Cultural Reasons Behind the War on Drugs

Cynical bon mot:

Q: How many street gangs sell crack cocaine?

A. Just about all of 'em.

Q. How many sell cigarettes or liquor?

A. None. You can buy them in stores.

Around here the local street bums (who are mainly drunks) can wander around downtown and pick up enough (deposit paid) soda and beer cans, or donate blood, or do day labor and so gain enough funds to buy a pint of their favorite liquor and a pack of smokes most days. And so their cravings are satisfied and they don't have to resort (very often anyhow) to overtly anti-social (i.e. illegal) behavior.

You would think that all the liberal social welfare-types and the penny-pinching fiscal conservatives would finally agree on something like legalization of street drugs in order to save precious government "resources" and let the bums do their thing as long as they don't bother anyone else. So WTF are they always trumped by the bleeding hearts nanny statists and law ‘n order nutbags?

Despite all arguments to the contrary, American law still is very much in the hands of busybodies and puritanical statists who hate the idea that shiftless creeps should be able to piss their lives away just because they want to.

As H.L. Mencken said of puritans, statists too have "the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time."

--Ali Massoud