My anger over this farcical, destructive, sham of a policy, and the assholes who so gleefully endorse and enforce the naked injustice of it, burns volcanic. It's fucking up our country and fucking up people's lives just as much as the drugs, if not more, because these policies are having negative impacts on the society as a whole, and that includes non-drug users.

Let me count the ways:

1. Last summer, at the motel where I worked, Amy H., a 23 year old girl, was arrested for conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance: heroin. I don't know what the penalty for that is, but I'll bet that it includes about 5 years in state prison, minimum, without any chance of parole.

Behold a beautiful young woman whose life has just been lawfully fucked.

The undercover cop who pulled up to the motel's front desk, where I was working, was excited and very proud of himself. He had a pot belly, a cell phone, and was smoking a big, fat cigar; his clothes made him look as if he'd mugged a mannequin from JC Penny. He told me proudly, excitedly, how he got to engage in a 100 mph car chase with Amy's boyfriend, who fled when the police tried to arrest him. The cop's undercover car, a green van, was running fast and smelled of hot grease. I was sure that he and his buddies would have a good drunk later that night at their cop bar, swapping stories of their day's excitement sort of like football players comparing plays.

This happened in July of 2001. A 23-year-old girl's life, ruined.

10 years ago, in 1991 - back when we knew the drug war wasn't working and some of us had proposed new ways of handling the issue - Amy was 13 years old. She was probably a graduate of her local junior high's D.A.R.E. program.

People like me, back in 1991, said "Hey, this Drug War is fucked up. It's not working. We've got to start going about this differently. Just because people use drugs doesn't mean they're wicked. Maybe we should stop treating drug use like a crime. Maybe then we could make some progress."

But conservative assholes scoffed at me as if I were a fool or a criminal or both. Their mantra was something like "But what kind of message are we sending our children?" So they passed even harsher legislation, establishing draconian 'mandatory minimum' laws that landed some people in prison for 10 or 25 years to life for relatively miniscule infractions.

Under the mandatory minimum laws, a person dealing pot to his friends would receive a stiffer sentence (and no chance of parole) than a person who was burglarizing homes or mugging people on the street.

So that was the message they were sending to 13 year old Amy H. back in 1991.

10 years later, she's facing a 5 year felony conviction in an overcrowded state penitentiary.

Thank-you, Drug Warriors.

I put the heroin addiction, the arrest, and the imprisonment of beautiful 23 year old Amy H. on the head of every fucking shallow-minded, short-sighted piece of shit Drug Warrior in this country today. You should be very proud of yourselves, because there are a million more Amy H's to come. (Talk about job security.)

Today, after you read this essay, I want you to go out to your local shopping mall and look around you. Look at the innocent faces of the 13 year old girls who might be gathered around a table in the food court, comparing their GAP purchases of the day.

Because of the Drug War, because of the grossly ineffectual and stupidly harsh methods that it now employs, the chances are good that, 10 years from now, one of those girls will be spending 5 of the best years of her life behind bars - or dead from a heroin overdose - unless we change our methods now.

Think about it.