Hello, to all.

This will be my first attempt at blogging. I have been motivated to this due to my best friend having his life torn apart as we speak by this nations so called "War on drugs", a "War" that has for all intents and purposes been declared on the people of this country & the negative effects it is having on our nation as whole.

Despite my personal opinion that all drugs should be decriminalized, I at this time, am mostly going to concentrate on Pot & the costs to our court systems/individual citizens associated with relatively benign drug.

As a brief aside my reasoning behind the decriminalization of all drugs would be the reduction of violent crime as a result of the failed Prohibition on drugs. think about this for just a moment, If drugs are legalized the profits that suck our children into gangs & motivate those same gangs to kill one another for valuable territory will disappear over night. this has already been prov-en with pilot programs in other countries. the basis behind this theory is this, if you go to buy a gram of heroin on the street the price would likely be in the neighborhood of 180.00 to 300.00 usd. however the us government can obtain the same amount for approx. fourteen bucks. the difference between these two amounts is the money that is being used to lure our children into gangs & what motivates the violence that one would associate with the drug trade.

But lets leave the hard drugs out of the equation for the moment & discuss marijuana. last year 3.7 billion of our tax dollars where used to prosecute users of marijuana. this isn't even taking into account the amount of money spent keeping these non-violent offenders in jail or under court supervision. though these figures are not broken down in a way that I have been able to find I would think that doubling the above amount would be a conservative number. so lets say 7.4 billion of our tax dollars being spent to punish end users. Note; I am talking only about those who have been busted for possession of any amount, this does not include cases of "intent to distribute" or "trafficking". that is a lot of our money being spent to traumatize our very own brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers & children. There are states in our nation that will slam you in jail for a decade if you are caught with a single joint. let me repeat that Ten years for a single joint, we're talking less than a gram here folks. less than a gram of a drug that is less lethal than booze or cigarettes.

It's time for us as a nation to stand up & let it be known we will no longer put up with these monetary & personal losses over nothing. the government has done the people of this nation a huge disservice by lumping marijuana in with harder drugs. this association makes marijuana a gateway drug.

How is that you ask, well I'm glad you did. If I'm your typical under or misinformed youth watching ad after ad & reading propaganda that ranks pot as being right there with heroin, meth & cocaine but I know plenty of people using pot without having their lives come crashing down around them, the next logical thought is going to be along the lines of, "if their lying to me about the severity of pot, their probably lying to me about the dangers of these other ,highly addictive, drugs as well". this is not my own thought process by the way but a conclusion I have reached after having listened to those who are addicted to harder drugs talk about how they decided it would be OK to experiment with..., insert hard drug of choice here.

the costs of putting a person in jail has another side effect as well, this person who may have been a productive member of society is now a drain on society. most of these people had real jobs, paid their taxes & contributed to their communities in positive ways, aside from their personal use of a drug the us government has deemed criminal. My friend, for example, had his own business, had an employee, paid his taxes, was always there to lend a hand to those in need. now we will quite possibly not only loose his & his employees contribution to our tax base but as well we will loose his other less tangible benefits to society, for nothing more than his preference of pot over booze. now multiply that by the several thousand each year that are incarcerated or otherwise damaged by the court system & we begin to see where the real harm lye's, not from some guy smoking a bowl playing video games but by our own government declaring War on its own people.

It has already been shown that the majority of our population supports, at the very least, legalizing pot for medical reasons & at least a large percentage couldn't care less if we sold pot legally over the counter, using the vary same controls that are in place for tobacco & alcohol.

imagine what our schools or medical establishment could do with a few extra billion each year, imagine how much more would be in the coffers if those who are currently serving time for non-violent drug offenses were out there working at their jobs, raising their children, or in other words, allowed to remain productive members of our society. Try to think of someone you know who has been branded a felon due to a "Crime" such as this & how much harder their lives have become, the trauma of being incarcerated with real criminals. could you imagine what it would be like to spend the next few years of your life locked away with murderers & rapists just because you thought it would be fun to get stoned & down a box of Twinkies. Hardly seems right, let alone just.

I will leave you all with a horror story of a man who sold dime bags & carried a gun in his boot because he trafficked his wares in a bad neighborhood. this man never used the gun, never so much as brandished his gun but simply due to having one while he went about his "business" received a mandatory minimum sentence of Fifty-five years at the ripe ol age of twenty six, he will be eighty-one years old before he is free again. never harmed a soul, was by all accounts a good father to his children. we now get to pay hundreds of thousands to keep this man behind bars, his children will be raised fatherless.

And we wonder why our country is going down the shitter at an exponential rate