Santa Fe New Mexican | 2002: A Year in the Life of the Drug War: Welcome to America, 2002, Land of the Virtually Drug-Free where President George Bush insists that casual drug users are financing terrorism, while his niece is caught with crack cocaine in drug rehab. Where one person is arrested approximately every 44 seconds on a marijuana charge. Where 77% of Texas drug convictions are found to involve less than one gram of a drug.
U.S. fighter pilots in Afghanistan are given amphetamines to stay awake on bombing runs, leading some to question the drugs contribution to multiple "friendly fire" deaths. Despite a campaign promise to allow states to "choose as they so choose" regarding medical marijuana, the Bush Administrations Justice Department and DEA stay busy throughout the year raiding compassion clubs in California, and one in Oregon......
It's really quite an impressive year in official lunacy. Basically, the domestic trend is to more and more prohibition and high-profile punishment, despite its demonstrated ineffectiveness, and internationally, the trend is to more and more leniency. Curiously, the Supreme Court utterly fails to cite the international trend to leniency when upholding the results of harsh laws, despite the fact that they did exactly that when overturning the death penalty for retarded people. Apparently, international (and a good deal of domestic) opinion only matters when it's going the way they want in the first place.
Posted by iain at January 08, 2003 05:03 PMComments
