My name is Nobody, and I am running to be the next Governor of New Hampshire. This is an official policy statement:
If elected as Governor, I will pardon every single New Hampshire victim of the War on Drugs.
The War on Drugs is a human rights nightmare. It was created by the Nixon administration for the purpose of suppressing two cultures that Nixon considered to be enemies: hippies, and blacks.
In the words of his former domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman,
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” CNN
The war on drugs, therefore, is a war of genocide, waged against a race and a culture. This is unacceptable. It must end. It would be justice if those who perpetrated the War on Drugs were hauled into the Hague and tried for crimes against humanity. But justice will probably never come. The time has come to at least give us peace.
This is not an endorsement of drug abuse. Some drugs can be extremely harmful, like alcohol, cocaine, meth, and heroin. All drugs carry risks. Even marijuana can harm you under certain circumstances. I myself have had two run-ins with cocaine, once during my teenage years, and once last year. I recovered, but it was difficult. People will continue to do drugs whether you like it or not, and whether I like it or not. That is reality. So the question is, how do we cope with this reality?
The nanny state solution has not worked. Quite the opposite, the problem of drug abuse has grown worse and worse while the government has wasted more and more money on attempts at interdiction. Not only can they not keep drugs out of America … or even out of prisons … by force, but the drug war creates conditions which draw people into drug abuse. Kids who grow up in neighborhoods where the richest neighbor, the king of the hood, is the local drug dealer come to see the drug business as a means to advancement. Deregulation of drugs would destroy these economic incentives, and destroy the economic backbone of gangs which fund themselves by selling drugs. Users will not buy their drugs from gangbangers when they can get them from a safe and reliable bricks-and-mortar business or by mail order.
The other thing that would collapse under deregulation is drug prices. People who are now paying $120 a day for their drugs could pay $8 a day. This means that a $40 streetwalker would have to work once every 5 days in order to get his or her fixes, rather than 3 times a day, reducing the damage to body and psyche. An addict who steals today to feed his habit might find that he could panhandle $8 a day to meet his needs, without resorting to violence. A working addict who spends a large portion their income on drugs would be able to spend more on the things that really matter … or hiring a therapist.
Addicts would be must less likely to die of their addictions under drug deregulation. Deaths due to adulterated drugs or unpredictable dosages would end. Users would be able to set up safe injection sites where they kept an eye on each other and could react to overdoes. Clean needles would be obtainable, so the spread of HIV/Aids and Hep C would be reduced. And recovery is much more likely when the addicts future has not been foreclosed by a felony conviction.
Governmental efforts to combat drug use and abuse have been dismal failures. We have become the most imprisoned country on earth. Our cities have become war zones. The social structures of Latin America are being destroyed, producing mayhem and refugees. Our kids are dying. These things are happening because of, not in spite of, the governments efforts to stop it.
I hope that you will join me in this fight to end the war on drugs. Pro-drug-war politicians frequently extort us to “think of the children”. I am thinking of them. If my children found themselves addicted to drugs, I would not want them in prison. I would not want their futures destroyed by the government. I would not want them to die because they got bad drugs, or unexpected dosages. I would not want them to have to spend so much money on their supply that they were crushed economically. I would not want the to die because there was no safe place they could shoot up. I would not want them to contract HIV/Aids from a dirty needle. I would want them to come through their ordeal safely, and to recover successfully.
As for children who are not drug addicts, I do not want them to be forced to pay for incarceration of addicts, or for their treatment. I do not want them to be killed in the crossfire of a drug-war fueled gang war. I do not want them killed by police in a misguided or fraudulent raid.
I ask you today to join with me in ending the war on drugs once and for all, and putting an end to a dark chapter in American history.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks