By Staff
Area police agencies are wisely employing their limited resources against a wave of methamphetamine use sweeping the nation. The federal government is fighting a different war, however, and dubiously.
Marijuana accounts for almost half of drug arrests nationally - up from barely a quarter of all busts 10 years ago.
Since that Supreme Court decision in June affirmed federal agents' right to hit hard against medical marijuana, the Drug Enforcement Agency avidly went after California pot clinics with high-profile raids. Police from Memphis (where marijuana arrests are up 19-fold) to Philadelphia racked up thousands of arrests in a fresh offensive against pot smokers.
At an estimated cost of $35 billion a year, the drug war is going about as well as the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, with illegal drugs remaining cheap and plentiful.
The Bush administration poured more than $5 billion into the Andes to eradicate cocaine, only to see coca cultivation rise a reported 29 percent. Drug prices are as low as they've ever been and purity is at an all-time high, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug-reform organization in Washington, D.C.
Smugglers and South American cocaine growers have the upper hand in eradication efforts because they can adapt more quickly than a behemoth such as the U.S. government.
Since the flow of drugs hasn't been stemmed, even eager enlisters in this war are having second thoughts.
While the White House continues to back harsh sentencing laws, even the Pentagon, focused on fighting real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, quietly cut back on trying to intercept traffickers in Central America and the Caribbean.
We think of the drug war as bringing justice to bear on high-level dealers and keeping their poisons such as cocaine and heroin off our streets. But the reality is law enforcement officers devoting precious hours on hundreds of thousands of arrests for possession of a bit of marijuana.
Not dissuaded, tough-talking John Walters, drug czar since 2001, besides painting pot as an addictive "gateway" to harder drugs, links drugs to terror in television ads suggesting pot proceeds fund Al Qaeda. Welcome back, "Reefer Madness."
The Sentencing Project analyzed marijuana arrests and found they've soared from 300,000 to 700,000 a year since 1992.
Did you know the $4 billion a year the government spends arresting and prosecuting marijuana crimes is more than it spends on treating addiction to all drugs?
Lately, busts are increasingly for possession - not dealing.
One in four persons in state prisons for pot offenses ranks as a "low-level offender."
War on marijuana isn't proving much of a deterrent. About a third of all teens and young adults report smoking pot in the past year. So do one in seven adults over 35. According to the National Drug Intelligence Center of the U.S. Justice Department, 19,000 tons of marijuana continue to be harvested annually in the United States. Michigan, the only state that required welfare recipients to submit to drug testing, suspended its program after a federal court declared it illegal. States, their budgets stretched to the breaking point, are backing away from tough mandatory-minimum sentencing laws that were all in vogue.
Let's face it, fighting marijuana diverts money and manpower needed to combat the burgeoning meth epidemic swamping rural America. Almost half of state and local law-enforcement agencies identify meth as their greatest drug threat - compared with only one in eight for marijuana.
More than 1 million Americans use highly addictive meth, which is linked to violent crime, explosions and fires at labs, severe health problems and child and family abuse.
In 2003, drug agents busted 10,182 meth labs, which are straining the resources of local police and sheriffs.
What did the White House do? Proposed slashing federal aid for rural narcotics teams by half.
At least our local law enforcers have their priorities straight.