This is from "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris, from a chapter devoted to how he believes Religion, and in general, belief without evidence is responsible for some of the absurd laws that still exist in many states in our country:

The influence of faith on our criminal laws comes at a remarkable price. Consider the case of drugs. As it happens, there are many substances(many of which are naturally occurring), the consumption of which leads to transient states of inordinate pleasure. Occasionally, it is true, they lead to transient states of misery as well. But there is no doubt that pleasure is the norm, otherwise human beings would not have the continual desire to take such substances for millennia. Of course, pleasure is precisely the problem with these substances, since pleasure and piety have always had an uneasy relationship.

When one looks at our drug laws, indeed, at our vice laws all together, the only organizing principle that appears to make sense of them is that anything which might radically eclipse prayer, or procreative sexuality as a source of pleasure, has been outlawed. In particular, any drug:

-LSD
-Mescaline
-Psilocybin
-DMT
-MDMA
-Marijuana
-etc

..to which spiritual or religious experience has been ascribed to by it's users, has been prohibited. Concerns about the health of our citizens or about their productivity are red herrings in this debate, as the legality of alcohol and cigarettes attests. The fact that people are being prosecuted and imprisoned for using marijuana, while alcohol remains a staple commodity, is surely the reductio ad absurdum of any notion that our drug laws are designed to keep people from harming themselves or others. Alcohol is, by any measure the more dangerous substance. It has no approved medical use, and it's lethal dose is rather easily achieved. It's role in causing automobile accidents is beyond dispute. The manner in which alcohol relieves people of their inhibitions contributes to:

-Human violence
-Personal injury
-Unplanned pregnancy
-The spread of sexually transmitted disease

Alcohol is also well known to be addictive. When consumed in large quantities over many years, it can lead to devastating neurological impairments, to cirrhosis of the liver and to death. In the United States alone, more than 100,000 people annually die from it's use. It is also more toxic to a developing fetus than any other drug of abuse. Indeed, crack babies appear to have been really suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome.

None of these charges can be leveled at marijuana. As a drug, marijuana is nearly unique in having several medical applications and no known lethal dosage. While adverse reactions to drugs like aspirin and ibuprofin account for an estimated 7,600 deaths and 76,000 hospitalizations each year in the United States alone, marijuana kills no one. It's role as a 'gateway drug' now seems less plausible than ever, and it was never plausible. In fact, nearly everything human beings do; driving cars, flying planes, hitting golf balls- is more dangerous than smoking marijuana in the privacy of one's own home. Anyone who would seriously attempt to argue that marijuana is worthy of prohibition because of the risk it poses to human beings will find the powers of the human brain are simply insufficient for the job. And yet, we are so far from the shady groves of reason now that people are still receiving life sentences without the possibility of parole for growing, selling, possessing or buying what is in fact a naturally occurring plant. Cancer patients and paraplegics have been sentenced to decades in prison for marijuana possession. Owners of garden supply stores have received similar sentences because some of their customers were caught growing marijuana.

What explains this astonishing wastage of human life and material resources? The only explanation is that our discourse on this subject has never been obliged to function within the bounds of rationality. Under our current laws, it is safe to say, if a drug were invented that posed no risk of physical harm or addiction to it's users, but produced a brief feeling of spiritual bliss and epiphany in 100% of those who tried it, this drug would be illegal, and people would be punished mercilessly for it's use. Only anxiety about the biblical crime of idolatry would appear to make sense of this retributive impulse. Because we are a people of faith; taught to concern ourselves with the sinfulness of our neighbors, we have grown tolerant of irrational uses of state power.

Our prohibition of certain substances has led thousands of productive and otherwise law-abiding men and women to be locked away for decades at a stretch; sometimes for life. Their children have become wards of the state. As if such cascading horror were not disturbing enough, violent criminals; murders, rapists and child molesters are regularly paroled to make room for them. Here we appear to have overstepped the banality of evil, and plunged to the absurdity at it's depth.

