I Spent $100 Billion Dollars and All I Got Was This Lousy Drug War

Researchers at the University of Michigan have released a study full of optimistic observations on teen smoking and drug use. The rates are for both in almost every category, the exceptions being inhalant use among younger teens and the use of Rush Limbaugh’s favorite lemon wedge substitute, Oxycontin. I haven’t personally read the report, but the AP story was quite informative. What I found most interesting about the report, was that inadvertently the study confirmed what most reasonable people have known for years: the War on Drugs is stupid. Anna Nicole Smith on painkillers stupid.

Yes drug use is down by about a third, while smoking is down by half, give or take a few percentage points. Now, at first glance, the one third drop would seem to indicate that the War on Drugs is a success. After all, fewer kids are doing drugs, well, most drugs. It’s a good thing. Unless you count the kids on prescribed medication. How much would you bet that number is actually higher than the kids on illegal ones? And does it bother you that a lot of anti-depressants, the drugs they feed kids to keep them from acting like, well, kids, now come with suicide warnings in regards to those kids?

But they’ve had significantly more success with reducing smoking, using less viciously stupid methods than the War on Drugs. Not once in the report do they attribute the success of anti-smoking campaigns to tougher enforcement of existing tobacco laws.

They haven’t thrown little Tommy in prison with Mad Dog the crazed horse molester for smoking a Camel, they haven’t tossed the nice Korean couple that runs the corner store in jail for peddling death, and they haven’t questionably confiscated hundreds of millions of dollars of property from tobacco farmers and retailers. Last I checked the government still subsidizes tobacco industry to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year. I mean, nobody compares the Marlboro Man to Pablo Escobar.

And just in case you’re wondering about how many people the Marlboro Man and is ilk have killed with their product, as opposed to how many Pablo and his product have, a University of Pennsylvania website with data from the Centers for Disease Control puts things in perspective. In America: deaths from illegal drugs – 18,000, deaths from alcohol – 81,000, deaths from tobacco – 430,000. I would guess that you could throw in everybody killed in drug related activity, drive-bys, executions, revenge killings etc., and you still wouldn’t be have ten percent of the tobacco related deaths.

So, the question, like an elephant in the living room that everybody is trying desperately to ignore, is why the federal government spending so much money, so many man-hours, and risking so many lives on repressive, idiotic policies which have among other things, treated the Constitution like a dirty little whore, and ultimately are less effective than the educational solutions they’ve been forced to adopt against smoking?

It’s not just that the Drug War is stupid, it makes as much sense as pissing directly into the wind, it’s that we know, for a fact, that there are safer, cheaper and more effective methods of fighting it. The blame lies in two places. One is the decidedly Puritan streak that still haunts this country, the other is sheer amount of your tax money the bureaucratic funding whores, especially the DEA, need to feed their collective addiction. They are on their proverbial knees every year, servicing Congress with lies to keep the money flowing.

Fish In The Barrel – A Few Quick Notes From The Wire

Maybe there is something to say for that British sense of propriety. Thirty-two men arrested in a child pornography sting in Great Britain have committed suicide. Bloody considerate of them to save society the trouble.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry: a granny went into a bank in Idaho and tried to rob it. She explained that she needed the money, she was so poor she had even pawned her gun…before the robbery.

Good news for those of you scared to death of AIDS, there’s an untapped dating pool for you in North Korea. Han Kyong-Ho, director of Pyongyang's Central Hygienic and Anti-Epizootic Center aid that more than 400,000 people have been tested for AIDS since 1989, and that none other than the 27 foreigners was found to have the disease. "Those 27 foreigners were sent home at their request," Han said.

Now this is drug enforcement the country could live with. Indonesian authorities raided a couple of ecstasy labs after party people who ate the pills complained the pills were bogus.

This is how things work in France: as a law enforcement official, it is perfectly normal to give a speech on ethics then use a colleague’s stolen credit card to buy a hooker.

In other news from the land of snotty concierges, the French have put a spy satellite into orbit. The satellite is expected to give the French military a worldwide spying capability, allowing them to begin surrendering long before a foreign army ever reaches French soil.