Yeah, This is Smart...

Lawmakers in at least eight US states are considering legislation to force the weak, the poor and the disaffected, who are also the economically, socially and legally disenfranchised (i.e. those on welfare, unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc) to take mandatory drug tests in exchange for receiving that massive amount of largesse from the state.

Okay then. Let's look at this with the jaundiced eye of reality. Let's say one of these poor saps flunks the test because he has marijuana in his system. He's immediately cut off whatever poor excuse for a living stipend that he has coming in, which means that in order for him to get some money to make up for that loss, he'll most likely turn to crime of some sort (if it's a male, it's usually burglary and if it's a female it's usually prostitution, but sometimes they go to something more hostile and with more potential for mayhem, like armed robbery) to make up for it. Immediately you have created a real criminal where only a "paper" criminal existed before.

And to go a step further, let's say that his neighbor is smart enough to know that marijuana stays in your system and is drug-testable for something like four weeks. So, knowing that he's going to be drug-tested in order to keep his unemployment benefits, he turns to something that metabolizes and disappears out of the system in 24 hours or less. Something like crack cocaine or heroin. He gets to keep his benefits as long as he's more than one day away from the test (and who isn't smart enough to pull that one off?).

Now it comes down to this: Who do you want living next door to you? That pot smoker who is always laid back and groovy, or the guy on the other side who's cranked up on crack cocaine and thinks that your dog is working for the CIA and your cat is taking secret spy-camera x-ray photos of his testicles?

This is what the so-called War on Drugs has gotten us after 40 years: A bad investment in time, money and resources. If you ask me, we should just do what Paul Harvey (yes, that Paul Harvey) suggested about Vietnam, also 40 years ago: Declare a victory and get out.

I don't know how many billions of dollars, all told, are squandered on this phony "war", but it's a hell of a lot when you count up all of the time and equipment and salaries and man-hours squandered in the areas of Coast Guard interdiction, on-land law enforcement, the overworked court system and the overcrowded prison population. We'd have a much small budget crisis if we diverted all that cash into something where we actually had a chance of making the money work for us. Like universal health care or expanded Head Start programs.

It's about time that we realized that after 40 years of stalemate, the so-called War on Drugs is over. We lost. It's time to take a new direction, and penalizing the poor, the weak and the disaffected even more is a losing proposition from the get-go. Legalize drugs, tax the hell out of them, and recognize finally that no one -- I repeat NO ONE -- has EVER died from a marijuana overdose.

Because there ain't no such thing...