- After 40 years, the United States war on drugs has cost
$1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use
is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread. Even U.S. drug
czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked. In the grand
scheme, it has not been successful, Kerlikowske told The Associated Press.
Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything,
magnified, intensified.
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- U.S. President Richard Milhouse "I am not
a crook" Nixon
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- Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a new
war he thought he could win. This nation faces a major crisis in terms
of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people,Nixon
said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act.
The following year, he said: Public enemy No. 1 in the United States is
drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to
wage a new, all-out offensive. His first drug-fighting budget was $100
million. Now it's $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon's amount even when adjusted
for inflation.
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- From the beginning, lawmakers debated fiercely whether
law enforcement no matter how well funded and well trained could ever defeat
the drug problem. Then-Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, who had his doubts, has
since watched his worst fears come to pass. Look what happened. It's an
ongoing tragedy that has cost us a trillion dollars. It has loaded our
jails and it has destabilized countries like Mexico and Colombia, he said.
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- The Office of National Drug Control Policy says about
330 tons of cocaine, 20 tons of heroin and 110 tons of methamphetamine
are sold in the United States every year, almost all of it brought in across
the borders. Even more marijuana is sold, but it's hard to know how much
of that is grown domestically, including vast fields run by Mexican drug
cartels in U.S. national parks. The dealers who are caught have overwhelmed
justice systems in the United States and elsewhere. U.S. prosecutors declined
to file charges in 7,482 drug cases last year, most because they simply
didn't have the time and the arrestees decline to "cop a plea,"
wherein they plead guilty in return for a more "lenient" sentence.
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- Less money spent on treatment, prevention - Mexican
President Felipe Calderon says if America wants to fix the drug problem,
it needs to do something about Americans' unquenching thirst for illegal
drugs. Kerlikowske agrees, and Obama has committed to doing
just that. And yet both countries continue to spend the bulk of their drug
budgets on law enforcement rather than treatment and prevention. President
Obama's newly released drug war budget is essentially the same as Bush's,
with roughly twice as much money going to the criminal justice system as
to treatment and prevention,said Bill Piper, director of national affairs
for the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance.
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- Nixon said in a special 1971 message to Congress. It
comes quietly into homes and destroys children, it moves into neighborhoods
and breaks the fiber of community which makes neighbors. We must try to
better understand the confusion and disillusion and despair that bring
people, particularly young people, to the use of narcotics and dangerous
drugs. Just a few years later, a young Barack Obama was one of those young
users, a teenager smoking pot and trying a little blow when you could afford
it, as he wrote in Dreams From My Father. When asked during his campaign
if he had inhaled the pot, he replied: That was the point. Why continue
a an extraordinarily expensive policy which has proven NOT to work?
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- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FREEDOMSFORUM/message/140720
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