Licking pig snot can get you SOOOO high.
Ed raises an interesting critique that the reason we have a War on Drugs is to keep poor people in jail. He suggests (and shows) that drug incarcerations parallels with the decision to embrace the Reaganomics idea that transferring wealth to the richest Americans will be awesome for everyone. But of course, it's not awesome for the poor. How to keep them from rioting? Preemptive lock up for drugs.
It's an interesting argument, but I think it overstates things. Again, my feeling is that conspiracy theories are false because they assume a level of cleverness and foresight that just doesn't gibe with my observation of human nature. Stupidity is usually a better answer than evil. We have a drug war, because we make some stupid assumptions about drugs (Pot will lead to heroin use.), not because we have some evil Soylent-Green-like plan to do away with poor people.
The roots of the drug war come not from the needs of a small slice of the super-rich, but from Nixon's need to appease his silent majority of middle class squares. It was hard for the suburbanites of the early 1970s to understand why all the verities of their lives had been upended. Why were black rioting in Watts and Newark after "all we had done for them" with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights act? Why were these kids being so obstreperous when we bought them all the slinkies and hula hoops they wanted and sent them to college? What's happening to MY AMERICA?
It's hardly an isolated phenomenon, as we see with the Birther movement.
Drugs provide a great, external example. Blacks aren't rioting because despite having voting rights they have no political voice and despite being allowed to sit in a lunch counter, they can't afford to eat there. No, they are rioting because they are hopped up on drugs.
And your kids are stoned, not because they find the world around them false and meaningless, but because marijuana is addictive.
The War on Drugs was a misguided attempt to try and control massive social change, just as the War on Terror was a misguided attempt to impose order on anarchic actors beyond the easy reach of our laws.
I remain ambivalent about the legalization of marijuana, but I do support the decriminalization of much of marijuana possession. But there is probably a Freakanomics article about how locking up every other black dude is a really good way to bring down crime rates.
Let's face it, if most of the poor are behind bars the only people left to commit crimes are Wall Street bankers.
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