Uncle Sam Needs Chemo!
There's a Cancer Eating Away the Soft U
Drugs don’t kill people drug pushers kill people. That is the core of the argument for an end to legal prohibitions on various street drugs—after all prohibitions never succeed. Remove the profit from the product remove the criminal organizations from the neighborhoods and countryside empty the nonviolent offenders from the bursting prisons stop throwing taxpayer dollars into the wind. The projected savings are “trillions upon trillions.” The expected benefits are enormous.
The federal government’s drug obsession is seen as an inadvertent advertising program which actually popularizes experimentation among rebellious youth. A long-term reduction of faith in the moral authority of public figures is bemoaned. Kids have lacked respect since corporal punishment with the Board of Education was outlawed. Popular villain Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation is tapped as the single largest societal catastrophe abetted by Earl Warren’s left-leaning Supreme Court. As law-and-order politicians extend minimum sentences for simple possession of controlled substances murderers and child molesters must be released early to free up cell space. Those in power lack the courage to break the cycle.
…the government is responsible for a vast majority of the violence in our communities…
Gischel’s policy proposals regarding drug legalization and gun control for the most part hold water as do his predictions of those policies’ likely effects. The closer he sticks to that central agenda the more reasoned he seems. A side trip conflating the personal activities of elected politicians with waves of school shootings shows fallacious causation. Beyond issues of logical soundness the quality of the writing varies. Emotion bubbles up; a degree of redundancy is present in some chapters but the summarizing final chapter is quite cohesive. Supporting statistics are largely undocumented; some appear too extreme to be correct and may be more about perception: “Two out of every three young black males in our inner cities are either currently in prison out on parole or awaiting trial…”
E.H. Gischel is not a young pothead he’s a retired nuclear engineer once in the headlines as a whistle-blower on the Three Mile Island meltdown cleanup project. His previous writing is specific to the nuclear industry. Uncle Sam Needs Chemo should be considered an opinion piece but an interesting one which counters popular convention in the fighting of crime. Readers more concerned by killers than stoners should see what they think of this plan.
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