Pork Barrel Politics and Marijuana Legalization

Pork barrel politics have weakened the economic, moral and cultural backbone of this country, and it’s time we get back on the road to recovery. The term “pork barrel politics” refers to government spending meant to serve special interest supporters of a politician in return for their continued financial support. Typically, this involves funding for government programs whose economic benefits are concentrated in a particular area but whose costs are spread among all taxpayers.

The so-called War on Drugs was nothing but one of the history’s biggest pork barrel scams designed and propagated to suck the American taxpayer dry to the bone, while fattening the pockets of multi-national corporations. The truth is that prohibition only harms society. Mainstream media only talks about the cost of drugs to society, but you never hear about the social and economic costs of prohibition.

History has shown that prohibition only creates a black market of illegal sales that fuel violence and crime, while big government corruption escalates until the innocent suffer. The prohibition of medicinal herbs, like marijuana, has only built more for-profit-prisons and brought drug cartels across the US-Mexico border.

Facts have simply been ignored. New evidence has proven the health benefits of medical marijuana, while economists are exposing the financial pitfalls of prohibiting the marijuana and hemp industries. Why in the world would you ban an entire natural resource, which offers nothing but good things for the economic well-being of society? Because multi-national corporations control products that would compete with marijuana and hemp and they want all the money for themselves.

In 1988 taxpayers paid nearly $10 billion for prohibition and in 1992 the federal prohibition budget surpassed $15 billion. Obama’s proposed 2013 federal drug budget is nearly $26 billion! Even with the staggering federal debt, collapsing dollar and housing crisis, the fed increased the Drug War budget by 1.6% over fiscal 2012. Where’s it all going? $61 million goes to local law enforcement, while others of the prohibition policy include the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education (propaganda), Obama Care, Homeland Security, Justice (DEA), State, and of course, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the drug czar’s office.

On top of all this, hundreds of millions of dollar in increased funding, requested for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is an outrage. Especially considering from 1980 to 2008, the amount of people incarcerated in America quadrupled from roughly half a million to 2.3 million people.

Currently, the US has 5% of the world population and we have 25% of the world’s prisoners. “Get tough on crime” and “war on drugs” policies are funding for-profit- prisons, spending an additional $700 billion of taxpayer dollars on corrections, and another $200 billion on prison and jail safety annually.

Marijuana constitutes almost half of all drug arrests, and between 1990 – 2002, marijuana accounted for an 82% increase in the number of drug arrests. In 2004, approximately 13% of state prisoners and 12% of federal prisoners were serving time for marijuana-related offenses. Federal and state policies also impose collateral consequences on people who are convicted of drug offenses, such as denial of public benefits or licenses, that are not applicable to those convicted of other types of crimes. Not to mention, the $500 to $700 billion in commerce lost due to prohibition of the marijuana and hemp industries. So you tell me what’s the real cost of pork barrel policies that prohibit marijuana and hemp?

~The Botanical Guru