War on Drugs Claims Another Victim

This is disgusting. A young woman in the dawn of her life, Rachel Hoffman, was busted for selling a little bit of weed and possessing a little bit of MDMA. Cops used the pending felony charges to coerce her into wearing a wire during a crack and gun buy. During the buy, Rachel went missing. She turned up dead two days later.

Dead at 23 because she got caught selling weed. Tough business, that.

This is just so incredibly fucked up. We've blown a couple trillion dollars over the past couple of decades on the "War on Drugs," and all we have to show for it is the world's highest prison population. Why? I happen to think that it's because there's so much money in the prison industry and because TWoD provides another lever of control.

Harm reduction is the best possible outcome because people will always use drugs; if they still use drugs with the current penalties, they will always use drugs. If the goal of the Drug War were really to mitigate the damage from drugs , you'd think we'd be looking at different strategies. The bust-'em-and-lock-'em-up thing is clearly not working, and it's causing far more harm than it's alleviating.

Marijuana shouldn't even be illegal. Here you have a plant that grows like a weed from the equator to almost the arctic. Its intoxicating effects are mild. Its use cannot result in physical addiction or overdose. It has multiple therapeutic uses and a plethora of non-drug industrial uses. Why in the hell is it illegal?

While psychedelic drugs like LSD, MDMA, and mushrooms are similarly non-lethal (notwithstanding a scant few MDMA overdoses) and non-addictive, their effects are much stronger than those of marijuana. Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, the father of genetics, credited his discovery to his use of LSD. In fact, a great body of scientific and creative work seems to have been inspired by psychedelic "trips." These types of drugs should be tightly regulated, not distributed by shadowy street networks. If I were King of the World, I would make these drugs available by psychiatrist's prescription since they mainly affect the mind.

As for addictive and potentially lethal drugs like amphetamines, heroin, and cocaine -- those should be directly regulated by doctors or the government and treated as a medical problem. Addicts should be given supplies at very low prices and encouraged to get treatment, which would be made available to them when they were ready for it. The ruthless criminal networks (like the one that murdered Rachel Hoffman) that control these drugs need to be put out of business, and the way to do that is to take the profit out of it. The way to remove profit from the equation would be for the government to control distribution through a system of trained health care providers, undercutting the criminals' prices.

But that's not the country we live in. In our country, the government can convict a person of a crime based only on hearsay evidence. Yes, it's true. If they can't bust a target for drugs, they'll bust them for conspiracy, a conviction for which requires only the testimony of one government witness. This lady spent 10 years in prison for conspiracy because a former tenant plea bargained by testifying against her. Our laws are so crazy that the actual drug dealers spent only a year in prison while their former landlady spent ten years in prison -- based only on their obviously tainted testimony. (The testimony is tainted by the very fact that the person giving it stands to benefit in the form of a reduced sentence.)

This is insanity. According to the Cato Institute, 40,000 paramilitary raids happen every year in this country. Every day, 100 times, cops in full battle rattle bust down somebody's doors and smash in their windows in the middle of the night with guns drawn on everybody in the house. They can do this, again, based only on hearsay evidence. That's just not right. It's NOT RIGHT! It's A DISGRACE!!! It should make every American hang our heads in shame that we have allowed ourselves to accept tactics like those deployed by the Stasi! When did we become like East Germany? Ve haf vays of making you talk. Ve haf vays of making you testify. Ve haf vays of getting you to do our dirty vork.

We really need to put an end to this madness. A free society does not imprison so many of its citizens. A free society does not conduct 40,000 paramilitary raids per year on its own citizens. A free society does not let 23-year-old lives get snuffed out needlessly.

Rachel Hoffman, rest in Peace. The law may have seen you as a criminal, but you were a victim of an evil law.