The following is my email letter to our new president Barack Obama. You too can write to him at: comments@whitehouse.gov

January 20, 2009

Dear President Obama:

Congratulations.

There can be no real positive change in the state of social justice, public safety, public health and national security in America as long as the American government continues its current misguided and counter-productive policy of moralistic prohibitive intolerance toward Americans with the unpopular genetic based disease of addiction. Poverty will not be reduced as long as thousands more Americans are marginalized out of our economy each year by the government imposing drug convictions. And our economy will have a harder time recovering from the current downturn as long as tens of billions of tax dollars are wasted each year on drug police and prisons by the states and federal government when that money could be better spent curing the underlying disease and regulating the criminal anarchy out of the distribution to the $ 141-billion a year U.S. intoxicant drug consumer demand.

Prohibition economics did not work in the Roaring Twenties for alcohol and it is not working today for intoxicant drugs. In this time of economic disruption you could take a lesson from the 1932 congress that moved forward with repealing the Volstead Act specifically for the tax revenue that legal alcohol sales could bring to federal covers at a time when high unemployment was robbing the treasury of much needed tax dollars.

United Nations 2003 estimates of a $ 320-billion annual global black market for intoxicant drugs is the leading financial source for literally dozens of stateless terrorist organizations including Hamas and the Taliban. According to the Oct. 2007 report, "Opium and Afghanistan: Reassessing U.S. Counternarcotics Strategy" by John A. Glaze for the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute "...an estimated 70 percent of the Taliban's income now comes from protection money and the sale of opium." Drug prohibition is no more than an act of legislation. America could deprive the Taliban of 70% of their funding by simple legislative fiat leading the way for the western world to follow our lead.

For years bin Laden has been preaching to his followers around the world that they should use drug markets both as a source of untraceable money to finance operations, (the Madrid train bombings), but also as an asymmetric weapon targeting western children. As the world Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon still smoldered Sen. John Kerry referred to this 'silent jihad' of bin Laden's when speaking with the media, "That's part of their revenge on the world," Kerry said. "Get as many people drugged out and screwed up as you can." U.S. Sen. John Kerry 21 Sept. 2001

Our southern border too is in the terrible state that it is in today because of the lucrative unregulated U.S. consumer demand that entices criminal organizations to create new ways to circumvent even our best border security measures and economically empowers them to levels of violence and anarchy never before seen. So much violence that, according to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the city council of El Paso, Texas recently passed a unanimous resolution calling for a national discussion on drug legalization.

America's streets can never be truly safe as long as drug profits support gangs, in the same way they support the Taliban, providing untraceable cash for weapons and to maintain a sales force of addicts with every incentive and virtually no impediments to sell addictive substances to each new generation of American children. As long as there is the massive demand from drug gangs for cheap and easy to get illegal guns the market for illegal guns will effectively be subsidized for all would-be criminals seeking to escalate their criminality with deadly force. A regulated drug market would end this subsidy to street thugs ending the proliferation of guns that kill innocent American by-standers and police trying to protect us all. The 75th Conference of the U.S. Conference of Mayors alluded to this when, after citing a litany of social, public health and public safety ills that they attribute to the war on drugs policy, they passed the following resolution:

"NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the United States Conference of Mayors believes the war on drugs has failed and calls for a New Bottom Line in U.S. drug policy, a public health approach that concentrates more fully on reducing the negative consequences associated with drug abuse, while ensuring that our policies do not exacerbate these problems or create new social problems of their own; establishes quantifiable, short- and long-term objectives for drug policy; saves taxpayer money; and holds state and federal agencies accountable..."

America cannot hope to reduce exposure by children to intoxicant drugs so long as the primary sales force for these substances are addicts and/or users who have every reason and incentive continuously find new untaxed and unregulated markets and customers. Regardless of the age of those potential customers or the dangerous qualities of the substances. And as long as America keeps drugs in a posture of being a forbidden fruit they will entice young people. Young people who we leave to run this intoxicating gauntlet of their formative years between addicted peers and gangsters on one side and little more than police and prisons on the other.

There is another way. Trust the democratic institutions of regulation, taxation and public health. And trust the majority of the American people to use these substances wisely and with cautious self interest just as most Americans use alcohol to intoxicate wisely and with with cautious self interest. For those substances deemed to have a low addictive potential a regulated and licensed market place would put responsible self-interested members of the community in control of most distribution and in between substances and children.

For highly addictive substances a medically prescribed market, such as that currently being used to great effect by the Swiss, would remove from the sales forces of the gangsters those deemed to suffer an incurable level of addiction. At the same time it would get most of the people who have the highest criminal recidivist rate out of the need to resort to crime and victimization for economic sustenance. Crime that includes selling drugs to more children and starting yet another generation into addiction. This, more than anything, would reduce new addiction in America and do so both quickly and with compassion for those now suffering with addiction.

Democratic institutions of regulations, licensing and taxation would, at the same time reduce the demand on the tax base of states, local governments and the federal government for prison cells and police while providing user taxes and fees to pay for government public health services needed to address the negative consequences of addiction.

I wish you the best in your presidency of change. And I hope that you will actually consider some positive changes in Richard Nixon's war on drugs policy that has wastefully cost America more than a trillion dollars since 1972 and destroyed tens of millions of lives to drug abuse or the unnecessary lifelong social outcast status that criminalization imposes on a citizen. Pat .....