A great article on the futile "drug war" and its terrible consequences appears this month in Harper's.  Started by Prez Tricky Dicky this monumentally stupid war has caused death, anguish and untold expense for naught much like the tax policies of Reagan that have brought us to this sorry point in economic history. Unfortunately neither is still alive to have the devastating results shoved into their faces. The author of this Harper's piece tells of his visit to former Nixon aide Erlichman. Excerpt:

"I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this [drug war] was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “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’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”"

Read about the results and what we ought to be doing in the Harper's article by Dan Baum here.