RETIRE WAR ON DRUGS

Retired U.S. General Barry McCaffrey has announced that he is now retiring
from his position as America's drug czar.

If only he would take the war on drugs with him.

Of all the domestic wars that the U.S. government has waged in the last
several decades, the war on drugs has got to be the most immoral and
destructive of them all.

The drug war has constituted a frontal attack on individual liberty. It has
caused the death and destruction of innocent people, not only in America
but overseas as well.

And by everyone's standards, the war on drugs has failed to accomplish its
own purported goals despite at least 30 years of warfare.

The drug war enables and encourages the police to peer into your windows,
examine your trash, monitor your bank accounts, turn your children into
stool pigeons, and haul you into court and send you to jail for engaging in
what public officials consider to be personal, immoral conduct within the
privacy of your very own home.

What do they have to show for it after 30 years of warfare? Good intentions?

Through it all, they've never answered two fundamentally important
questions with respect to the issue of individual liberty.

Why should the state have the power to punish adults for ingesting harmful
substances?

Doesn't the very essence of human liberty entail the unfettered right to
engage in self-destructive behaviour?

For more than three decades, the drug war has assaulted our liberty,
invaded our privacy, increased our taxes, and provided an innocent cover
for government bigotry.

It's time to put the was on drugs out to pasture.