Law enforcement professionals against the war on drugs

So good I lifted it verbatem from BoingBoing

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Law enforcement professionals against the war on drugs
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition is an international organization of cops, district attorneys, judges, corrections officers and others who oppose the war on drugs.
I've lost a few friends to prohibition, people who took unknown street drugs and overdosed as a result, and I lived in a crack neighborhood for years in San Francisco. Though I don't take narcotics (I did when I was younger, but ran out of time to indulge in either liquor or drugs when my life got very busy in my mid-twenties) I believe that prohibition of drugs leads to far worse evils that even the abuse of drugs engender.

I further believe that the war on drugs criminalizes otherwise law-abiding people and forces them into criminal contexts to engage in something that is intended only to change their own mental state. Finally, I believe that the law has no business telling adults which chemicals they can take to change what and how they think.

After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over half-a-trillion tax dollars and increasingly punitive policies, our confined population has quadrupled over a 20 years period making building prisons this nation's fastest growing industry. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.6 million for nonviolent drug offenses‹more per capita than any country in the world. The United States has 4.6 percent of the population of the world but 22.5 percent of the world's prisoners. Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs. Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before. We would suggest that this scenario must be the very definition of a failed public policy. This madness must cease!

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