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April 11, 2013
Why is Cannabis Still illegal? Ask Obama.
The campaign for alcohol Prohibition was created by an amalgam utopians, mostly female, who had come to believe that banning commerce in alcohol via Constitutional Amendment would keep working husbands and fathers from hanging out in saloons, spending money on alcohol, and thus neglecting their families. With the help of a small number of like-minded power brokers like Wayne B. Wheeler, evangelist Billy Sunday, and others, their female-dominated movement scored the first-ever "single issue" victory in a national referendum in 1918; two years before women were even allowed to vote.The high hopes of its sponsors were soon dashed however; the ban on alcohol was almost immediately followed by a series of unwelcome consequences: bootlegging, violent criminal competition, rampant police corruption, and a surge in underage drinking. The failure of the "Noble Experiment" also exposed some unpleasant human weaknesses: our collective desire for profits tends to trump our best intentions; especially if enforced through the criminal code. Thus a wise society should probably keep its criminal prohibitions to a minimum; relying instead on a well educated, productively employed population to minimize the need for coercive policing. In that connection, the human weaknesses of police themselves make it critically important that Law Enforcement officers be well educated, highly motivated, and carefully monitored.
Perhaps no policy on Earth better illustrates the need for those principles than the "war on drugs" America has foisted off on the world through UN Treaty since passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970.
Since then we have completely ignored the most important single lesson that should have learned from the failure of the Eighteenth Amendment: that criminal prohibition of a desired commodity leads to social disaster. Despite all our advantages in wealth and power, we now rank among a global leaders in crime and incarceration. Ironically, we are also the principal market for products US Attorneys General have placed on "Schedule One" of Nixon's feckless CSA.
Even more ironically, it took only 14 years for failure of the Eighteenth Amendment to be acknowledged, but we are still burdened by a failing drug war over forty years after passage of Nixon's folly in 1970.
While there are many complex reasons for that discrepancy, perhaps the most important is that Nixon created his own police force to enforce the CSA and the inevitable failure of the policy it's unable to enforce continues to scare our distracted body politic into accepting that failure.
Most ironically of all, the drug that at the top of the DEA's list of failures is cannabis and we now have a President who undoubtedly benefited from his own illegal toking, but is either too dumb, distracted, or dishonest to cop to it.
I know he's not dumb. Thus I'm hoping someone with access to the Presidential ear will remind him that he was raised by a single mother before he completely alienates the Muslim world with drone executions.
No one ever said being a US President was easy, but further infuriating an implacable enemy is not a good idea. It's also not a good idea to think you can get away with such glaring hypocrisy for another three years.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at April 11, 2013 01:47 AM