If Barack Obama or John McCain wants to find a federal program that wastes hundreds of billions of dollars, he can take the scalpel (or better yet the hatchet) to the national war on drugs. Economists, physicians, police chiefs and prison wardens have repeatedly concluded that the drug war has been a very costly failure over the past four decades, but then neither Obama nor McCain needs to hear the truth from any expert -- because each of them can draw on his own painful personal experience.
The war on drugs HAS, however, been quite successful at incarcerating hundreds of thousands of mostly African-American citizens, although the incidence of drug use in the African-American community is similar to the incidence of drug use in the Euro-American community. This war has led to a very "profitable" prison-building industry (profits going to the builders of the prisons). There were almost 830,000 marijuana arrests in 2007, 89% for possession.
From opposite ends of the social and economic scale, both candidates have observed the casualties and injustices of American drug policy. Both should be able to understand why the system of punishment must be replaced by a paradigm of medical treatment. And both seem reluctant to discuss the subject for obvious reasons.
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The only reason to talk about past drug abuse by Barack Obama or Cindy McCain is to point out the waste and injustice of the ongoing drug war. Both of them broke the law, repeatedly, by their own admission, but neither deserved to go to prison and no useful purpose would have been served by punishing them.
Today we spend well over $50 billion annually at the federal, state and local levels on a domestic war that has never achieved any of its objectives and never will. If either of the presidential candidates still believes that this is a worthwhile investment of our money, despite his own experience, it would be fascinating to hear him explain why.
The so-called "war on drugs" (it was never a war on DRUGS - drugs don't have money, houses, families, armies, navies, or air forces: wars are always ALWAYS waged against human beings) was really a marketing tool for "law and order" candidates to run on, for the "silent-majority" to feel good about, and for the "Reagan democrats" to point to -- a rejections of the DFH's of the 60's, but, FAR more important, symbolically -- a way to incarcerate dark-skinned people and make light-skinned people feel somehow "safer."
