Army storm troopers set off into the battle zone, well equipped for any challenge. Suddenly, they run into an enormous problem: The enemy is a phantom. Believe it or not, I am not talking about the war in Afghanistan.
If I were only endowed with the skill and the determination of a true journalist, I could probably cite a shocking statistic to point out the astronomical amount of money the United States spends battling drugs, but it is much more convenient for my purposes to make up a number. Each year, the government spends $9.7 kajillion on an unjust and never-ending conflict.
In addition to the fact that the monstrous cost of the war on drugs is a bigger waste of money than an investment in Enron, the U.S. drug policy has a mind-boggling amount of problems.
In recent years, forces in the government have attempted to stamp out the growing demand for the legalization of marijuana for medicinal purposes. While U.S. legislators have a glorious history of withholding necessities from the suffering masses, they usually keep such injustices to places that don't concern their constituents, like Iraq.
It is difficult to comprehend denying patients valuable relief just because of slight side effects of the drug. Using the same logic, imagine if they discovered that Immodium A-D sometimes causes people to laugh hysterically while watching \Loony Tunes."" That would make for some terrible lines for the bathroom in the Humanities building.
Another preposterous feature of the policy on drugs directly affecting our campus denies financial aid to students with past drug offenses. Shockingly, the law takes away the rights of drug offenders, but does not place restrictions on violent criminals.
Although it may not be apparent, there is a certain benefit to the ridiculous law. By restricting people with drug charges on their record and admitting more violent offenders, college students throughout the nation can rest assured that the Lunchable supply at their local store will never be depleted and that the annoying kid who sets the curve on the calculus exam will be beaten down by a maniacal assault artist.
There are also racist inconsistencies in the drug policy: Minorities are locked up for drug offenses at a disproportionatly high rate. Thankfully, Sept. 11 has given us a new excuse to unjustly incarcerate people whose skin color frightens us, and we no longer have to rely on drugs for all of our racial profiling needs.
Even if you ignore the racist double standard, incarceration is nothing more than a useless fa??ade to avoid dealing with the real problems of drug use. While drug abuse is a serious problem, it seems to me that forcing somebody to go upstate and become Fat Earl's bitch is much more likely to promote heroin use than to cure addiction.
Perhaps one of the most surprising things about the drug war is the hypocrisy of it all. For the most part, the people that are now persecuting our generation for experimenting with drugs are the same people that were rolling joints in the parking lot of Grateful Dead concerts just decades ago.
All too many times, I've heard people give ludicrous justifications for their support of the drug war, such as, ""I used to smoke, but it was much less potent back then,"" or, ""I used to snort coke, but that was before I was president of the United States.""
The hypocritical, propagandizing nonsense of the war on drugs is enough to make me sick to my stomach. Does anybody have any Immodium A-D?
