War on Drugs becoming War on America

America's War on Drugs has failed to stop drug use, drug smuggling, and drug manufacturing in the USA.  What the WoD has successfully done is destroy Amercan lives and families.  Billions of our tax dollars have been thrown away in the pursuit of the War on Drugs.  Today, the United Nations announced for the entire world to hear that the Global War on Drugs is a total failure as well.  The Global Commission on Drug Policy report calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalization of drug users.


In response to the above, White House drug tsar Gil Kerlikowske rejected the panel's recommendations.  "Drug addiction is a disease that can be successfully prevented and treated," said a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.  "Making drugs more available - as this report suggests - will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe."


Let's forget about the staggering amount of money wasted, ignore that illegal drugs are in all possible ways worse now than at the start of the War on Drugs.  Further, we'll sidestep the issues of massive prison overcrowding caused by painfully overzealous arrest criteria and draconian sentencing due to WoD policies.  Instead, lets talk disease.


Drug addiction is not a disease.  Smallpox is a disease, agoraphobia is a disease, diabetes is a disease, but drug addiction is not.  Why not?  Nobody pushes the flu on a streetcorner, nobody buys an ounce of Obsessive-Compulsive disorder, nobody suffers withdrawals from cancer.  Nobody goes out of their way to get a disease, though drug addicts (alchohol included) will risk prison, disease, or death to get what they want - drugs.


The whole idea that drug addiction can be diagnosed and treated like a disease is worse than silly.  How?  There's no blood test to determine if you are a drug addict, no pill you can take to cure addiction.  In fact, the treatment Americans are far and away most likely to receive for addiction is prison.  Only the rich can afford effective rehabilitation, which still so very often fails. Tens of thousands of Americans each year are imprisoned on drug charges.  Jobs are lost, careers and marriages destroyed, and truckloads of money spent, all in the name of curing drug addiction.  That is worse than silly, it's insane.  It's like burning down the house to cure termites.


Even worse, despite clear and bloody lessons from America's prohibition past, our leaders continue to help drug dealers by increasing the price of their product and churning out MORE convicted drug offenders every day.  What do they expect convicts to do when they can't get a job, have no home to return to, and receive little help for their addiction beyond threats of more prison?  Some break the cycle, but more become fully acclimated criminals.  Imagine blowing up the house infested with termites and calling it a cure, though all that was accomplished was destroying a house and spreading the infection.


It wouldn't be hard to go on and on.  Many have, to no avail.  I just want to be clear -- this isn't about disease, it's about politics.  Doctors can't cure addiction, so how in the hell could a politician claim that power?  Yet many Americans go along with the lie. 


The reality is this:  The War on Drugs has damaged America and much of the rest of the world.  We Americans need to stand up and say "Stop" before the whole house burns down.