levite

100% true. This idiotic drug war wastes money that could go to improving public education, assisting the poor to escape from poverty, and housing the homeless-- not to mention funding a national health care system. We overcrowd our prisons with drug prisoners-- disproportionately poor people and people of color, and prioritize penalizing people for vices and addictions more than for harming others.

Not only that, but by criminalizing marijuana in especial, we prevent its widespread use as a cheap and gentle medication for people in need of such, and we prevent the growing of industrial hemp to make particle board, paper, cloth, and oil,-- all of which would be biodegradable, and have a far, far lower impact on the environment than the wood scraps, wood pulp, cotton, and petroleum we currently employ.

The DEA is a self-perpetuating money hole, and the only ones who truly benefit from this drug war are the oil, logging, paper, cotton, and pharmaceuticals industries.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)