Speech I'm delivering for class Wednesday

Anti-War on Drugs =D

In 1920, the Prohibition Act, to make alcohol illegal, was passed with the people largely behind it. During Prohibition however, alcohol was an even stronger commodity. Speak-easies, illegal alcohol dens, were everywhere – up to 100,000 in New York alone.
The gangs controlling the bootlegging saw a major increase in revenue, and the government's actions directly funded the black market. The public, because of this, saw an increase in gang violence – with the gangs shiny new tommy guns spraying the streets for rivals and cops – and the public saw a major decrease in safety. Prohibition was ended, again with large support of the people, in 1933. Or was it?


Our current prohibition, The War on Drugs, provides less regulation on drugs, gives money to dangerous criminals, and criminalizes, imprisons, and kills American citizens.

The War on Drugs gives the government less control over drugs than if they were in the regulated within open market, say like how alcohol, nicotine and caffeine are. Don't just listen to me however, allow me to provide you with expert testimony.

Joseph D McNamara, former Chief of Police for three major cities and holder of a PhD in public administration, wrote in his article “The War On Drugs Is Lost”
“Sadly, the police have been pushed into a war they did not start and cannot win.”

He goes on to describe a specific case, where him and his partner were arresting a heroin addict for possession of a hypodermic needle and trace amounts of heroin in the bottle cap he used to heat his fix. He says that such petty cases are used to provide evidence that the war is working, much like the body count in traditional war. The user offered to narc for the police, so they could catch a dealer instead. Officer McNamara and his partner were surprised, that while they tailed him in their car, in broad daylight he went up to dealer after dealer, being refused only cause they were out, until the third one was holding, sold it with the cop car just feet away, and was promptly arrested. It was another user, selling only to support his own habit.

This is a clear example of Law Enforcement being no viable threat to the supply of drugs, under prohibition.


As former Superior Court Judge James P. Gray Sates in his book, “Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It”, “Today, the only “laws” addressing the actual use, sale, and quality of the drugs out are those enforced by the illegal drug sellers. […] This is uniquely a problem of drug prohibition, not the drugs themselves.”

We can not regulate drugs if they are illegal. Law can not control the black market that prohibition creates. What is the government doing as far as stopping children's access to marijuana, cocaine, heroin? Illegal drug dealers don't card. I can't buy smokes when I don't have my ID – I wouldn't run into that problem with crack.

Prohibition doesn't only create a void between the law and it's control of drugs,

The War on Drugs funds gangs, promotes gang violence, and even increases crime among drug addicts, giving the government less control on crime overall.


A large majority of the drugs on American streets comes from South American drug cartels. For instance, 90% of our cocaine comes from Colombia. From the cartels, the drugs move onto traffickers who sneak the drugs over the border., then into the hands of drug lords, who move it over to the distributors, before they finally move it onto the dealers, who are often middlemen for other dealers to buy from. There is an estimated 1000% mark up on street prices created by this process.


That 1000% goes to bribes of corrupt officials, dangerous drug lords, distributors, and dealers within our own soil, dangerous smugglers of US and foreign citizenry, and drug cartels with personal armies worldwide.


That 1000% mark-up funds the gangs that fight over the product, the territory, and blast innocent civilians when they get in the way of their battles.
That 1000% mark-up, created by prohibition, makes users of drugs like coke and heroin unable to afford their fix – and their addiction makes them willing to steal, mug, and kill to get it.



Instead of focusing on educating the public about the harms of drugs, instead of focusing on rehabilitating drug addicts, government resources are put into this “war” - a war they've created – and can not win. A war that criminalizes, imprisons, and kills American citizens for their personal acts.

Prohibition makes it a crime for people to use any substance marked illicit. Marijuana has been tried by 42% of Americans. That's 129 million criminals right there. That's 42% of America that should be imprisoned according to the drug laws and the drug czars. And many of them are.

1 in 8 prisoners are behind bars for marijuana related crimes. Nearly a quarter million Americans are in prison for drug offenses. With the current prison population of 1.6 million, that is almost a sixth of the prison population, and that doesn't include the crimes that were committed to buy drugs, or protect gang turf.

Much worse than making illicit drug users into criminals, or imprisoning them, the War on Drugs is indirectly and directly responsible for the death of countless drug users. Ethan A. Nadelmann, PhD tells us that “Crack cocaine [is] as much a creature of prohibition as 180-proof moonshine during alcohol prohibition.” and “AIDS spread rapidly among injecting drug addicts, their lovers, and their children, while government policies restricted the availability of clean syringes that might have stemmed the epidemic.”



The quality of drugs, the forms drugs take, and the use of dirty needles are all affected by the War on Drugs. If drugs were actually regulated, we wouldn't have drugs spiked to increase potency, we wouldn't have more dangerous forms of drugs spilling onto the market because they are better for illegal traffickers, and we wouldn't have diseases spreading because of non-availability of clean needles. We also wouldn't have drug users being dehumanized by officials and neighbors alike, because they don't use one of the acceptable drugs.



I want to give you one final quote, again from, Officer Joseph D. McNamara, “The former police chief of Los Angeles, Daryl Gates, testified before the United States Senate that casual drug users should be taken out and shot. He justified these claims to the Los Angeles Times by saying, “We're in a war.”

The War on Drugs doesn't just target drugs, it targets your neighbors, your family, your friends. It targets your doctors, your teachers, your lawyers. Statistically, it targets many of the people in this very room. And like any other war, it leaves collateral damage. Through the criminals it pays, through the lawlessness it creates, through the regulation it lacks. End the War on Drugs, end the War on Drug Control, start the War on Gangs, and end the War on America's citizens.

 

very nice, +1

 

Why has no
one
commented?

 

tltr... make video.. its is a speech

 

yup.

I wasn't even sure I'd get any replies =P Figured I'd put it up here for the hell of it

 

hurrah!
nice job, man

 

Thanks

 

what clss is this for? history, civics, law?

 

Speech =P

 

I read it I was j/k cause of nero..

 

I didn't feel like reading it yesterday, due to the length, but I just now read it and it's very interesting. Good job man

 

thanks