NYTimes piece for Drug Legalization from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

Nice piece by President Carter with links to recent pro-legalization report by Global Commission on Drug Policy HERE.

The global war on drugs perverts us in big and small ways. A few:

1. Markets where the state abrogates its ability to enforce contracts lead to immense violence in communities. In this manner the global war on drugs has genocidal consequences in places like Mexico, Afghanistan, and urban black and rural white communities in the United States. The violence and dehumanization resulting from mafiazation are debilitating to hundreds of millions of people just trying to live decent lives.
2. Incarcerating people in an effort to save them destroys tens of millions of lives. In the United States now a black person born this year has a one in four chance of being incarcerated in the worst prison system among industrialized countries. As with the mafiazation of society, putting so many African American males behind bars has predictably awful consequences on the institution of marriage and rearing of children (children in one parent households are, all else being held equal (including standard of ling) are twenty times more likely to be incarcerated at some point in their lives).
3. All of the wasted resources in prosecuting the war on drugs and massive incarceration could be invested in something else, like infrastructure, the adequate construction of which creates the good jobs that aren't available in communities where young men are drawn to the drug trade. Likewise, decent public infrastructure is one marker of a decent society (versus the Pakistanization model of private opulence for the few and public squalor for everyone else which is sole policy prescription of the Republican Party in the United States).
4. Medicine is warped in horrificly sadistic ways as drug warriors make it impossible for millions of people to adequately medicate their pain. Recent research has shown that hallucinogens such as LSD, mushrooms, and peyote have (when used under clinical supervision) far, far better outcomes for treating depression than any of the current legal prescription medicines. It is clear now that making theses drugs illegal even in clinical settings is an act of gross inhumanity to the mentally ill. Likewise, people in chronic pain and the doctors who treat them have been imprisoned in the United States, making it harder for everyone else to get decent medical care. Anyone who has had a horrible gall or kidney stone in the United States knows this drill, where they won't give you pain medicine for hours while you are going through the worst pain of your life, just because a drug addict might be faking the pain to get the medicine. This was borderline traumatic for me with my gall stones, and I know I am not alone. For example a prominent philosopher I know has serious neuroses about pointed objects ever since as a child he was not given anaesthesia while an interveneous tube that went from his thigh to his heart was pulled out, as he was held down screaming; one of my friends was refused morphine as a child as he was forced to sit in a hot salt bath as the dead skin from the third degree burns that covered his arms was scrubbed away, again he was held down and screaming for the long ordeal and has mental scars to match those on his arms to this day. Thankfully, hopspice has waged a successful war on undermining the most sadistic of these policies against the terminally ill. Given the amount of human suffering remediated as a result, this is a story that needs to be told.
5. Public Stupidity- Like the embargo on Cuba, supply side economics, Apartheid in Israel (to be fair, supported by neither the majority of Americans nor Israelis), the war on drugs is yet another sacred cow that politicians all lie to us about, even though there is overwhelming and obvious evidence that would lead any morally decent informed person to go against the status quo. We are all made stupider by this, and I can't help but believe that the prevalence in such obvious public lies (in democracies with free presses!) cause all sorts of unrelated policy paralysis and corruption.

Anyhow, please read and link above to President Carter's nice piece and also read the report to which he links. Lots of conservative stalwarts who worked with Reagan and the United Nations and diplomatic community to bring about the immoral and idiotic status quo on drug policy have radically changed their minds. Unfortunately, no major United States politician is willing to agree with them, and Obama's "drug war Czar" predictably criticized the report in a reprehensibly dishonest manner last week.

We fought the war on drugs and drugs won! A basic level of sanity and non-sadism here and abroad require public admission of this fact and radical change in policy.

It is going to take decades for Mexico, Afghanistan, the poorer areas of the United States, and so many other areas of the world to recover from widespread mafiazation and all the other pathologies described above. The world desperately needs the chance to start healing.