Anthony Citrano on the Drug War

Here is an excerpt from Huffposts Anthony Citrano on the drug war:

This year, about two million people will be arrested for a drug offense. In a great number of these cases, young Americans guilty of nothing more than the possession of a politically incorrect intoxicant - ranging from marijuana to crack cocaine - will be separated from their families, stripped of eligibility for student aid, and eternally exiled from the world of gainful employment. This unfolds hundreds of times each day while we - the privileged - sip our martinis and dare wonder why they don't make better lives for themselves.

These policies have amounted to nothing short of a genocide. Millions of supposedly free Americans - most of them poor black Americans - have been arrested, imprisoned, and had their hopes and futures destroyed - all for possessing the moral equivalent of a bottle of wine.

Beyond staggering social costs, these policies have seriously damaged the Constitutional rights of us all. In the name of protecting us from our vices, we have assented to the evisceration of our fourth, fifth, eighth and tenth Amendment rights. And recently, in the Supreme Court's Morse v. Frederick decision (colloquially known as "Bong Hits for Jesus"), we trimmed our hallowed First Amendment rights as well: the Court actually ruled that speech can be selectively punished based merely on its marijuana-based content. This is a flagrant affront to the Framers' First Amendment intent that no idea should ever be considered too dangerous to be heard.

Our double standards are staggering: American television networks sandwich "anti-drug" ads between beer commercials and dreamy sequences that promote "medications" to cheer us up. That most of us miss the irony is a vivid demonstration of our blindness; it would be funny were it not so heartbreaking

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