01.29.09
Sticking the Dick in the Mashed Potatoes
That’s what much of America’s so-called War on Drugs is all about: maintaining leverage in certain communities by pursuing unwinnable policies at the street level. Using drug charges as predicates or doggie snacks or swords of Damocles. It’s hard to believe that the Community Organizer-in-Chief is down for keeping the black markets black and making criminals out of people and making markets out of criminality. After all, you can’t benefit from or integrate with what you drive underground and you can’t be morally serious by incentivizing lawlessness —for both the putative criminal and the System alike.
And so it is: the other part of the so-called War on Drugs is all about the Full Employment Act for Cops, Judges, and the Prison Industry. How many thousands of young men are in prison right now for the sale or possession of marihuana? Is that really why we maintain prisons? How about it, President Obama? How many different ways are you going to lie to us and lie to yourself about why we can’t legalize industrial hemp and marihuana? How many young men’s lives are being ruined by their associations in our prisons this very night with actual murderers, rapists, and robbers on simple account of some marihuana deal?
As they say, if not now, when? And if not you, who?
I want more for my paradigm-shifting dollar, please.
