I don’t want to be complicit in my own oppression. I’m going to fight it however I can, even if my impact is less than the words I use to describe it.
The drug war oppresses and damages us all.
I don’t want to smoke pot. I don’t want to smoke opium. I don’t want to pop Adderall, Oxycontin, or Xanax. I don’t want to shoot meth or heroine. Yet the drug war is out there like poison in the water waiting to destroy the innocent along with the guilty.
The drug war has militarized the police and it has brutalized and corrupted the justice system. The drug war has repealed the fourth amendment to the constitution which is supposed to keep us secure in our persons and property. The fourth amendment is invalid if someone suspects you have a few flakes of pot in your pocket.
The use of SWAT teams has exploded. Special Weapons and Tactics used to be reserved for special situations—quasi-military situations, calling for a quasi-military response. SWAT teams are supposed to be for bank robberies gone wrong with a dozen hostages in danger and maybe a ticking time bomb somewhere in the mix.
Now SWAT teams are battering down the doors of private citizens on a daily basis. A SWAT team could be on your lawn tonight because of a typo on a search warrant or because someone made a malicious phone call.
I hope they don’t ever come to your door with high-powered rifles and battering rams. I hope not. But it would be nice to have a better guarantee than hope.
The oppression caused by the drug war is not because it prevents me from taking drugs. The oppression is the brutality and cruelty of how our system makes “war” on drugs. The oppression is from the lost and ruined lives. It’s from the fines, fees and lengthy prison sentences generated by the prosecution of petty behaviors that do not have unwilling victims.
The oppression is in the deaths of thousands per year—not caused by the drugs, but by the “war” on drugs.
Cocaine is dangerous. It’s highly addictive and causes about 1000 sudden heart attacks per year. A lethal dose is about 1.5 grams—a little more than ¼ teaspoon. Altogether, about 5000 people die every year from cocaine.
For every person who dies of cocaine poisoning ten more die because cocaine is illegal. They are killed by law enforcement. They are killed by dealers. They are killed in prison. They are killed by other addicts.
There might be hundreds of thousands of people who lives are ruined just by the addiction itself. For every person whose life is ruined by addiction, 100 more have their lives ruined by law enforcement, the justice system, prison. They are casualties of the war on drugs, not the drug itself.
And marijuana isn’t addictive. Marijuana doesn’t even have a lethal dose. Nobody knows how much marijuana it would take to kill you. Nobody has ever died of it.
Thousands, possibly millions, have died because marijuana is illegal. None of have died of the marijuana itself.
If you make heroine available to lab rats they will compulsively self-administer the drug. That is how the addictive properties of a drug are usually studied.
Lab rats will not self-administer marijuana. They will self-administer cocaine or opium, but not pot.
The DEA website says that pot is addictive, but that is not based on laboratory studies. That is based on a non-scientific definition of the word “addiction.” Using the DEA’s criteria, chocolate is addicting. So are football and video games.
Withdrawal from heroine or Oxycontin causes seizures, vomiting, muscle cramps and other forms of extreme physical discomfort. Withdrawal should be undertaken under medical supervision. (Keep in mind that opioid withdrawal is far less dangerous than withdrawal from perfectly legal alcohol.)
Withdrawal from pot will cause anxiety, paranoia, nervousness and other mild emotional systems. But even the DEA admits that those symptoms are present only after very heavy use, which is rare among users.
Light use among heroine addicts is not common because heroine is physically addictive. The user must increase the dose to have the same effect and there is a significant physical penalty if the user skips a regular dose.
There is no similar penalty if a user stops smoking pot for a while. Light use is common. Quitting is easy.
Why is marijuana in the same classification as heroine? Why is marijuana even illegal? Why was it made illegal in the first place?
And why have we allowed the justice system become a source of oppression rather than protection?
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