PHARMACIST STEVE

http://www.barrowjournal.com/archives/12787-Buffington-Drug-laws-just-clogging-up-courts.html

America’s war on drugs has been a catastrophic failure. Look at the arrest and incident reports in this week’s newspaper to see just how little impact the current legal system has had on illegal drug use and abuse.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a massive amount of abuse of legal drugs across the country, as evidenced by the ongoing opioid epidemic.
It’s time the nation, from the federal government down to local governments, re-think these misguided efforts.
We are clogging up our courts and jails with people who often need addiction treatment, not a cell. In the process, we are sometimes ruining the lives of young people whose only “crime” was to get caught with a marijuana joint.
There has to be a better way to deal with serious drug addictions and minor recreational drug use in this country than to push citizens through the legal system’s meat grinder.
At the federal level, there are two things that need to happen:
•Remove marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug. As currently classified by the DEA, Schedule 1 drugs are supposed to have no accepted medical use and have a potential for abuse. Marijuana clearly doesn’t meet that standard. There’s a growing body of evidence that the chemicals found in the cannabis plant do have medical value. But medical research on cannabis has been stymied by its being classified by the federal government as a Schedule 1 compound. The reason marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug today has nothing to do with medical or scientific evidence and everything to do with politics. Before 1942, marijuana was listed as a legal medicine in the U.S. It was removed as a legal substance following the 1930s “reefer madness” propaganda. (That movement was rooted in an anti-Mexican sentiment sweeping California at the time. That grew into a national movement fueled by “yellow journalism” publisher William Randolph Hearst.) In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon went on a rampage against drugs, especially against marijuana which was connected to the anti-Vietnam War “hippie” movement. Nixon punished that movement, which didn’t support him politically, by having cannabis listed as a Schedule 1 drug under the DEA, an agency which his administration had helped create. It’s very clear that cannabis should not be listed as a dangerous, addictive drug that has no medical value. Congress should force the DEA to change that.
•In addition to ending the farce about marijuana, the federal government should crack down harder on the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture addictive opioid drugs and market them as being harmless. Some of that is happening and big pharma is increasingly coming under scrutiny for its role in creating the opioid crisis. (There isn’t space here to outline all those details, but if you’re interested look up Purdue Pharma and see how that company marketed OxyContin in the 1990s and early 2000s.) But more can be done by the feds to hold big pharma accountable for its misleading marketing of dangerous, addictive drugs.
At the state and local level, there are things that can also be done differently:
•Marijuana use should be decriminalized by state and local law enforcement. That’s already being done in some jurisdictions. Locally, the Town of Braselton has stopped arresting for minor marijuana possession and just issues a citation (like a speeding ticket) instead. The City of Jefferson does that sometimes, depending on who the arresting officer is. But too many other local law enforcement agencies continue to arrest people for having a small amount of marijuana. That’s nuts. It’s clogging up our courts and ruining the lives of people whose only offense is having a bag of weed in their car. Issue a ticket and unless someone is clearly under the influence of drugs, let them go on their way.
•The state government should put much more funding into mental health and addiction programs. Many of those who have addiction problems have other mental health or life problems. Putting these people in jail isn’t getting them the help they need.
•The state should continue to open the door to cannabis for medical use despite its conflicted status at the federal level. State legislators often say they can’t expand medical cannabis because of the feds, but that’s just a copout. State legislators are often willing to give their middle-finger to the feds on other issues, so why not this?
•More drug courts that focus on changing behavior rather than criminal punishment need to be created and funded by the state.
•Every local government should join in the class-action lawsuit that is aimed at suing the pharmaceutical companies that helped the opioid crisis. Several area governments have already signed on and those that haven’t should do so.
There are no magic formulas to ending drug addiction, just as there has never been a way to stop alcoholism. The nation tried Prohibition for 13 years and that only led to more crime and public corruption. The current prohibition on drugs has not been successful, either. Since 1973, we’ve had a sustained “war on drugs” where we’ve tried to use law enforcement as a weapon to change social behavior. It hasn’t worked. Screaming “law and order” failed.
It’s time to try something new.

Perhaps the “war on drugs” is just a methodology for our judicial system to become self-perpetuating industrial complex ?

Filed under: General Problems