Forget Meth And Other Hard-Core Drugs -- The Administration Would Rather Waste Taxpayer Dollars In An All-Out Assault On Marijuana

More than two decades after it was launched in response to the spread of crack cocaine -- and in the midst of a brand-new wave of methamphetamine use sweeping the country -- the government crackdown has shifted from hard drugs to marijuana.

Pot now accounts for nearly half of drug arrests nationwide -- up from barely a quarter of all busts a decade ago. Spurred by a Supreme Court decision in June affirming the right of federal agents to crack down on medical marijuana,

The Drug Enforcement Administration has launched a series of high-profile raids against pot clinics in California, and police in New York, Memphis and Philadelphia have been waging major offensives against pot smokers that are racking up thousands of arrests.

By almost any measure, however, the war has been as monumental a failure as the invasion of Iraq. All told, the government sinks an estimated $35 billion a year into the War on Drugs. Yet illegal drugs remain cheap and plentiful, and coca cultivation in the Andes -- where the Bush administration has spent $5.4 billion to eradicate cocaine -- rose twenty-nine percent last year. "Drug prices are at an all-time low, drug purity is at an all-time high, and polls show that drugs are more available than ever," says Bill Piper, national affairs director for the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug-reform organization in Washington, D.C. :

Pubdate: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 Source: Rolling Stone (US) Copyright: 2005 Straight Arrow Publishers Company, L.P. Website: http://www.rollingstone.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/373 Author: Robert Dreyfuss Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v05.n1196.a10.html