{"id":5643,"date":"2011-06-26T09:32:53","date_gmt":"2011-06-11T11:29:26","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-11T11:29:26","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=5643","title":{"rendered":"Friday June 17, the 40th Anniversary of the \u201cWar on Drugs\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>NTY: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/06\/11\/opinion\/11blow.html?_r=1&amp;hp\">Drug Bust<\/a> by Charles Blow:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Friday marks the 40th anniversary of one of the biggest, most expensive, most destructive social policy experiments in American history: The war on drugs. <\/p>\n<p>On the morning of June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon, speaking from the Briefing Room of the White House, declared: \u201cAmerica\u2019s public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive. I have asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive. This will be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of supply, as well as Americans who may be stationed abroad, wherever they are in the world.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>So began a war that has waxed and waned, sputtered and sprinted, until it became an unmitigated disaster, an abomination of justice and a self-perpetuating, trillion-dollar economy of wasted human capital, ruined lives and decimated communities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Not to mention the Fourth Amendment becoming a casualty in the War on Drugs. When I was younger, I equated it with a casualty by friendly fire. On reflection, it was a result of \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/dictionary.reference.com\/browse\/%27fragging\">fragging<\/a>,\u201d which is \u201cto kill or wound (a fellow soldier or superior officer) deliberately with an explosive device,\u201d so fittingly <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fragging\">from the Vietnam War<\/a>. \u201cFragging\u201d is technically \u201cfriendly fire,\u201d in that it wasn&#8217;t the enemy. It is still a murder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>b2evALnk.b2WPAutP <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=5643\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}