Drug War? Were we all asleep in History class?

We spend billions of dollars every year fighting drugs. Drugs are bad. We were all taught in school to JUST SAY NO!! Drugs cause crime. Drugs destroy families. They put all kinds of nasty stuff in drugs that can kill you. Drugs destroy lives. People die from drug overdoses. Drug funded gangs shoot each other over territories to sell their drugs in. The prisons are full of people with drug charges. . . . and where are we.

We still have drive by shootings. We can't stop the drugs from coming into our country. We can't even stop drugs from being grown or made in our own country. Our prisons are filling up. We spend more and more money fighting this drug war and putting dealers and users behind bars and for what? To create more government jobs? "Its for the children." Drugs are bad so we must make them illegal? WHY???

I remember learning about something called Prohibition in history class. That was when some people in this country thought liquor should be illegal. They got an amendment to our Constitution to ban the production and consumption of alcohol. They all patted themselves on the back for their accomplishment. The "Demon Rum" was gone for good. Husbands would now go to church with their wifes. Families wouldn't be torn apart by alcohol. And everybody would live happily ever after, right. . .

Nope. The banning of alcohol caused the biggest crime wave this country had seen up to then. So the government fought back. Federal marshals, the FBI, the ATF, and local law enforcement all fought the mobsters and rum runners. They hunted down the smugglers, raided the "Speak Easies," and it didn't stop it. Government agents were being killed. The mob was killing each other over beer routes and control of the supply. Innocent people were killed being caught in the cross fire. Jails and prisons were filling up with people that were arrested buying or selling alcohol.

There were people going blind from drinking "Bathtub Gin" that was made wrong. No more controls on how the stuff was made let anyone build a still and crank out dangerous product. And the tea totalers used this to their advantage. They said "look at poor George here. He drank some bad moon shine and now he will never see again. We were right banning alcohol, look at all the crime and pain it causes."

Luckily our country came to its senses and made alcohol legal again. And guess what!! The mob collapsed. Most kept on doing what they were doing before, selling liquor, but now it was legal. No more drive bys with "Tommy Guns." No more people going blind from drinking bad alcohol. Crime went way down. Yes we still had drunks. Yes, we had families destroyed by alcohol, but we had those problems when it was banned too. Making it illegal didn't make it go away.

So here we are, today, fighting our "Drug War" and wasting our time and money when we don't need to. We are afraid of the drug gangs and the smugglers. We die in the cross fire of the gang wars for territory to sell their drugs. People who use the drugs pay crazy prices for them so they steal and rob to fund their habit. Dealers cut their product with anything they can get their hands on to make a better profit. No controls on quality. We cause all this and pat our own backs and tell each other we are doing a good job fighting these horrible drugs. We scream for more money to be spent stamping out this plague in our society, but we never look at the true problem. Just make the stuff legal!!!

Yes, we will still have addicts. Yes, people will still die from overdoses. We will still have a drug problem, like we still have alcoholics, but how many lives will we save not fighting a literal war. Cops won't die raiding a drug house or trying to catch smugglers. We will save billions of dollars not housing all the drug offenders in our prison system. The government would actually make money being able to tax the drugs.

But, no. We continue to fight this war, continue to watch people die. We forget what we learned in school or we say this isn't the same, drugs are so much worse then alcohol.

But are they really?? Or is that what they are telling us and we just don't spend the time to think about it for ourselves. . .