There are indications that we may be only an injection or a pill away from reducing whatever problematical craving that signals the brain. It was Ronald Reagan and George Bush who muscled tobacco products into the Pacific Rim countries and Japan and then into China itself. Yet this country would do well to step back and ponder what it has done and is doing. Fueled by drug war fever, Congress fashioned the 1987 U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, a rigid and overly severe sentencing formula that removed discretion from judges and handed it carte blanche to prosecutors. This foolishness only costs, with little or no real benefit to society.
Mass arrests result in mass destruction of families.
If children are involved they often become casualties on the battleground of divorce. Millions of children are growing up or have grown up during weekends in prison visiting rooms. Everything in life telescopes farther and farther away from the inmate. He or she becomes an abstraction, a shade, a life reduced to a series of badly done prison visiting room photographs or a dusty album in a box somewhere. Only next to death itself are people rendered so immaterial.