Posted by doctork
On December the 23, 2010, a well known Christian Conservative, Dr. Pat Robertson, spoke to his audience about the need to decriminalize small personal possessions of marijuana, “a couple ounces, or so”. Dr. Robertson correctly observed that sentences for “marijuana offenses” are way too harsh, and that the whole “enforcement” business is costing this country an absolutely inordinate amounts of money. Former US Surgeon-General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, remarked on CNN prior to November elections that, because of the anti-Cannabis repression in this country we are criminalizing more of our population than any other country of the Civilized World. As Dr. Elders pointed out, and as many people already know, the prison population in this country practically exploded since 1970, or when the DEA “took over” along with the so-called “Controlled Substances Act” of 1970.
At the historic L.A. Conference organized by the Drug Policy Alliance in cooperation with the California Society of Addiction Medicine held on July 8, 2010, there was an almost total consensus about decriminalization of marijuana for personal use, while the California State Medical Association had already made a policy statement in which it expressed that “criminalization of marijuana is a failed public policy”. All this is after the Shafer’s Commission recommended decriminalizing marijuana back in 1972, and Judge Francis Young said in 1988 that “marijuana is the safest therapeutically-active substance known to men”. Why, then is marijuana still illegal in this country, why our everyday, decent, hard-working people are still being thrown in jail over the use of a natural substance with a multitude of medicinal properties? How is it that both the serious science and the common sense say “legalize (or, at least, decriminalize) Cannabis” to this government, but to no avail? How is the DEA able to fight “tooth and nail” the Medicinal Cannabis that has served humanity as medicine for thousands of years? In order to answer these, and some other questions, we need to look at what the L.A. Conference called the “Prison-Industrial Complex” in this country, an entity with tremendous amount of “lobbying power”, which is being headed and directed by none other than the DEA itself! It is very hard to really understand the despotic powers that these people have, and it is even harder to make others understand them, but what helps in my case is that I am a former political refugee from a world at one time ruled by the KGB, so the mechanics of this repression are made somewhat more “intelligible” for me.
When Pat Robertson made his remarks about the need to decriminalize Cannabis to the “700 Club”, he correctly observed that criminalization of marijuana costs this country a whole lot of money, in addition to the harsh, life destroying criminal sanctions directed at the people of this country for exercising their rights as free citizens. In order to even begin to understand the DEA’s iron grip on power in the United States, let’s look first at the current debate about cutting our Federal spending as a way to deal with the ballooning deficit. Many proposed spending “cuts” are being discussed, but have we noticed that there is practically no discussion about reducing the DEA budget, or that of the Prison-Industrial Complex as a whole? In fact, it appears to me that our so-called “representatives” in Congress would much rather talk about taxing a mother’s milk than about cutting the DEA budget together with its “marijuana enforcement”. Any one who would even dare to suggest that maybe the DEA should somehow contribute to the much-needed saving of resources, would be labeled as “soft on drugs” with the potential very unpleasant political consequences.
Read complete article here:
http://blogs.alternet.org/doctork/2011/01/10/the-dea-or-the-usa-that-is-the-question/