The Damage (Add or replace sources as you please. That s definitely the most help.

) I claimed that no evidence exists for the dangers that cannabis poses, and this is true physiologically, psychologically, and in regard to society as a whole. I ll take the evidence in reverse order, as the effects on society have been so devastating that they deserve attention above any possible medical ramifications of inhaling cannabis smoke. One only has to look at the federal agencies which are nearly bursting at the seams with money reaped from self-sustaining evidence seizure which actually takes the form of federal police literally confiscating the money from the pockets of patients at state medical dispensaries. These are legitimate and legal medical establishments, mind you, though the Executive Branch occasionally forgets the en vogue state s rights argument when convenience is too convincing. The money is bloody and greasy, and its odor so repugnant as to be unbearable to any lover of liberty. In May of 2010, the Seattle Weekly ran a piece explaining that police took $80 cash from a 9year-old girl s Mickey Mouse wallet in one of these infamous trash-and-dash faux-sting operations. What could I write that would exemplify the horror and cruelty of Prohibition than this under-reported and absolutely shameful act of civil savagery? Overall, the War on Drugs has cost an estimated $2 trillion, a staggering amount compared to the piddling $700 million Congress saw fit to retract from National Public Radio. The DEA itself has an annual budget of $2.5 billion which is so clearly a waste of money that words seem to fail me. Add to this cocktail the individual lives ruined and we have ourselves a senselessly swarthy potion. Imagine being arrested three times for cannabis possession (again, a clearly victimless crime) and, on the fourth go-around, you are imprisoned for life. A life in prison is no life at all, and the suffering of one of these poor individuals weighs heavily upon our collective conscience, whether or not we choose to acknowledge them. Robin Spottedcrow, a mother from Kingfisher, OK, was handed a 10-year prison sentence for selling $31 worth of cannabis to a police informant. Entrapment or not, the suffering this woman has endured at the hands of unscrupulous lawmakers (more breakers ) is chillingly Orwellian. Cannabis prohibition truly is sensory prohibition, and it was not just a literal authoritarian regime that we were warned against. Rejecting 1984 in 2012 must be one of our main priorities. There are no boogey men, but grey suits can be just as terrifying. Lawrence Krauss put it perfectly when he claimed that there is no size pre-requisite for tyranny. What we can see are well-armed paramilitary groups barging into legitimate and licensed medical practices; this must cease immediately. There is a measurable way to assess the damage Prohibition has done; not quite an equation, but a metric for equality it can be. The three variables are Users, Preventers, and Liberty; the balance between these has been skewed and skewered so that Users vastly outnumber Preventers, and Liberty is lost almost completely in the tussle. This is why the United States currently has the highest prison population in the world. Second place goes to Rwanda. Minorities are ten times as likely to be imprisoned rendering Prohibition, almost impossibly, just that much more insidious. Beneath the civilized veneer of our dusty legal system lies the ever-present threat of arms. How can a legal maneuver called rational review possibly stand up for itself when the little guy is threatened by unprecedented firepower? Cannabis smokers are allegedly not a protected class but a law which persecuted

drinkers would be just as unwelcome as the ban against smokers is. Jazz musicians in the 1920 s referred to fellow musicians who enjoyed cannabis as vipers and those who preferred alcohol This is what I mean when I call Prohibition a charade. We pretend to honor the heroes who have perished in the line of duty with flowery parades while steadfastly refusing to address the rotten core of chronic miscalculation. We have to choose one of two options: either we impose stricter penalties for users and dealers--similar to Singapore or Malaysia--or we act adult and assume that individuals can best decide what is proper to put in their own bodies. Our interdiction efforts have served only to galvanize criminals into submarine-piloting super villains, the ugliest capitalism the world has ever seen.