wipe out the already 60-billion dollar black market by placing marijuana in the open market. (Guideline #4)It is the enforcement of the laws criminalizing the possession, use, manufacture, and distribution of marijuana that are causing the violent crime. This war on drugs is wasting the money, as well as the lives of American people. The widely recognized opinion maker William F. Buckley, Jr. writes:...The time devoted to tracking down, arresting and then trying marijuana users and then trying marijuana users is perhaps the greatest exercise in lost time in contemporary activity. In the last two years, approximately 750,000 arrests were made in our mad, quixotic effort to stamp out marijuana. What this adds up to is millions of police hours spent on bootless missions, millions of hours of court time wasted, and millions of months in jail, using up space sorely needed to contain people who can't wait to get out in order to resume mugging and murdering. (Guideline #5)The drug laws imprison a multitude of otherwise law abiding people, a disproportionate number of them who are poor or minorities, for non violent acts that are directed at no one but themselves. Instead of eliminating drugs, the prohibition of them just fosters an illegal industry able to inflate prices. This is hauntingly familiar to the prohibition era of gangsters present when alcohol was illegal in the 1920's. Because drugs are sold on the black market, they cause violence, deaths due to no quality regulation, and diseases from sharing illegal drug paraphernalia. (Guideline #3, #6)The American Civil Liberties advocates the full decriminalization of the use, possession, manufacture, and distribution of drugs. It does this for constitutional reasons. The following is an excerpt from their policy on drugs which was adopted in 1994: Criminalizing the use, possession, manufacture, and distribution of drugs violates the principle that the criminal law may not be used to pro...
