Change is slowly coming on the "War on Drugs"

I wasn't sure if we were supposed to blog about the article we were to find regarding the "War on Drugs", but i figured what the heck, why not?

The article I chose , " 9 signs the War on Drugs is almost over", was written  for Alternet, by Tony Newman, a communication director for the Drug Policy Alliance, back in December of 2012.  He also followed up in 2013 with another article titled, "10 ways the War on Drugs changed forever in 2013".

In this article Tony Newman stated, " 2012 would go down in history as the beginning of the end to American longest failed war, the war on drugs".  That one sentence caught my attention, but after reading the article, two years later i feel we are still in the beginning , there has not been much forward progress on this front.

Momentum to change the War on Drugs did start in 2012, and since then we have seen a number of changes as stated in the article.  Colorado and Washington passed laws legalizing marijuana, California passed Proposition 36, which changed the "three strikes" mandatory minimum law. Latin American Presidents called for an end to the war on drugs and here in America we also saw some states pass the 911 Good Samaritan Law, allowing and encouraging people who witness an overdose to call 911 without fear of arrest. Politicians, started to change their stance on the "War on Drugs", including; Beto O'Rourke, Ellen Rosenblum and Andrew Cuomo started speaking out in regards to changing the laws and decriminalizing marijuana.  By 2013, 58% of the American population , the majority, want to legalize marijuana.

The article, makes you believe as a country we are headed in the right direction and change is occurring, but it is really?  Two years has passed since the article was written and very little change has happened since the beginning.  While it seems we came out of the gate fast,  somewhere coming down the front stretch, we start to stall.

We are still facing high incarceration rates, due to drug persecution.  Profiling is happening everyday in our inner cities by police officers wanting to make quick arrests.  These arrests are quick, not much work and allows the officers to sign, seal and deliver the arrest quickly, offering those officers the ability to move up in ranks because of the large number of arrests they made,  and the government is spending over $50 Billion a year on a war that is hurting people more than it's doing to help them.  No changes are in place to treat the addict, to help them become better members of society, we are still locking these individuals up and in some instances throwing away the key, but at what expense.

If we are going to truly end the "War on Drugs", then we need to start lobbying our congressmen and senators.  We have to have a voice.  It has to start somewhere and the more pressure applied to government, maybe the more they will react and make the changes that are necessary and quite honestly has been a long time coming.