Report Shows Marijuana is Focus of Drug War

Rev.Holden Greene

http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/050505mjdrugwar.cfm

As ONDCP Launches New Scare Campaign, Report Proves That "War on Drugs" Has Become "War on Marijuana"
Thursday, May 5, 2005

This week The Sentencing Project, a think tank based in Washington, DC, released a report with a conclusion that comes as no surprise to drug policy reformers: the "war on drugs" has become a war on marijuana. The report examines statistics on arrests, sentencing and incarceration for 1990-2002, and finds that marijuana arrests increased 113% in that time period, and 79% of the increase in drug arrests in the 1990s was for marijuana possession.

The cost of targeting marijuana offenders is $4 billion each year - a strong contradiction to drug war bureaucrat claims that the current approach to drug policy is an efficient use of taxpayer money. The Sentencing Project's report is one more strong piece of evidence that the "drug war" has failed.

Rather than using this information to consider revising its strategy, the ONDCP is plowing ahead with a new campaign to push the idea that marijuana use leads to mental illness despite serious questions about the methodology of the study on which that claim is based. An ad they plan to run in newspapers nationwide next week also features the debunked myth of marijuana being more potent today than it was 30 years ago.

The office continues to tout other distorted statistics as well - for example, claiming that the number of people seeking treatment for "marijuana abuse" is on the increase, without making clear that the majority of people who enter marijuana treatment are forced to do so by the courts. Alliance director Ethan Nadelmann said, "It's a tragedy that 50% of people who want treatment can't get it becasue the criminal justice system is filling up much needed spots by coercing marijuana users into treatment. They're misrepresenting the facts in order to justify a $40 billion failure - the war on drugs."

For more information, you can read the report here, or a front page Washington Post article on the findings here.
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Tyler Durdan

Echo · Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 9:36 pm Post subject:

It's a war on marijuana users, against people. Scary uh?
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**Ferre** · Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 2:23 am Post subject:

People should read this: Agency of FEAR - Origins of the Drug Enforcement Agency (pdf)
Opiates and Political Power in America. The Story of How the Drug Enforcement Administration Came to Be.
By Edward Jay Epstein
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