There was an interesting article in the Friday June 18 2010 Cincinnati Enquirer. The article stated that there are as many emergency room visits for legal drugs as there are for illegal drugs. ' RX abuse sends as many to ER as illegal drugs'. The writer goes on to state that the number of ER visits from medication abuse doubled over a 5 year period. The Drug Czar, Mr. Gil Kerlikowske, weighed in by stating," The abuse of prescription drugs is our nations fastest growing drug problem". The increase in ER visits was attributed to the increased use of painkillers as a result of the stepped up treatment of intractable pain.
The focus of the Drug Czar and the White House Office of Drug Control Policy in their 2010 report to the President outlined an increased focus on prescription, meaning legal, drug abuse. Is the Drug Czar giving up trying to control illegal drug use? This focus on legal drugs is proof that our current drug policies do not line up in any way with the reality of drug use and abuse among adult Americans. Even the choice of what drugs are legal or illegal does not make any sense.
Marijuana is listed as schedule I, dangerous and has no medical value. Why? Here we have a drug that is pretty benign. Sixteen years of medical marijuana law in California has not shown a corresponding increase in either violence, traffic accidents, or overdose deaths. On the other hand, alcohol which is legal, is the cause of untold misery, violence and more than 14,000 overdose deaths every year. Heroin is also listed as schedule I. Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug law reform group, recently noted that dilaudid, a super pain killer used by many doctors, is essentially the same as heroin. If you were to switch out all the dilaudid patients use with heroin no one would notice the difference. One is legal to prescribe one is illegal. Why? Why are drugs which are essentially the same treated differently? Why have we built up a huge and expensive police/ court/ prison industry over these particular drugs and not others? In California, a move to pass sentencing reform as it pertains to the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine was defeated mainly by the large amounts of money donated to it's defeat by the prison guards union. Is it true then that our prohibition policy is nothing more than a program to keep police, prison guards and probation workers in a job?
In the final analysis it is clear that our forty year policy of prohibition and incarceration is not working, never has, and we are long past the point that this failure should be recognized and dealt with. If prohibition were a program to end child poverty and after 5 years there were twice as many children in poverty, legislators on both sides of the aisle would be falling all over themselves calling for an end to the program. Reporters would flood the media with stories about the failure of the program and the suffering of the children because of it. Everyone would be up in arms but with the drug war, nothing! Not a peep! Have we so indoctrinated our citizens that they are afraid to say anything? Stand in line at a store with a friend and use the words drugs or marijuana in not a loud but a clear voice and watch what happens. People will slowly move away from you. They are not moving away because they are afraid of you, they are moving away because they are afraid of the police. They are afraid that the police , or someone who would tell the police, might think they have drugs and put them on a list and start investigating them. That is why they move away, fear! Now, I've never lived in a police state but our repressive prohibition policies well, if it walks like a duck?
When will this lunacy end? The Republicans claim to want smaller government and government out of your business, and to end programs that don't work to save taxpayer dollars. The Democrats claim they want to base decisions on science and logic yet both parties continue to fund this failed policy regardless of the hypocrisy the demonstrate every time they do. It is enough to make a citizen throw his hands up and cry," A pox on both their houses!"