The Real Cost of the War on Drugs in America

Let me begin by saying that marijuana is unequivocally safer than alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, taurine, nasal decongestant, or high fructose corn syrup. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot. There, that was easy enough. Only hurts for a second, right? Now we can move on to the real issue...

Hard drugs, and alcohol must be included in this, have the ability to destroy lives, disrupt families, fracture communities, and turn our borders and parts of our urban landscape into perpetual battle zones. They don't ruin everyone they touch, but enough of them that it would be callous to take no action. That said, everything is wrong about the global, national, state, and local response to drug abuse; prohibition is worse than the disease, as we found out quite painfully when alcohol was banned by the 18th Amendment, which is precisely why it was the only Amendment to be repealed. Yet we cannot even bring sanity to a war on drugs that treats the sick and the casual user alike as criminals, leaves countless people dead or maimed, and costs us tens of billions of dollars each year.

If that weren't bad enough, it has led to drugs wreaking havoc on our culture. In case this was not public knowledge, artists of all types do drugs at a rate substantially higher than the population as a whole; they also tend to be more functional addicts, but our goal is to help our culture, not enable self-destructive habits. The quality of mainstream culture has descended quite rapidly over the past several decades, and it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots here: a lot of people in entertainment (the heart of a culture) are on drugs and in the closet, because addiction has been criminalized and stigmatized. It's not a good thing to be a wanton addict, but it's not wrong to have a problem, just very, very human.

If everyone who had committed fraud on a loan application were in jail, and $100,000+ frauds are a serious felony on both the federal and state level, our nation's prison population would quintuple overnight, and we already incarcerate at several times the rate of any other industrialized nation. We would rather put those desperate enough to abuse or sell drugs and foolish or unlucky enough to get caught doing so in prison instead, then we go out and spend beyond our means, addicted to consumption and unashamed, and act indignant when our economy falls on its face.

We have a problem here, folks. A big problem, and it isn't just the United States. Our disinclination to self-control has combined with our desire for hasty, arbitrary punishment to cost us the war in Afghanistan and our influence across much of Latin America, but that is a topic unto itself. Another day, perhaps.

If the Record Industry Hasn't Been Price Fixing I Haven't Been Masturbating

I mean the audacity of their denial is palpable. It is like arguing in court that the sky is not blue because it is a windowless room, sheerest idiocy of the highest order. Unforgivable. Burn them at the stake! If they're really not colluding, no one will come to put the fire out, and they'll be proven innocent. I know they are damn liars because...

I contacted every one of them about ten years ago and got no response, because I thought we record labels should negotiate up from free (the norm) rather than down from CD prices (so high they limit sales) and guess what? El zilcho, no response whatsoever, because they thought - still think - they need to exist for musical culture to continue. To the contrary, they need to be found guilty, and busted up from their media conglomerates to play fair with those of us who might have started an independent label. Ahem.

Instead, they worked out a sweetheart deal with Apple, held a gun to Napster's head, and generally went about setting the $1/song price for duplicating a digital file that I know for a fact can be downloaded (twenty times an hour for free) on anyone's home computer if they have a mediocre broadband connection. Corporations aren't capitalist at all, they're totalitarians, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a goddamn liar.