I’ve argued that even fascists should support the legalization of marijuana. In fact, marijuana prohibition is a perfect example in some ways of fascism, or of communism, or of any authoritarian system that you would think of. However, just from the civil point of view of economics and basic politics, you have really finite resources to bring to bear in a society in terms of criminal justice activity. At some point or other, the most brutal totalitarian societies will find that prisons are simply too full. Also, by the way, the United States has more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world. We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Thank god for the leaders of the free world … I think we feel like otherwise.
The fact is that we have finite resources, I call it finite justice. If justice doesn’t matter to you, there are still really important functions for the police who don’t want to have neighborhoods that are dangerous because that means you get lower rents, which means you get lower profits, which means that you are wasting police resources by going after criminals as opposed to your political enemies.
No matter how bad the system is you really always have finite police resources. This is, of course, in a democratic society where you have governments that cannot meet all the needs of the electorate that they are supposedly dependent on. Then you really do have to look at the basic economics. If you’re spending more money putting somebody in prison than you are in putting them through college, that is probably not a good use of finite resource. If you’re using police to go out and look for medical marijuana patients, that’s probably not as good a use of police power as having them go out for murderers as the rapist and Republicans, depending on where you are. This is the thing is that we have to think about justice, whether we mean it in the ideal sense of where we’re supposed to mean it or if we mean it in terms of simply criminal law elements and efficiency. You don’t want to spend it on something that is really a hoax.
On the other hand, if you’re running a hoax as a racket, you have this huge investment in this propaganda, this is what you’re stuck with.
And that is really where the Jeff Sessions of the American criminal justice system is. They have this enormous vested interest in the drug war, first and foremost in marijuana prohibition. Whatever the subject is, you know oh yes, but let’s talk about marijuana prohibition. John Walters, who is the drug czar who went around the country telling rural sheriffs that marijuana is more of a problem than methamphetamine. The rural sheriffs are going this city slicker doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is how ideology was driving thing. And driving a wedge into the prohibition is police state.
On the other hand, there are counties in Texas where the sheriff will tell you that if it wasn’t for marijuana prohibition, they’d have real budget problems. You know, what are they doing to the criminal justice system with marijuana prohibition? If you really want to be a good fascist, you need to study economics. Poor Mussolini.
Even Mussolini wasn’t dumb enough to outlaw marijuana. They really didn’t.
That’s how it works, folks.
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