Reefer Madness

Well, this makes good sense.

The focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of federal crime statistics released yesterday.

The study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10 years later. During the same period, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of the total to 45 percent.

Coming in the wake of the focus on crack cocaine in the late 1980s, the increasing emphasis on marijuana enforcement was accompanied by a dramatic rise in overall drug arrests, from fewer than 1.1 million in 1990 to more than 1.5 million a decade later. Eighty percent of that increase came from marijuana arrests, the study found.

The rapid increase has not had a significant impact on prisons, however, because just 6 percent of the arrests resulted in felony convictions, the study found. The most widely quoted household survey on the topic has shown relatively little change in the overall rate of marijuana use over the same time period, experts said.

“In reality, the war on drugs as pursued in the 1990s was to a large degree a war on marijuana,” said Ryan S. King, the study’s co-author and a research associate at the Sentencing Project. “Marijuana is the most widely used illegal substance, but that doesn’t explain this level of growth over time. . . . The question is, is this really where we want to be spending all our money?”

Sure. Let’s spend billions on arresting pot smokers for absolutely no good reason. They should taking the purple pill instead like Real Americans anyway.

There is a rather large minority of Americans (or so I’ve heard…) who smoke marijuana or who have smoked marijuana and the numbers have stayed pretty much the same from decade to decade since the 60’s. Every once in a while the government and the moralists get hysterical like today’s “this is your brain on pot, oh my God, it’s not Cheech and Chong’s marijuana — it will drive you mad, I say, mad!!!” — and then it all quiets down for awhile.

That is not to say that we don’t have a problem with the drug culture. However, the drug culture I’m talking about is the one that’s advertised incessantly on television that tells people they should eat pills from dawn to dusk. Hey, it’s a free country, but if you’re going to pass moral judgments, how about taking a little look at the chemically induced burgeoning erection business?

(Meanwhile, in Bobo’s world, half of the heartland is blowing themselves up in meth labs and screwing themselves to death. But I think they tend to vote Republican.)

Seriously, this is one reason why kids do dangerous drugs. They find out quickly that this stuff about pot is nonsense and people who say it is as dangerous (or more dangerous by implication) than cocaine or methamphetamine, then lose all credibility. If they’re lying about this, they’re probably lying about everything.

I don’t know what it is about pot that upsets some people so much but it always has. Associations with race used to be the thing; now I think it’s lazy pleasure. These people apparently believe that pleasure has to be mixed with violence or punishment. Certainly, the right’s foremost expert on drug abuse, Rush Limbaugh, seems to think so.

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