Bitter-end drug warriors do more damage than weed: Column Continued war on weed infringes on personal freedoms.

Dana Rohrabacher | USA TODAY

The end of the second prohibition era draws near. The disastrous consequences of the misbegotten “War on Drugs,” with its focus on marijuana, are now widely recognized. More humane approaches to drug use are being implemented as states ease restrictions.

But not if the bitter-enders prevail -- as witness Gov. Chris Christie's struggle with the issue in Wednesday night's GOP debate."

President Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971, placing the counter-culture’s favored drug, marijuana, on Schedule I of controlled substances. Since then, countless lives have been ruined, not so much by the drug itself, but by the legal regime that followed.

Whereas it is true that less than 10 percent of pot arrests are designated felonies, recorded misdemeanors stay on offenders’ records. This especially damages minority and other young Americans seeking jobs. In the most serious cases, appallingly long sentences, counted in decades of imprisonment, disrupt sustainable employment and tear apart families.

Our criminal justice system has been corrupted and our foreign policy — as every Mexican president since Vicente Fox has complained, as well as other Latin American leaders — perverted, undermining our ability to conduct positive relations with our neighbors.

Inner-city violence and hostility to militarized police stem both directly and indirectly from the drug war. Beyond our borders, a wave of anti-American sentiment grows as an unintentional consequence of our global do-goodism.

The generations since Nixon placed his faith in massive coercion have advanced toward a psychology of individual decision-making, which promises far more progress against addiction and self-destruction.

Among the most glaring hypocrisies in this debate is the succession of baby-boomer political figures — exemplified by former-president and prospective first gentleman Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama — who, having acknowledged youthful pot-puffing, cannot bring themselves to assist in eliminating the penalties they themselves circumvented.

By their unwillingness to defund and declaw our monstrous weed warrior machine, they deny young Americans the same potholed path to redemption and success they themselves managed to follow.

Too many conservatives and progressives meet in an antiquated belief that citizens must be coddled throughout life. Ordinary Americans are considered adolescent, rambunctious students, and they, the government, are junior high school vice principals.

Most of us who grew up since the ‘60s reject the need of lifelong guidance by vice principals, whether local, state or federal. The vice principals’ “gateway” argument — that a recreational joint leads inexorably to helpless injections of the hard stuff — is a hopeless fallacy.

By such illogic, underage beer-chugging constitutes a likelier gateway candidate. We inhaled, we partied and then we moved on with life, the vast majority of us unsullied.

Never mind the statistics. Just ask around your workplace, your faculty lounge, even your church.

The drug war bureaucracy has been more focused in securing its own budgets and bolstering its law-enforcement power than in tackling an impossible job. It has gone to great lengths to obscure the failure of the mission.

Last year, my Democratic colleague Rep. Sam Farr and I attached a provision to a spending bill blocking federal authorities from prosecuting medical marijuana cases in states that have legalized it. In a Feb. 27 memo this year, the Justice Department owned up to issuing talking points to Congress to derail passage of our amendment.

The talking points warned that our provision was so powerful that it would thwart the feds’ ability to prosecute not only medical but even recreational marijuana use. So now, by the DOJ’s own admission, we learn its previous legal analysis was wrong.

But now that the amendment is law, the department continues to prosecute medical marijuana practitioners, claiming it is not barred from pursuing those prosecutions.

This heavy-handed hypocrisy violates what Congress passed into law for two consecutive years. Rep. Farr and I have demanded the department’s inspector general investigate its agents’ lawless behavior.

Bitter-enders argue that they’re simply protecting people from themselves, dismissing any medicinal potential for marijuana. But anecdotal evidence supporting medical marijuana has reached critical mass. Veterans find relief from PTSD, children from seizures, seniors from arthritis and so on.

Is research limited and inconclusive? How could it be otherwise when marijuana’s Schedule I status prevents the fullest possible scientific research?

Not very long ago they trumpeted yet another study purporting to show marijuana to be “more dangerous than thought.” Thought by whom? Legalization advocates have always acknowledged its dangers, just as we recognize the potential harm of alcohol, tobacco, sugar and other indulgences.

Marijuana entrepreneurs are ready to meet demand and minimize dangers. Unlike now, legal pot will carry carefully calibrated, identifiable and advertised levels of potency. That is how competitive capitalism works, with self-regulation far more exacting than anything government can concoct.

The real issue is personal freedom.

Lagging politicians still want to control our lives. I believe in limited government, individual, freedom, personal responsibility, the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship and the Constitution’s 10th Amendment, wherein the states resolve such issues.

Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican, represents California’s 48th Congressional District.

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