OPINION: Where's The Outrage?

The FBI annual crime report is out. There were 1.6 million drug arrests last year. 82% were for possession only. Of those charged with marijuana law violations, 750,591 (88 percent) were arrested for marijuana offenses involving possession only. That means three/quarter of a million human lives were destroyed for doing exactly what every President of the United States in the last 30 years has done — smoke a joint.
The only difference is the former and current Presidents didn’t get caught, otherwise their free to be President, vote, have a job, and raise children and everything else guaranteed them by our Constitution. Their counterparts who got caught face not only arrest, jail and imprisonment, but also restrictions on their right to hold public office, vote, have a job, and even raise a family.

In this time of budget crisis where all we hear is cutting funds for education, infrastructure and health care we spend at least half of our nation’s criminal justice budget to accomplish what — destroy 750,000 peoples lives for smoking a joint, many who do it regardless of the law because it eases pain, eliminates wasting in cancer patients, and heals. Who knows what else it could do for our nation’s health if we started testing its medicinal qualities rather spending billions annually to tell the country how bad it is for you. Why don’t we take the budget for the ONDCP and give that money to marijuana research? Meanwhile the tobacco and alcohol lobbys keep their drugs legal and provide billions in taxes to maintain our government.

Where is the outrage, when we see year after year, close to a million lives destroyed because we don’t have the same courage previous politicians did to end prohibition of alcohol? Where is the outrage when we see the hypocracy of our politicians who admit “youthful indiscretions” yet support a system that criminalizes the very activity they engaged in, but skirted the consequences they now support? Where are our criminal justice leaders, who say they need more money to fight crime like murder, rape, and terrorism when they devote most of their time busting people for possession of a bag of grass?

There is a movement out there to stop this outrage. Go to www.norml.org and sign up. But also when you see these numbers don’t just shake your head and say, “it isn’t going to happen.” Show your outrage to those who say we don’t have money to fix your pothole, educate your child, or care for your parents rising healthcare costs. Tell them to stop the third war we lost a long time ago — not Iraq, not Afganistan. Although that be nice, but the military-industrial complex will not let that happen. Instead at least stop the war on our own citizens — The War on Drugs. The War that’s been going on for over thirty years and five Presidents and has destroyed not thousands but millions if not tens of millions of lives. Show your outrage the next victim will be somebody you know — your fellow man, your neighbor, and a member of your extended family.