An Interesting Take on BLM

[Lissa]

And what makes you think that it is any less the case now, relative to a previous time? What material evidence is there to support that the 'war on drugs' (a euphemism for the war on minorities) is not still on-going today?

I think in the Nixon era, they spent so much time demonizing drugs, that no administration can successfully curtail the vitriol against drugs without saying they were lying (or at least wrong) from the very get go, and for any politician, that is a hard pill to swallow because it usually means political suicide by showing weakness. I think the ones who know the truth are afraid to speak the truth, and the ones who back the war on drugs are just plain ignorant and subscribe to the hyperbolic rhetoric.

I think you need to go waaaaaaaaay back into history to see where demonizing drugs came from (hint, it goes at least back to the mid-late 19th century). Originally it started in the US just after the rail road building craze when Chinese workers brought opium and the like to the US and it started being used by more than just the Chinese workers. As the usage spread throughout the US populous (all races were effected), the government stepped in and started cracking down on the minorities first (whites were not being arrested and jailed for drug use). This did eventually change over time, but it wasn't until the prohibition era when everyone was being arrested (so whites were allowed to use drugs for around 50 years where minorities were being arrested for about 40 of those years).

Now, more recently, some state governments and DC (Feds are still being blind to the tax bonanza available if some drugs were legailzed) have started to legalize marijuana. Slowly the politicians are starting to see the value of legalizing some drugs because of the taxes they can get. IMO, the best thing to do would be to legalize drugs, tax them heavily (like what happens with cigarettes, cigars, and alcohol), set very stringent under influence laws, heavily educate on the effects of the drugs, make addiction counselling more available, and several things would change. The govenrment would have a new tax resource, you'd have less violent crime involved in the drug trade, and a the number of people put in prison would drop as well (which lowers costs there as well).