IT'S TIME TO LEGALIZE DRUGS AND BAN POLITICIANS

Imagine a system where in order to save you from the potential danger
posed by crossing the street, someone will throw you off a tall
building. This is the current insanity of drug policy. In order to
'protect citizens from the danger of drugs', we throw people in prison.

Drugs are dangerous; I am smart enough to grant that. You can overdose
easily on most drugs, and that includes alcohol. I've had enough booze
in me until I hallucinated pirates and such and probably could've died
from it. Do I think alcohol should be illegal? No. Because when taken
responsibly, alcohol isn't that dangerous; the same is true for the
bulk of the drugs out there now. Indeed, much of the danger of drugs
today lies in the illegality of it-buying drugs of unknown potency
from shady characters raises the risk, for certain.

But ask anyone who has been to prison for a substantial amount of time
and they will tell you that prison is a dangerous place where you are
almost ensured that you will come out of it worse for having been
there. In addition to the constant danger of prison violence, an
inscrutable 'convict code' and the fact that many prisons in the US
date back to the Civil War and have substandard electrical wiring and
other problems, one has to consider that it is a place of intense
psychological damage-of deprivation and squalor meant as pure
punishment for having done something harmful to others.

Prison is designed not to be a place that is safe or comfortable or
helpful. Drugs have dangerous potential, but prison has dangerous
certainty. And that, at the end of the day, is the truth of drug
policy; we trade the potential danger to a citizen for a certain
danger. To top it all off, we buy this trade off at a significant markup.

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the federal
government spends roughly $600 every second enforcing drug laws.
That's $600 of taxpayer money every second to increase the profit
margins of dangerous drug cartels in Mexico. This year, state and
federal governments have already spent more than $12.5 billion to make
drugs more lucrative and to warehouse mostly non-violent drug
offenders, roughly half of whom are arrested for marijuana.

You know, though, that marijuana's never jumped up and taken a
percentage of my paycheck every two weeks. DMT, LSD, PCP or mushrooms
haven't spent that percentage of my paycheck on stupid programs like
building a $2 million outhouse in a national park with a relatively
small number of visitors each year or some such. Politicians, though,
have.

Politicians will spend your tax dollars on a crappy little button
that's supposed to say "reset", but instead says "overcharge" because
the translator they paid too much to do the job couldn't be bothered
to, you know, do the job right. And certainly couldn't bother to
render Russian in Cyrillic. Politicians will spend your tax dollars on
giving another nation's politicians region-specific DVDs, so they
can't be watched by the recipient (who doesn't even like movies that
much, anyway).

Politicians will spend your tax dollars on a War on Drugs to send
stoners to jail, all while they themselves have admitted to smoking
the stuff themselves, and having not only survived since having done
it, but thrived. Indeed, some notable pot smokers and coke-snorters
have become the leaders of the free world. And yet, they'll tell us
proles that if we ever even touch the stuff, we'll end up in a gutter
offering sexual favors in exchange for an ounce of weed, and that's if
we're lucky!

However, most importantly there is a quote from Terrence McKenna
(noted author, philosopher, ethnobotanist, and originator of novelty
theory): "Psychedelics are not illegal because a loving government is
concerned you will jump from a third story window, psychedelics are
illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid
down models of behavior and thought processes. They open you up to the
possibility that everything you know is wrong, and government and
society spend a lot of money educating you into being a loyal worker,
consumer, debt payer and citizen."

At the end of the day, the real danger of politicians is their need
for control of the population. That is their drug. They're high on
control, they have a fetish for doing so with massive populations,
fusing polyamory and domination into a sick game they play with us on
a daily basis. They aren't motivated to raise tons of money to accept
what is for most of them a gigantic pay cut just so they can protect
you. They do it because they are addicts-control junkies, and they're
constantly strung out and looking for their next fix.

So, how about we do a little trial run for the next couple decades and
flip it around? Legalize drugs, ban politicians. We've tried it the
current way, and we're seeing where it's gotten us.