If you haven’t come to the obvious conclusion yet, the War on Some Drugs is stupid. Prohibition never worked. It only creates organized crime, new classes of criminals who are doing nothing truly wrong, increases the severity and impact of actual crimes, and moves us closer to a fascist police state.

In today’s Bits Hits, several drug-related news headlines illustrate the stupidity of the War on Some Drugs.

• John Walters, head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said that the street price of cocaine has gone up 19%, and its purity has fallen, due to U.S. interdiction efforts in Latin America. What he doesn’t say is that means people who feed their drug addiction through crime are going to have to commit at least 19% more crime to keep taking the same amount of drugs.
• Some Mexican drug lords have figured that due to tighter border controls, it’s easier to grow marijuana in the U.S., than to import it from Mexico. So they’ve taken over sections of California national parks. The government’s response? Go in with guns blazing, of course. We can’t have people smoking marijuana, and if you want to know why, see the next story.
• Chicago police shot and killed three pit bulls that attacked four people, and then sent the dogs’ bodies to be tested for marijuana. Police want to know if the dogs were high at the time of the attacks. As anyone who’s ever been high will tell you, marijuana decreases aggressive behavior (except for the munchies).
• And in yet another study proving the government is lying about marijuana, it was found that marijuana decreases symptoms of depression and can help with sleeplessness. The study will be published in the journal Addictive Behaviors. Walters was not available for comment at press time.