Florida gubernatorial candidate proposes drug legalization

Here I am handing over a crack pipe to the police. I won a battle in my personal war on drugs in “Cracktown” by pushing out the local dealers and cleaning up the neighborhood, but the drug activity just moved elsewhere. The obvious solution to the problem – taxing and regulating drugs just like alcohol and tobacco – is the elephant in the room that no politician wants to discuss.

Last year, over 6,000 people were killed in the Mexican Drug War, which is now being fueled by a grant of $500 million by American taxpayers, thousands of guns streaming south courtesy of American gun dealers, and billions of dollars in illegal drug revenue from American consumers. The Mexican Drug War, which joins the ongoing American Drug War, now operates in over 200 American cities, including all major Florida cities.

The law enforcement approach will never accomplish more than moving the problem around. The most lethal drugs – alcohol and tobacco – are already legal, and alcohol Prohibition spawned the same scourge of soaring incarceration and violent crime rates in the 1920s that we are experiencing today.

By any measure, the current approach to crime, drug activity, mental illness, and homelessness is an abysmal failure throughout the United States. In the U.S we incarcerate our citizens at a rate that is 7 times higher than Canada, 9 times higher than Germany, 11 times higher than Norway, 12 times higher than Japan and 23 times higher than India. We have 4.5% of the world’s population and 24% of its incarcerated. We incarcerate 2.3 million people with an additional 4 million on probation or parole. That is 1 in 31 people, more people than the populations of 39 states, including the District of Columbia. Despite locking up a greater number of our citizens than any other country in the world, we still have a higher level of violence than any other industrialized country. The nearly 40–year–long war on drugs and the process of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill has turned overcrowded prisons into asylums and created a plague of homelessness. Half of the people in prison are non–violent offenders. Half are there because of mental illness or substance abuse related issues (not necessarily the same half). Large numbers are in prison because of mandatory sentencing guidelines, which have been shown to be ineffective in reducing crime.

Approximately half of the untold billions spent by the municipal, county, state, and federal law enforcement goes to prop up the futile war on drugs. The city of Miami by itself will spend over $228 million – 43% of its total expenditures in 2009 for public safety. Many police departments are already reducing their drug and gang enforcement in order to handle the budget cuts.

To a large degree, Alcohol Prohibition ended in 1933, during the Great Depression, because the government could no longer afford to enforce a policy that was not working. We are in the same situation today. Ending drug prohibition across the country will lower violent and property crime, gang activity, and organized crime. We will then have resources to deal with the health issues connected with mental illness and substance abuse. President Obama has thus far steered clear of these issues, but he needs to know the impetus is out there beginning on the state level.

The tentacles of special interests wanting to continue the failed War on Drugs run very deep in our economy. The so–called “Prison Industrial Complex,” consists of the immensely profitable prison building industry. Drug and alcohol companies benefit from laws prohibiting low–cost, grow–your–own alternatives. Law enforcement agencies get bloated budgets and asset forfeiture proceeds. The military gets more funding. These are only a few of the legally sanctioned special interests. Others wanting to see the drug war go on indefinitely include terrorist groups like al–Qaeda (who finance part of their operations from the opium trade) global organized crime syndicates, drug cartels, drug gangs, and the local pusher selling your kid drugs (which are easier to get than alcohol.)

If anyone could be more opposite of Governor Charlie Crist in his views of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs, it’s this man, Michael E. Arth.  He makes me wish I could vote absentee in Florida!