by Joseph Whalen

Created on: June 14, 2010   Last Updated: June 16, 2010

On average, about sixteen thousand people are killed in alcohol-related accidents in the United States each year.  Over fifty percent of fatal accidents involve alcohol. Tobacco has been proven to be a highly addictive carcinogenic product containing poisonous compounds such as arsenic, cyanide, and formaldehyde as well as nineteen other cancer causing substances.  Each year cigarette smoke accounts for approximately 1 in every five deaths, or approximately 438,000 lives.  Yet these two “controlled” substances are somehow still legal in the country.  By allowing such toxic and proven life threatening drugs to be sold and consumed in this country, the United States government is in effect saying that people do have a right to do drugs, but only the drugs approved by the government.

Of course, the reasons surrounding this issue are both economic and political.  The alcohol and tobacco industries are a massive source of income for the government in the form of common “sin” taxes on these products.  Entire budgets are written based on estimated income from the sale of these deadly products to every American. The government makes a fortune on killing its citizens through the allowed consumption of these chemicals.  It’s one of the biggest profit makers of the federal government, its big business, and its political power because of the money involved.

Conversely, the American government spends billions of dollars in an attempt to fight a “war on drugs."  To coin a popular phrase, our “war on drugs” is less a war and more a police action, and a failing one at that.  Despite the billions of dollars we spend on Coast Guard, border patrols and vice units to stop the drugs from entering the country and then confiscating those that do make it, the efforts simply are ineffective.  While a large portion of drugs never make it into the country, there are vast amounts that do.  Those drug shipments that do make it into the country fuel the rise in gangs and inner city criminals who are forced to move to what were the relatively peaceful suburbs as a result of increased anti-drug raids. So the blight that was largely confined to the inner city streets is now being scattered to rural America like a cancer.

The reason the United States wages a war on drugs has little to do with the moral cause of stopping little Johnny or Suzy from becoming a crack addict on the street. 

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