and can be used to fight other crime without firing police officers.

[indepat]

3. Off you go to the greatest page

[barbtries]

5. glad to see this

in the LA times.