Unlike my grandfather's generation who saw the folly and perniciousness of Prohibition and repealed it, this generation of politicians adds to the federal drug laws and builds more and more new prisons for those who partake in what was totally legal in 1913.
Our drug laws are also causing devastation in countries which supply us with "illegal" drugs. This is mentioned in an October 13, 2006 Wall Street Journal article entitled: Uribe vs. the Drug Thugs which ends by saying: "Still, his (Colombian President Álvaro Uribe’s) biggest problem remains security, and it is hard to imagine real progress unless the demand for illegal drugs collapses in Europe and the U.S., or rich countries change their prohibition policies."
Our federal drug laws should be repealed.
The following is a short history of the federal drug laws. Note how a law passed ostensibly just to gather information became the monster problem we have today.
The Man Who Gave Us the Drug War
Text excerpted from Drug Crazy, Mike Gray, Random House 1998
Dr. Hamilton Wright was famous for his discovery that beriberi is an infectious disease. It isn't. It's a vitamin deficiency but by the time his error was uncovered he had already married well. Very well in fact – to the daughter of Senator W.D. Washburn, head of the Republican Party.
When Dr. Wright moved to Washington his new father-in-law got him a job as a delegate to the Chinese Opium Commission of 1909. This conference, aimed at helping the Chinese with their opium problem, was billed as an American good will gesture. The actual intent was to pull the rug out from under the British and open China's vast markets to US merchants.
But Dr. Wright, who always suspected he was destined for greatness, took the assignment seriously and by the time he returned from China he had persuaded himself that opium addiction was a global scourge. His mission would be to save the world from the evil of narcotics.
He faced daunting odds. The other key players—England, France, the Netherlands did not share Wright’s horror of opium. A British study had recently concluded that opium addiction was no worse than alcoholism and maybe not as bad. But Wright's moral certainty finally carried the day on Capitol Hill. Badgering superiors and threatening foreign ambassadors, Wright managed to get the State Department to convene two follow-on conferences at Hague in spite of resistance from almost every other nation involved.
In the end they all caved in and agreed to control cultivation, manufacture, and distribution of narcotics. Wright was able to achieve this stunning reversal through simple deception. At The Hague he said that the United States was demanding narcotics control, then back in Washington he squeezed Congress with fabricated demands from The Hague.
The U.S. legislation that Wright engineered finally made it through Congress in the winter of 1914 and at first glance the Harrison Narcotics Act appeared to be just a means of gathering information. It called on everybody in the drug trade to purchase a license and keep precise records. The bill passed in minutes. The New York Times didn’t even mention it.
But Hamilton Wright had installed a land mine in the language, an extra clause that enabled federal agents to decree that all narcotics addicts should go cold turkey. Most addicts at the time were productive citizens with jobs, homes and a medical problem. Overnight they went from patients to criminals.
Today, as a direct result of using lawmen to supervise doctors we have 30 million Americans undertreated for chronic pain. And what did we get in return? After spending $1 trillion over the last 90 years the rate of narcotics addiction in the US has increased 500 percent.
Constitution Party of Michigan - www.ConstitutionPartyMI.net