WORTH REPEATING: War Is Over, The Drugs Won

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NEW YORK TIMES: Friday marks the 40th anniversary of one of the biggest, most expensive, most destructive social policy experiments in American history: The war on drugs […] has waxed and waned, sputtered and sprinted, until it became an unmitigated disaster, an abomination of justice and a self-perpetuating, trillion-dollar economy of wasted human capital, ruined lives and decimated communities. (Since 1971, more than 40 million arrests have been conducted for drug-related offenses.) And no group has been more targeted and suffered more damage than the black community. As the A.C.L.U. pointed out last week, “The racial disparities are staggering: despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites.” An effort meant to save us from a form of moral decay became its own insidious brand of moral perversion — turning people who should have been patients into prisoners, criminalizing victimless behavior, targeting those whose first offense was entering the world wrapped in the wrong skin. It feeds our achingly contradictory tendency toward prudery and our overwhelming thirst for punishment. MORE

RELATED: In February, Oakland City Attorney John Russo asked the Obama Justice Department whether his city’s plan to regulate large-scale medical marijuana cultivation would get the approval of the federal government. As expected, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag responded to Russo with a declarative “No!” Little did patient advocates realize, though, that Haag’s letter would begin a trend resulting in similar U.S. Attorney letters sent to local and state officials in at least 9 different medical marijuana states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. This cynical tactic of sending letters that threaten public officials with criminal prosecution is not new — the Bush Justice Department made similar threats against New Mexico officials in 2007 — but it’s now being used by Obama to obstruct the democratic process and impede the development of local and state laws regulating cultivation and distribution of medical marijuana. MORE

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