Hillary Clinton has gone ahead and promised more American dollars to Central American countries to help them fight our drug war:
Mrs Clinton told a regional security conference in Guatemala that the US would increase its aid by more than 10% to nearly $300m (£187m).
Analysts say the figure is still small, given that more than two-thirds of cocaine sent from South America to the US now passes through Central America.
In total, some $1.8bn was promised to support the region’s security.
That’s a lot of taxpayer money just to enforce a prohibition on what people put into their own bodies. Instead of spending billions fighting this needless war, keeping non-violent people imprisoned, and getting people killed enforcing anti-drug laws let’s try something better, let’s just end the prohibition on currently illegal drugs.
Ron Paul and Barney Frank understand this and rumor has it that they’ll introduce a bill to legalize marijuana very soon. This would be the first step in ending the pointless war on drugs and would likely slash the number of people we put into prison every year.
We should have learned our lesson about prohibition during Prohibition. All the war on drugs has accomplished is the waste of untold billions (maybe trillions) of dollars, increase the rate of violent crime, lead to drug cartels gaining enough power to basically overthrow several states (and replace them with even more violence which is the negative part), and swelled our prison population to the highest in the world.
We can’t control what people put into their bodies because simply making something illegal doesn’t stop it from happening (which is why we have criminals by the way).