I just spent an hour and fifteen minutes engaged in a class discussion about whether or not the government should be allowed to make drugs illegal on the basis of regulating our health. Questions were posed such as "should the government then make food that makes us fat illegal?" But what if that's not the issue? The evidence indicates to me that perhaps health and public safety have absolutely nothing to do with drug laws in the United States. Our economy is capitalist and our government cares more about the economy than anything else (often because they are compelled to). Drugs are illegal because their very illegality helps to generate classism, a capitalist society and politics as usual.
Name a single commodity that the government does not ensure a result in personal profit on. That is the very purpose of taxes, it is the purpose of many of the laws that have been constructed in this nation including drug laws. The base price for cigarettes is ridiculously low in contrast to the amount the consumer pays for them after taxes. Additionally, the government receives literally millions of dollars a year from tobacco interest groups and corporations and the GDP increases rather significantly from the sale of tobacco products. Hence, cigarettes are legal.
So why is it that marijuana is illegal? Marijuana is distributed via independent dealers, not corporations in the pockets of the government that have to pay corporate income taxes. The black market does not contribute to the annual GDP and the government cannot tax the consumer for its purchase because it is being sold through the means of underground sellers.
Making drugs illegal ensures that the government is capable of generating profit off of them as well. Arrest a upper middle class who uses marijuana, make him pay court fines and so on and the capital has been collected. Arrest a poor person with inadequate representation in the judicial system and you can send them to jail or prison (depending on the mandatory minimum).
How are prisons beneficial to the government? At the very least, in two ways. First, they are fundamental economic stimulants. The expansion of prisons yields the growth of several sectors in the economy—law enforcement, legal, construction, private security and prison operation companies, etc. Secondly, unemployment statistics are manipulated to the benefit of a nation with prisons. Economic disparity is evident in drug laws and conviction rates, let alone the prison population. The urban poor are often heavily unemployed. Warehousing them in prisons removes them from the economic definition of the unemployed, the basis of which requires an individual is actively seeking employment. For example, under Bill Clinton's employment boom, blacks were unaffected. If one were to take the number of blacks in prison into account, the black unemployment rate in the United States would have been near a horrific 40%
If the government cared about our health then why does the crack versus powder cocaine disparity exist? I challenge the notion that they do. Instead, I think this disparity exists because the elite in the government do not wish to prosecute their fellow aristocratic members of society, they want to target the individuals who cannot afford adequate defense, who will almost certainly contribute to the economy directly through their arrests.
The American Cancer Society: "Cigarettes kill more Americans than alcohol, car accidents, suicide, AIDS, homicide, and illegal drugs combined."
That's quite a bit of killing. Sort of a detrimental health effect, wouldn't you say? Still, no Surgeon General's warning on marijuana. And by the way, Amsterdam isn't rampant with gang crimes. The correlation between drugs and violence that conservatives try so desperately to make does not exist. The war on drugs, like all wars, is a war on the already oppressed, the disadvantaged and those without arms that could possibly combat their opponents.
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