There have been billions of dollars spent on the 'war-on-drugs', and, in the end, there seems to be no effect on the drug market. High school kids find drugs, especially marijuana easy to obtain. Despite spending billions on its eradication. The US has aggressively fought coca production in middle America, and yet it is still grown. It isn't really that surprising, in hind sight. You can grow a lot of drugs in a little dirt with some water. People can grow these plants. Illegalizing peyote is a little like Illegalizing wheat. It's impossible to enforce, extremely expensive. A lot harder than illegalizing something like a gun. It is also so much more pointless to pursue. Why would we try so hard to protect people from themselves? Especially when one of the side effects is getting people killed by drug cartels...?
It's a lot like basketball. The game of basketball has long since outgrown its rules. Professional basketball is played as a strange strategic contest against the rules for the last 10% of play time, not as a sport. There is something in the design of the game which leads to mono-stardom, not teamwork. If you are the kind of person who can throw a ball through the hoop no matter where you are on the court (and it helps if you are tall enough to throw it over anyone else's head), then that's all ya really need. You are unstoppable. Game over.
Someone might argue that I'm wrong, but the rules need to be changed. It's not working.
It is appropriate that it is an American Game. Invented at the Young Men's Christian Association in 1891. It closely resembles our broken politics. Our politics have become a depressing game, played more against the rules than for anything else. Except, worse even than pro basketball, there are only two teams to watch.
Each team has about 5 positions that anyone knows about, and only one that people care about. One super-star who becomes the face of the team. The locus of all their faith and hopes. The others are just there to support him
For a long time, the players mill about, pretending to do their job. Pretending to compete in prowess and logic. And then, in the last seconds, the game heats up.
But instead of being a rational process, following the purpose of the game, our elections have become a strategy against the rules. It is bickering and arguing and placing falsified blame until the overwhelmed and underintelligent voting public pick the person they are least afraid of. Not the one who makes the most sense, or lies less. Often, the one who lied more successfully. Or had their timeout or fouled at the right time before that buzzer rings and its all over.
It is at this point we need to step back and think of what went wrong. What can be done better. Like the war on drugs, we must scratch off tactics which are not successful. We need to change rules that are easy for the cruel or immoral to misuse. Because, we can all agree, there is a lot of broken morals behind our broken politics, whatever side of the fence you are on.
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Our elections, what is supposed to be the
Like the war on drugs, we need to think of a different strategy. Rework the rules of the game.
Jeffrey A. Miron wrote a study that fou
Johnston, L. D.; O'Malley, P. M., Bachman, J. G. & Schulenberg, J. E. (November 30, 2005). "Table 13: Trends in Availability of Drugs as Perceived by Twelfth Graders" (PDF).Teen drug use down but progress halts among youngest teens. Monitoring the Future
there have been numerous studies suggesting that we spend all the money we do on legal enforement o
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