The consequences of our irrationality on this front are so egregious that they bear a closer examination. Each year, over 1.5 million men and women are arrested in the United States because of our drug laws. At this moment, somewhere on the order of around 400,000 men and women languish in U.S. prisons for non-violent drug offenses. One million others are currently on probation. More people are imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses in the United States than are incarcerated for any reason, in all of western Europe, which has a larger population. The cost of these efforts, at the federal level alone, is nearly 20 billion dollars annually. The total cost of our drug laws, when one factors in the expenses from state and local governments, and from the tax revenue lost by our failure to regulate the sale of drugs could easily be in excess of 100 billion dollars, each year. Our war drugs consumes an estimated 50% of trial time in our courts and the full time energy of over 400,000 police officers. These are resources that might otherwise be used to fight violent crime and terrorism.

In historical terms, there was every reason to expect that such a policy of prohibition would fail. It is well known for instance, that the experiment with the prohibition of alcohol in the United States did little more than precipitate a terrible comedy of increased drinking, organized crime and police corruption. What is not generally remembered, is that prohibition was an explicitly religious exercise; being a joint product of the woman's Christian temperance union and the pious lobbying of certain Protestant missionary societies.

The problem with the prohibition of any desirable commodity is money. The United Nations values the drug trade at 400 billion dollars a year. This exceeds the annual budget for the U.S. Department of Defense. If this figure is correct, the trade in illegal drugs constitutes 8% of all international commerce. While the sale of textiles makes up 7.5% and motor vehicles just 5.3%, and yet prohibition itself is what makes the manufacture and sale of drugs so extraordinarily profitable. Those who earn their living in this way enjoy a 5,000 to 20,000% return on their investment; tax-free. Every relevant indicator of the drug trade; rates of drug-use and interdiction, estimates of production, the purity of drugs on the street, etc, shows that the government can do nothing to stop it as long as such profits exist. Indeed these profits are highly corrupting of law enforcement, in any case. The crimes of the addict, to finance the stratospheric cost of his lifestyle, and the crimes of the dealer, to protect both his territory and his goods are likewise the results of prohibition. A final irony which seems good enough to be the work of Satan himself, is that the market we have created by our drug laws has become a steady source of revenue for terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Shining Path and others. Even if we acknowledge that stopping drug use is a justifiable social goal, how does the financial cost of our war on drugs appear in light of the other challenges we face?

Consider that it would only require a one-time expenditure of 2 billion dollars to secure our commercial seaports against smuggled nuclear weapons. At present, we have allocated a mere 93 million dollars for this purpose. How will our prohibition of marijuana use look(this comes at a cost of 4billion dollars annually) if a new sun ever dawns on the port of Los Angelos? Or consider that the U.S. Government can afford to spend only 2.3 billion dollars each year on the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda are now regrouping, warlords roam the countryside along the city-limits of Kabul. Which is more important to us? Reclaiming this important part of the world for the forces of civilization, or keeping cancer patients in Berkley from relieving their nausea with marijuana? Our present use of government funds suggests an uncanny skewing, we might even say, derangement of our national priorities. Such a bizarre allocation of resources is sure to keep Afghanistan in ruins for many years to come. It will also lead Afghan farmers with no alternative but to grow Opium; happily for them, our drug laws still render this a highly profitable enterprise.

Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the stars, will feel that punishing men and women for their private pleasure is perfectly reasonable. We are now in the 21st century. Perhaps we should have better reasons for depriving our neighbors of their liberty at gunpoint. Given the magnitude of the real problems that confront us; terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the spread of infectious disease, our failing infrastructure, our lack of funds for education and health care, etc, our war on sin is so outrageously unwise as to almost defy rational comment. How have we grown so blind to our deeper interests? And how have we managed to enact such policies with so little substantive debate?
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Please spread this message, and with some work we'll live in a more sane world.
ArgoSG Reviewed by ArgoSG on . An excerpt everyone should read This is from "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris, from a chapter devoted to how he believes Religion, and in general, belief without evidence is responsible for some of the absurd laws that still exist in many states in our country: The influence of faith on our criminal laws comes at a remarkable price. Consider the case of drugs. As it happens, there are many substances(many of which are naturally occurring), the consumption of which leads to transient states of inordinate pleasure. Rating: 5