Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

what is the best solution? Unsurprisingly, the federal government thinks that expanding it so more of our money can be wasted is the answer. The Wall Street Journal reported in July 2009 that the Obama administration is planning to toughen safety standards to try to prevent contamination of foods and ensure food industry compliance with federal standards. Generally, “tougher” means more expensive. So, the likely outcome is that government will get bigger, taxes will go up, and our food will be just as unsafe this year as it was last year.

Lie #11

“We Are Winning the War

on Drugs”

The “war on drugs” is a deceptive name for what has really become a war on the American people through the government’s assault on human freedom, the prison system, and all taxpayers. Despite nearly four decades of battling against the use and selling of drugs, the government’s so-called “war on drugs,” both at home and abroad, has largely been a failure. The tide of drugs imported into this country has not slowed, despite astronomical spending by the government and the imprisonment of record numbers of Americans, often for the possession of insignificant amounts of recreational drugs. Legislators, police, and prosecutors have encouraged judges to lock up more and more Americans, causing prisons to be bursting at the seams and ruining countless lives, a great many of them among racial minorities.

This government lie is hardly new; in fact, the “war on drugs” is in effect a reincarnation of prohibition. The sale of all alcoholic beverages was outlawed in 1920, with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Closing the legal market on something that consumers desire simply opened a black market, and in the 1920s, there was a great deal of corruption and violence caused by the government’s ban. It actually created the lawlessness that characterized the era. Consequently, gangs and organized crime flourished. By 1921, the murder rate in America jumped.1 After seemingly recognizing the harm that Prohibition had caused, the United States enacted the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933 to allow people to drink as they pleased.2 After Prohibition was repealed, the homicide rate began to fall.3 This is not a coincidence.

After the alcohol ban was repealed, much of the organized crime that was facilitated by Prohibition simply switched businesses and entered into the illegal drug market. Today (several decades after the “war on drugs” commenced), the black market for drugs is thriving. The parallels between today’s prohibition and yesterday’s prohibition are glaringly obvious and point to the government’s severe case of amnesia and its Victorian attitude about our bodies; except that this time, the stakes are higher. In our twenty-first-century global economy, the violence is not confined to the U.S.; it is worldwide. Ironically, in its metaphoric war on the use of drugs, the government has facilitated actual wars, actual violence, and actual death. It’s about time that the government put its weapons (and our cash) down and began to use some common sense.

The War on Taxpayers

Ethan Nadelmann has written extensively about the futile war on drugs. He is a former Princeton University professor and is the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that promotes alternatives to the drug war. In one 2003 speech he stated:

We’re a wealthy nation. If we want to lock up millions of our fellow citizens, we can afford to do that. . . . On the other hand, our economy is not what it once was. In the 1990s, incarcerating millions of people was something we could afford—10, 20, 30 billion dollars: a drop in the bucket of the national economy. But now . . . we can no longer afford this failed war on drugs.4

If America could not afford a war on drugs in 2003 when Nadelmann wrote this, we certainly can’t afford a war on drugs now with our ailing economy paired with ever-increasing government expenditures. Yet, is the question really “Can we afford it?” Wouldn’t “Why should we pay for it?” be a more appropriate question?

American taxpayers are once again forced to foot the bill. And a mammoth bill it is, as the United States spends at least $40 billion a year on costs directly related to the drug war, and then several billion more in indirect costs.5 The costs—of spraying Colombian crops, of hiring numerous DEA and other government employees, of locking up more people on drug charges than all of Western Europe locks up on all charges combined6—are astronomical. And these are only the direct costs. What about the welfare dependence that comes from creating a class of people who have drug-related crimes on their records and often cannot obtain employment?

The drug war is indeed perpetuating a harrowing cycle for people with drug use or drug sales in their past. For example, let’s say you were charged with sales and then were forced to spend some time in jail. Once you served your time and were released from prison, you decide to apply for some jobs. When you fill out employment applications, you are asked whether you have had a criminal record. If you check the “yes” box, chances are that you won’t be the employer’s first choice. If you check the “no” box, you are lying and could get into further trouble if the employer does a background check or finds out that you lied. There are no great options here.

Then, because you cannot find a legitimate job, it is difficult to make a living. This makes turning to the sale of drugs an easy and almost sensible option, even if that is not the choice you wanted to make. The point is that when the government locks ordinary people away for committing nonviolent, nonvictim, harmless drug crimes, it sets people up for repeat offenses.

It also makes welfare a very plausible option. Either way, taxpayer money goes to the huge cost of filling prisons or the huge cost of supporting people and their families when the breadwinner is imprisoned or unemployable. And