DEA goons raid medical marijuana outlets

Last Wednesday, federal government thugs descended on West Hollywood and shut down the area's medical marijuana dispensaries. Never mind that Californians voted to allow marijuana as medicine, and that the conservatives now in power at the Federal level have long argued for "states rights" when it comes to causes of their own (such as blocking civil rights laws).

The War on Drugs is like the War on Iraq: a bad idea, justified with truckloads of phony propaganda - but hard for politicians to oppose. Now, when most politicians have found their voice on Iraq, few are yet willing to state the obvious: that the War on Drugs is a total disaster. Our city streets are teeming with gangs that thrive on drug prohibition, our prisons are overflowing with people who wouldn't be there if drug use was treated as a health issue, and other countries - from Colombia to Afghanistan - have had their entire societies ripped apart because of our hunger for commodities that are only available through a black market.

Enough. We need to decriminalize drug use. For starters, marijuana, a plant with nowhere near the potential for harm that tobacco and alcohol pose, should be legalized, albeit controlled and regulated in much the same way as tobacco and alcohol. Then we should look at how to deal with the use of the "harder" drugs - oxycontin, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, etc. It's simply not fair that conservative talk show hosts get off with "treatment" options for using their drugs of choice, while inner-city minorities get nailed to doing hard time for doing the same thing with different drugs.

I'm not saying that one should be able to buy cocaine without a prescription, any more than one can buy oxycontin without a prescription. I am saying that the debate over those kind of drugs should be centered on public health policy - education, addiction prevention, treatment, recovery - not on sending people to prison.