Hypocrisy

Here I go beating one of my favorite drums again. It is, of course, about the insane drug war, that never-ending political devise used to increase government employment roles and make America a worse, not better, place in which to live.

Let us compare just the deaths per year of legal versus illegal drugs. According to a Cato Institute paper (Policy Analysis 121), illegal drug use was responsible for about 8,000 deaths per year. Present estimates from "official" sources are between 15,000 and 18,000 per year.

The legal drug alcohol, which is a true narcotic drug, racks up a score of 200,000 according to Policy Analysis 121, and 80,000 to 100,000 from other sources. Approximately one-half of all murders are committed by people who have been drinking according to the government. That would be about 10,000 murders per year, since the approximate number of murders per year is 20,000. The number of alcohol related auto accidents deaths in 2005, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was 16,885, which was 39% of all motor vehicle fatalities.

Tobacco use kills around 430,000 people every year.

If we take the higher number for illegal drug deaths (18,000), the lower number for alcohol-related deaths (80,000), and the accepted number for tobacco-related deaths (430,000) then we can see that illegal drug deaths are only 3.5 percent of the deaths from legal drugs (18,000 divided by 80,000 + 430,000, or 18 divided by 510 = 0.03529 = 3.5%).

In other writings of mine I have quoted a New York Times Magazine article in which the writer estimated that the actual yearly cost of the so-called war on drugs, for all levels of government, local, state, and federal, comes to 100 billion dollars! That's a whole lot of money for a program that doesn't work, has never worked, and will never work . . . and to try and stop 3.5% of the deaths (from willing users) that legal drugs cause. That's rather like having a broken finger and a broken leg with the bone sticking out, and requiring the doctor to ignore the leg and put all his effort into fixing the finger.

And, of course, a great majority of our politicians (including presidents), prosecutors, police, and judges are all imbibers of that wonderfully deadly drug, alcohol. They pass rights violating anti-drug laws, arrest drug law violators, then prosecute them and imprison them (about one million or so of our present jail and prison population are non-violent, illegal drug offenders) while enjoying one of the most harmful and dangerous drugs known to mankind.

I call that HYPOCRISY!