Your gullibility is exceeded only by your bad manners.

At least [link|http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-180.html|this piece] has citations to actual checkable facts.

The current "War on Drugs"(tm) (ignoring the Nixon one that also never came to anything) was declared by Reagan in 1982. P-Bush rev 1 escalated it. The reps had 12 full years to whip drugs. If you can't win a war in 12 years you can't win it at all.

--on a nationwide television broadcast, the drug czar endorses the idea of beheading drug dealers;

--the full Senate votes to shoot down suspected drug planes;

--a congressman offers an "Arctic Penitentiary Act," a bill to create "an American Gulag" of remote prison camps for drug offenders;

--a man who rapes a teenager, hacks off her hands, and leaves her to die in the desert serves less time in prison than a first-offender mother of two who accepts $1,000 to carry a kilo of cocaine from one city to another;

--cocaine gigolos are paid by the government to entice lonely-hearts divorcees into an illegal drug transaction so that they can then be prosecuted;

--the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, manufactures his own crack cocaine for undercover cops to sell to buyers in order to arrest them;

--the House of Representatives resolves that the president should deploy the armed forces of the United States to seal off the borders to "substantially halt the influx of drugs" into the United States within 45 days;

--the U.S. invades a sovereign nation causing the deaths of hundreds of people and causing millions of dollars in property damage, to gain jurisdiction over the head of its government, General Manuel Noriega, for alleged drug trafficking;

--several million staid civil servants and applicants for the civil service have to urinate into a bottle, sometimes under the close observation of a monitor, so they may be pronounced fit to file papers and answer telephones;

--we pursue policies that Justice Scalia aptly described as the "immolation of privacy and human dignity in symbolic opposition to drug use."

Along with that we have Feds [link|http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n1753/a10.html?184|persecuting] medical marijuana suppliers in locales that have voted to permit the distribution of same.

I don't know where you dig this stuff up but its all unsubstantiated.

Anyhow, war is the wrong metaphor. I'm not a recreational drug user. I'm not particularly opposed to it though. I do think that the puritanical bent of the drug enforcement policies in the US is counterproductive. Among the examples:

Citizens vote to permit the use of [link|http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/marimed/es.html|medical marijuana]. But no pharmaceutical company can or will produce it. I mean, who can blame them when the feds continue to [link|http://www.pressdemocrat.com/local/news/16pot_a1empirea.html|ignore the law] and continue to bust suppliers? forcing citizens to form groups to produce their own. Even at this length, the feds ignore the [link|http://www.ohiopatient.net/Poll_Analysis.htm|will of the people] and their right to local [link|http://vote96.ss.ca.gov/Vote96/html/BP/215.htm|self government] and harrass those people by staging [link|http://www.safeaccessnow.org/newswire_detail.php?id=90|raids] - effectively denying beneficial medicine prescribed by licensed physicians.

My other beef is with the [link|http://www.medsch.wisc.edu/painpolicy/publicat/97apsmm.htm|current attitude] towards strong opiates to treat chronic pain. Again, because these drugs can make people feel unreasonably good when taken inappropriately, the establishment (AMA at the moment) scrutinizes their use and intimidates doctors into underprescribing pain medications when we have studies that show that when used appropriately there is no euphoria along with reduced chance of addiction - only a return to normal function.

This is the kind of crap that the "war on drugs" boneheaded attitude is buying us.

Finally, much [link|http://www.drugwardistortions.org/distortion13.htm|violent crime] in the US is [link|http://www.casacolumbia.org/newsletter1457/newsletter_show.htm?doc_id=6989|caused by] the high price of drugs.

This "WAR" based approach to the drug problem isn't getting us anywhere good. We just foster violent crime, funnel money to foreign powers, inflict suffering on legit patients and turn them into fugitives.

I agree that Clinton didn't help the war on drugs - he should have completely eliminated support for Reagan's stupid legacy program and changed the emphasis to decriminalization with social rehab programs. The Columbian government would thank us, the patients would thank us, and the car radio owning world would thank us.

Game, Set, Match.

I was only there a couple of days so maybe I didn't encounter the element or didn't know what I was seeing.

OTOH, I never really felt safe in San Francisco - their heroin problem is quite a bit more obvious and the city literally looks like a refugee camp. I saw kids shooting up on the sidewalk often and the most dangerous little area (6th Street near Mission) was only a couple blocks from my office (4th and Market) or Moscone Center (4th and Mission). It featured throat slashings and shootings on a regular basis.

IOW, you can't go to SF for a convention and miss stepping over at least one addict/wino lying on the street.