Police arrest someone in America every 36 seconds on marijuana charges, with a record 872,000 arrests made in 2007, "more than for all violent crimes combined, Hightower and Frazer point out. They note that 89 per cent of all marijuana arrests "are for simple possession of the weed, not for producing or selling it.
They argue the drug war "is doing far more harm than marijuana itself ever will, because (1) it diverts hundreds of thousands of police agents from serious crimes "to the pursuit of harmless tokers ; (2) it costs taxpayers at minimum $10 billion a year to catch, prosecute, and incarcerate marijuana users and sellers; (3) it enables government to snatch the cars, money, computers and other properties of people caught up in drug raids even if they have had no charges filed against them; and (4) it allows "police agents at all levels to trample our Bill of Rights in their eagerness to nab pot consumers.
The drug war has also unleashed a torrent of racism in the form of unjust sentencing, which confines crack-cocaine users who are mostly black to prison for longer terms than powder snorters, who are mostly white.
Hightower and Frazer say authorities have perverted the infamous "Patriot Act of 2001 for use in non-terrorism cases, allowing "sneak-and-peak search warrants to be used in drug war probes, including pursuit of marijuana users. The Act's provisions were supposed to be applied only for suspected terrorist acts. Only three of the Justice Department's 763 requests for "sneak-and-peak last year were used for terrorism searches, they report in Lowdown.
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