@Mike,
“There are others, but you get the point. The mightiest drug in America, the most abused drug in America, the most dangerous drug is America, is the good ol’ American dollar bill.”

As ever, solid.
I have a few minor points on which I disagree but hardly worth quibbling when the body is so whole and vital. To your conclusion, in MHO, I believe the desire for power and control belongs right up there–#1 with a bullet.
THAT drug is pervasive, addictive, and just as destructive as compulsive greed.

Functionally, this is the reason little to nothing gets changed in this country - too many people are making money or deriving power from it. We can’t simplify the tax system (see other thread) because too many people are getting jobs and making money off the complicated system we have. We won’t get people educated and get them jobs because they’re too many parts of the government that gets its power from the people on welfare. Very little can change in this country unless the power flows TO the government. Drugs are just near the top of the list that people actually care about changing, because it’s more fun.

Drugs are another thing that require more than a little personal responsibility to use safely and maturely. There are plenty of gun owners in this country who have never had an accident with their weapons, plenty of drivers who have never hit anyone, and lots of “recreational” drug users who have never let their personal practices affect anyone else directly or indirectly. While we’re at it, there’s lots of people who’ve enjoyed the odd milk shake or candy bar and not become a menace to shipping while swimming.

It’s the people who can’t use them responsibly that make the papers. The guy who loans a gun to his kid, The person who plows into the old lady and the urban legendary guy who thinks he can fly. And each time one of those exceptions makes the news (with the requisite “we have 24 hours to fill” period of serious discussion afterwards) it makes the folks who use and do the perfectly safely seem more and more the minority. And that’s annoying whenever it happens.

In most cases, the people who are warning you about this or that problem don’t want your answer to be “You’re right, I’m gonna go do something”, the want the reaction to be “What should we do?” They’re looking for power like anyone else. That’s true of the folks who are trying to get TV show XYZ taken off the air, the ones who were (and still are) trying to get books and comics banned, and the folks who rail about global warming. They tout themselves as the savior and the fixer of the problem, if only you’ll listen to them, and hopefully make a small donation.

“So why do they fight legalization? Because they know this is crap.”

Like you said, it’s the power of the dollar, and the idea that those who are in the know won’t get their fair share if pot was legalized that fight these things. The right winged goyem nutjobs also add to that too. I also think the government is such that NOTHING gets done without deals on the table, over the table, under the table, etc. Nothing gets done because there is no honesty in politics. Good ideas are thrown into bills with bad ideas, and it becomes a huge game of “who can pass it” and “who can’t”.

Even programs and laws that make complete sense, that every one can agree on, take years to make it to the public, because there is no fast track in Washington. There’s no accountability, when EVERYONE knows how to play the system. Everything takes forever to move, and who cares how long it takes when the money still flows into your pocket, regardless of speed.

There’s no way to wipe the slate clean either. As young, thoughtful, intelligent congressmen and women get elected, they are stamped out by the senior congressmen who tell them what to do, when to vote, etc. It’s high school politics on a national, state, and community level. And when someone educated enough spots this hypocrisy, and shouts it from a mountaintop (or blog, or column on a blog)… there’s never enough people who hear it who know what to do if they even agree.

While you made excellent points Mike, I wonder if the system is so corrupted, so benign, so…. worthless, that intelligent arguments like this and others are just destined to float on the air into oblivion. I wish it truly didn’t work this way, but I fail to note how far back we would need to go in our own history to find when our system worked correctly.

That being said, as worthless as you may find DARE, I can attest, it (combined with great parenting) did actually work for me. Worth the billions in tax dollars to fund it though? Not a chance… I learned more about why not to do drugs from sitcoms than DARE ever did.