10 Million Americans Busted for Pot: Enough is Enough

[babylonsister]

10 Million Americans Busted for Pot: Enough is Enough

By Paul Armentano, AlterNet. Posted October 1, 2007.


Since 1990, over 10.4 million Americans have been busted for pot. When will we recognize it's time to stand up to the war on harmless pot smoking?

What would cops do without weed? For one thing, they'd sure spend a lot less time arresting and processing petty pot violators. How much time? For starters, however long it took to bust the estimated 739,000 Americans arrested for minor pot possession in 2006.

That's according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, which reported last week that a record 829,625 Americans were arrested for violating marijuana laws last year. Of those arrested, 89 percent of those were charged with simple pot possession -- the highest annual total ever recorded and nearly three times the number of citizens busted 15 years ago.

Yet to hear local law enforcement spin it, busting small-time potheads isn't their priority. The record number of busts, they claim, is simply a reflection that record numbers of Americans are now smoking pot.

But don't tell Drug Czar John Walters that. After all, the czar just claimed earlier this month -- at a press conference announcing the release of the federal Office of Applied Studies (OAS) 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health -- that pot use has been declining for the better part of the past five years.

Predictably, both the cops and the drug czar are playing fast and loose with the facts. Yes, in fact more Americans are now admittedly consuming pot today than in 1991 (so much for the past 15 years of the so-called "war on drugs"), but this increase is hardly proportional to the dramatic spike in overall pot arrests.

more...

http://alternet.org/drugreporter/63988/

[leftysopaw]

1. that's a lot of bud

:)