These Doctors Want to Abolish the DEA
https://www.civilized.life/articles/doctors-abolish-dea/
Laws that prohibit drugs aren’t meant to keep the public safe, they are meant to silence opposition. And, when making decisions at the ballot box, voters must consider and compare how the candidates would spend taxpayer money. Candidates that support the war on drugs must be voted out and it is time voters push for the closure of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
The DEA has its roots in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), founded in 1930 under President Herbert Hoover. Noted racist and lead champion of cannabis prohibition, Harry Anslinger, was appointed to be the first commissioner. In 1968, the FBN became the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the predecessor to the DEA and a massive governmental bureaucracy whose existence relies on drug prohibition.
President Nixon’s top aid, John Ehrlichman, even admitted the war was racist and wasteful, saying Nixon’s war on drugs was really an effort to have a weapon for Nixon to marginalize his two biggest political enemies: people of color and the antiwar left.
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I am saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroine and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt these communities.
“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meeting and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did,” Erlichman said.
Wasteful expenditure of billions of dollars
This war strategy worked beyond Nixon’s wildest imagination and has led to the wasteful expenditure of hundreds of billions of tax dollars, the destruction of millions of lives, the rise of well-armed gangs, a significant role for the sale of illicit drugs to fund terrorism and the erosion of our Constitutional rights. There has been bipartisan support for the failed war on marginalized people and the massive amounts of government waste it generates. It’s time for voters to say enough is enough.
If the American public pushes their elected officials to rearrange their priorities, existing law enforcement could be employed to investigate terrorism instead. Do we really need the DEA? After all, over 90 percent of the drug war is related to cannabis, and it’s becoming legal state by state. Still, there are over 800,000 cannabis arrests per year, easily dwarfing the arrests for other drugs.
Treating marijuana use as a crime is ‘absurd’
Of course, the whole idea of treating the medical condition of substance abuse criminally, rather than medically, is absurd. The law enforcement approach is compounded by defining drug use as drug abuse.
If we took a harm reduction approach we could dramatically cut the $18-billion currently spent on prioritizing the enforcement of draconian drug laws. Also, if there was no longer an illicit drug market we would take money out of the pocket of terrorists. More importantly, we would have trained law enforcement personnel who could focus on tracking down would-be terrorists and combating terrorism.
Dr. Arnold Leff has come up with a timely idea that I support – abolish the DEA. Leff was President Nixon’s associate deputy director of the Special Action Office on Drug Abuse and has spent his career in public health.
The bulk of DEA agents are almost ideally suited to track down terrorists. We should move the vast majority of current DEA agents to the department of Homeland Security and put them to work where they can do some good: tracking down terrorists and preventing terrorist attacks.
Americans must ask themselves, what is their law enforcement priority?
Dr. David Bearman is a pioneer in medical cannabis, pain management and harm reduction. His work spans decades in California and beyond. His medical practice is located in Santa Barbara, California.
Filed under: General Problems
Do we really believe that the pool of politicians we have right now is going to do anything different than the ones in office right now?
In our presidential election.
First we have Jill Stein 4% support who’s Green Party ideals are great for our environment and would definitely push for the federal legalization of Marijuana, but she lacks the populations support.
What about the Independent presidential candidate who is not on the ballots in every state but it looks as if he will win Utah hands down? He’s an ex CIA agent who has probably done just as much to keep Marijuana illegal as the rest of the government.
Then there is Gary Johnson who also supports the legalization of Marijuana but lacks the foreign policy knowledge and only has approximately 8% of the populations support.
Hillary Clinton, who will probably win the presidency will NOT support the legalization of Marijuana and will continue to push for the reduction of opiate manufacturing and restrictions to access. She will do this because she is a career politician and makes decisions based on flawed information given to her by advisors. exe. The War in Iraq.
Then we have the BAT CRAP CRAZY final candidate who is definitely NOT a Republican, just says he is. BUT contrary to popular belief, he the answer. His honesty is non existing and bigotry is evident. He only says what he says and does what he does in order to create civil unrest and divided beliefs. History has had many just like him and you would figure that people would remember people who gained political support by creating fear and discrimination in a population. Hitler would be proud of the Republican candidate, but I’m positive Abraham Lincoln is turning over in his grave right now.
I see our only chance as our down party candidates. We need to get answers and vote accordingly. We all know how our current representatives feel about both MMJ and opiate pain medications. If these lawmakers remain in office nothing will change. The chronic pain community has a responsibility to send a message to all these career politicians. That message is that we are a deciding electoral force that refuses to sit idly by why our medications are taken away.