The War on Drugs is Over:
America and the End of Prohibition

Looks like it’s the beginning of the end. Yesterday’s Independent featured an excellent article by Hugh O’Shaughnessy called “US Waves White Flag in Disastrous ‘War on Drugs’”:

“After 40 years of defeat and failure, America’s “war on drugs” is being buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure of billions of dollars and the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people, a suitable epitaph for America’s longest “war” may well be the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be given the right to grow coca in its own backyard.”

and

“For the lives and sanity of millions, the seeing of the light is decidedly late. The conditions of the 1920s, when the US Congress outlawed alcohol and allowed Al Capone and his kin to make massive fortunes, have been re-created up and down Latin America.”

Highly recommended reading.  Are we finally coming out the dark ages?  It’s only in the last hundred years that we made it illegal to eat, drink, and/or smoke certain plants. Brainwaving.com has a fascinating history of what happened when drugs were legal and why they were prohibited.

All this comes in the same month that a New Jersey vote backed marijuana for the severely ill and California’s proposal to legalize and tax marijuana was approved by a key committee of the Assembly. Not to mention the opening of Oregon’s first marijuana restaurant/cafe.

Kind of ironic considering it was only last year the UK government reclassified cannabis as a Class B drug, meaning that in the eyes of the law, weed is as bad as amphetamines and barbiturates.

Fourteen states in the US now have medical marijuana laws, recognizing the positive potential of cannabis. Come on England!