The Rant Institute

  America’s War on Drugs dates back to what economist Thomas Sowell called the “ego boosting, moral exhibitionism” of the 1920’s. And if there's anything the 1920’s demonstrated, it was how prohibition tends to increase the demand for the thing prohibited.   In fact, from the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1920 "which prohibited the consumption of alcohol nationwide, until its repeal with the passage of the Twenty First Amendment in 1933, the United States saw a material increase in death from poisoned liquor, crime, violence and corruption. It also saw a higher consumption per capita of stronger beverages, like whiskey, than weaker beverages, like beer. This follows in accordance with a cardinal rule of prohibition that says there is always more money to be made in pushing the more concentrated substances. In many cities, for example, there were actually more “speakeasies” during Alcohol Prohibition than there previously had been saloons.” [i]   In ...

Make no mistake - America’s war on drugs has always been essentially a race war.   Whether Native American, Mexican, or African American, drugs have helped civilized folk justify their desire to discriminate.   Even the very first drug laws passed in San Francisco in 1875, which banned the smoking of opium in opium dens, were specifically aimed at the “tens of thousands of Chinese men and boys who had been imported into the U.S. during the 1850s and 1880s to build the great western railroads.” [i]   Those who passed such laws justified them by saying too "many women and young girls, as well as young men of respectable families, were being induced to visit the Chinese opium-smoking dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise." [ii]   As it was in the beginning, is now, and perhaps ever will be, the lowest forms of racism are always practiced in the name of the highest moral imperatives.  Ironically enough, America’s growing number of opium users ...

     The prison industry is the second fastest growing sector of the American economy.   This remarkable growth is the result of an increasing number of contracts being awarded to an increasing number of private companies.   Those companies discovered just how profitable it was to be in the business of building and running prisons and, as a result, a growing number of America’s prisons have steadily been handed over to private interests by the panhandling of a political lie.   That lie is the claim that the privatization of prisons is the only way to save money for John and Jane Q. Taxpayer.   The problem is - it doesn’t. In fact, in both the long and the short run, many private prisons end up costing taxpayers more money than they save.  Nevertheless, the responsibility for an increasing number of America's inmates has simply been transferred to private interests in order to create private profits at public expense.   T...