Dave’s Reviews > Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure > Status Update

At a conference of forensic scientists in Cincinnati, the chief toxicologist for North Carolina's medical examiner asked, "Is there anybody in the audience who would submit urine for cannaboid testing if his career, teputation, freedom or livelihood depended on it?" Not a single hand was raised.

Don't talk about the lives, taxpayer dollars, and civil liberties sacrificed for the Drug War. Don't talk about the culture and race wars waged under the Drug War battle flag. Don't talk about the medical potential of illegal drugs. Don't talk at all. Just say no. (2/2)

But Just Say No did something insidious. It reduced the debate to a single word. Don't talk about why people use drugs. Don't ask why Halcion and malt liquor are legal drugs while marijuana and cocaine are not. Don't talk about the difference between drug use and drug abuse. Don't talk about the tendency of prohibition to promote violence and the use of stronger or more dangerous drugs. (1/2)

Manufacturing jobs began disappearing in the 1980s for the first time since the Great Depression... But dope-smoking workers were not the problem. Industrial America was collapsing because companies were putting their money not into developing products and building factories to make them, but rather into buying and selling each other.

Acknowledging that it had come up with "politically inconvenient scientific knowledge," NAS found "no convincing evidence" that pot permanently damages the brain or nervous system, or decreases fertility. As for the legal question, small-quantity possession should not be a crime, the report said. "Alienation from the rule of law in a democratic society may be the most serious cost of the current [pot] laws."

Cocaine, occasionally used as a topical anesthetic, was a Schedule 2 drug, but marijuana was classified as being as deadly and useless as heroin. Finally, as one FDA official put it, marijuana will never be a legal drug because "there's no profit incentive to develop marijuana"; anybody can grow it.

"I think there is a genuine hypocrisy in all of this. The people in the federal government [are] just kidding themselves and kidding the people when they say we have mounted a massive war on narcotics when they know darned well that the massive war they have mounted in narcotics is only going to be effective at the margins." John Ehrlichman

"The government line is that the use of marijuana leads to more dangerous drugs," David Smith told reporters. "The fact is the *lack* of marijuana leads to more dangerous drugs."