The American criminal justice system is aptly named. It is criminal the way the system dispenses “justice,” and that criminality infests the entire system. That’s because the system has become a business and a blood sport based on profit, control and winning rather than determining a person’s guilt or innocence.
The result is that the U.S. has 6 to 12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as does Australia, Canada, France Germany, Japan or the United Kingdom. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its incarcerated people, and half of the world’s academically qualified lawyers, Those lawyers consume about 10 percent of America’s gross domestic product.
There are about 2.3 million people populating America’s 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories. In the U.S., people go to jail about 11 million times each year. Another 7 million are on parole or probation.
There is no question that America is a prison nation, and the overwhelming majority of people in prisons are there for non-violent crimes — about 20 percent of them for drug crimes. One in 3 Americans will be arrested by the age of 23. Those “crimes” are often nothing more than truancy and misbehaving in school. But the faux war on drugs has ensnared millions of Americans for the non-crime of possessing parts of a plant.
The so-called “War on Drugs” is lucrative business for various federal law enforcement agencies and all local law enforcement agencies and judicial systems. It is also lucrative for the drug cartels, as emails hacked from the security firm Stratfor and released by WikiLeaks in 2012 showed.
The “War on Drugs,” like most other government-declared wars, is a war that no one intends to win. Last week the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the epicenter of drug war corruption, declared that marijuana would remain a Schedule 1 substance under the Controlled Substances Act. That designation means that the Food and Drug Administration has determined that marijuana has no “medical use.”
As USA Today reported:
In reaching its conclusion, the DEA said a Health and Human Services evaluation shows marijuana has no ‘‘currently accepted medical use’’ because “the drug’s chemistry is not known and reproducible; there are no adequate safety studies; there are no adequate and well-controlled studies proving efficacy; the drug is not accepted by qualified experts; and the scientific evidence is not widely available.”
“There is no evidence that there is a consensus among qualified experts that marijuana is safe and effective for use in treating a specific, recognized disorder,” the report added.
“At this time,” the DEA concluded, “the known risks of marijuana use have not been shown to be outweighed by specific benefits in well-controlled clinical trials that scientifically evaluate safety and efficacy.”
Translation: The DEA determined that marijuana is not adequately patentable for it to be profitable for the “legal” drug cartels (Big Pharma); no medical benefits from it have been found so it is illegal; it is illegal so we have restricted research into its benefits so no benefits have been found; and we’re going to keep it illegal to conduct research so no benefits can be found and we can continue to incarcerate people who use it.
Petition principia; or begging the question — a logical fallacy.
It is also a lie. At the very moment the DEA was arguing in court that marijuana has no medical value and is a dangerous drug on the one hand, the federal government was patenting marijuana extracts for health-related uses on the other, and was even then in the process of granting a license to GW Pharmaceuticals to test a cannabinoid-based drug called Epidiolex for treatment of patients with multiple sclerosis.
That license was granted and already GW Pharmaceuticals is announcing positive results from trials Epidiolex in treating Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS) — a rare and severe form of childhood-onset epilepsy – and for Dravet syndrome – another rare genetic form of epilepsy that begins in first year of life in otherwise healthy infants.
Studies also have found that marijuana and cannabinoids prevent glaucoma, reverse the carcinogenic effects of tobacco and improve lung health, stop cancer from spreading, decrease anxiety, slows the process of Alzheimer’s disease, eases the pain of multiple sclerosis, reduces severe muscle spasms, lessens the side effects from hepatitis C treatment and increases treatment effectiveness, treats inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease, relieves arthritis pain and inflammation, supports healthy metabolism and helps the body process sugar, eases the symptoms of Lupus, reduces tremors in people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, assists in treating veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, protects the brain after stroke and stimulates the appetite and reduces the pain and nausea from chemotherapy.
The FDA knows all this, as these are all found in trails approved by the FDA. The FDA also knows that “cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties … [making] cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of a wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannaboids are found to have particular applications as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia.” (Statement from U.S. government patent 6630507, titled “Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants.”)
The war on drugs is scam and a fraud. It was started as a political tool in 1971 by Richard Nixon to go after anti-war protesters and black people. Since then, more than $1 trillion has been spent and millions of people have been incarcerated and many, if not most, of them were likely innocent.
The independent news agency ProPublica and The New York times have partnered on an exposé that revealed that the roadside drug test used by most police agencies routinely produces false positives. False positives, combined with LEOs (legally entitled to oppress) who are poorly trained in the use of the tests, have resulted in untold number of false convictions and guilty pleas. And the inadequacy of the tests have been known for years.
Based on false tests, many poor and disaffected people have been swept up in drug arrests, falsely imprisoned and coerced into pleading guilty by narcotics officers who browbeat and/or extort them, or persuaded to by court-appointed attorneys who have no interest in learning whether their client is innocent and want to do as little work as necessary to “earn” the small fee they are paid by the courts.
And in the off-chance that a defense attorney takes enough interest in the case — usually only done when high-dollar clients are involved – corrupt prosecutors like Ken Anderson and Jim Williams hide evidence, lie and dissemble because their goal is to win at all costs. Case victories are feathers in their caps come election time. Meanwhile, corrupt judges look the other way, take payoffs and forbid evidence; and incompetent and corrupt lab workers falsify, taint or misplace evidence. And juries are typically boiled down to the least common denominator and have no concepts like jury nullification.
And despite their corruption – or, if you choose to give them a pass, their ineptitude – prosecutors and judges are rarely held accountable. And LEOs making false arrests based on bad tests or overzealousness or outright ignorance also aren’t held accountable because they enjoy qualified immunity; because the police, district attorneys and judges enjoy a special relationship in that they are on the same “side” in most cases; and because the American public sitting on juries has been propagandized into believing that cops are paragons of virtue who put their lives on the line in deadly situations daily to stand between the vast marauding criminal element (and Muslim terrorists) and the people.
The result is criminal records for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people – mostly blacks – that haunt them throughout their lives by costing them access to jobs, housing and their families, all to benefit the corrupt system and Big Pharma, which is enabled to maintain its revenue stream of selling chemical “cures.”
