END PROHIBITION

Prohibition has done more harm than good. It has made organized crime filthy rich and boosted high tech weapons sales both to gangs and police departments. It has made the police into an invading enemy from the perspective of many inner city communities. Also, even one does support prohibition as a solution, one has to look at the priorities of drug enforcement agencies, and the harms they are causing, particularily in connection to Marijuana.
Any person who tries to claim that marijuana is even as dangerous, never mind more dangerous, than alcohol, is either lying, delusional or highly misinformed.
A relatively small amount of alcohol, easily available, can stop your heart. Deaths from alcohol overdoses each year are as high as for many other drugs. Overdosing on THC is pretty well physiologically impossible.
Alcohol is highly, physically, addictive.
When we say alcohol is connected to liver disease, we mean "ALCOHOL WILL GIVE YOU LIVER DISEASE!!!" if you drink it in quantity on a daily basis for a long period of time.
Studies on marijuana have shown short term memory loss with long term heavy usage, and find that teenagers are particularily susceptible to this.
Because of id systems, at least in Canada, pot is easier to get than alcohol now. If you really wanted to keep it away from kids you would legalize it and enforce restrictions from that standpoint, rather than implying to kids, as the law enforcement is doing now, that alcohol is safer than marijuana.
To even suggest that alcohol is as safe or safer than marijuana, is irresponsible and negligent, whether it's the DARE program, NA, the DEA, or the president of the US. This irresponsible negligence and hypocrisy has to stop, because it is fueling the world's hard drug crisis.
For example:
The DARE program tells kids that pot is now as strong as cocaine. Since they more than likely know some long term adult smokers (their parents, teachers, etc.) they know that pots not that strong. So what they're really doing is telling our children that cocaine is as safe as marijuana. So maybe coke, or heroine, or alcohol, isn't so bad after all...
Also, you take a kid who's smoking or selling any amount of pot, maybe even growing, whatever, and stick him in a jail full of hardened criminals? Or a detox center, for that matter NarcAnon meetings full of long term hard drug users who occasionally relapse and drag others with them?
The medical establishment also has a lot to answer for. Get a broken arm, back injury, heart attack, and likely you'll get a prescription for morphine, maybe prescription strength Tylenol, from which it is very easy to extract the codeine. Talwin, Ritalin, valium, the list goes on. A very high number of prescription meds end up on the street, often literally, like on the tips of the needles below.
They have the nerve to speak against legalization when it's them pumping the drugs into the country.
There was also the CIA importing heroin and cocaine in the 70's and 80's, while using the war on drugs as a mask to hide funding for terrorist contra's. Both practices have probably continued, but aren't reported as much. Part of the problem is the starting point: prohibition.
All it takes is a quick glance at history to see that since prohibition was introduced, the drug problem has gotten worse.
The harder the drug war has been fought, the more money has been pumped in, the worse the drug problem has become.
There is absolutely no possible way of refuting this fact: PROHIBITION DOES NOT WORK, WILL NEVER WORK, HAS NEVER WORKED.

But it's the money. Weapons manufacturers make a killing selling weapons to both sides. Corporations supplying prisons with various services lobby hard to keep prison populations high and rising. The introduction of "private" prisons is an example of this at it's worst extreme.

In prisons, after all, hard drugs prevail and intravenous use is the norm because marijuana's smell and plant-nature make it harder to smuggle, and smoking anything is easier to get caught at.
That's great for the company that corners the market on syringes.

Update: Recently on local news in Regina it was casually mentioned that 60% of drug arrests in Regina for 2003 were for Marijuana, this while marijuana was technically legal and also while a hard drug epidemic was (and still is) in full swing. Even people who favour prohibion could not, and probably wouldn't even try, to justify the twisted priorities of the Regina Police Service.

Daniel Johnson