Why America Can’t Quit the Drug War
The blinkered drug-warrior culture in the ranks of the departments of Justice, State and Defense remains similarly entrenched. The acting chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration calls medical marijuana “a joke.” The State Department’s top drug official insists, “Our objective remains … eliminating the use of marijuana in the United States.” With pot, such knee-jerk commitment to prohibition might be amusing. With harder drugs, it has deadly ramifications. At home, the administration’s early crackdown on prescription opioids helped drive the current spike in heroin deaths. South of the border, cartel violence rages unabated, despite the recapture of Mexico’s most notorious drug lord; the country’s homicide rate in February spiked to 55 murders a day.
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The unequal enforcement of pot laws also lays bare the racism latent in the American justice system. Despite roughly equal use rates, blacks are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested than whites. This pattern persists even in legalization states: Marijuana arrests have fallen 90 percent in pot-legal Washington, but blacks are still busted at twice the rate of whites.
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…“Military might is no match for market economics.”