Why is the federal government blocking research on medical marijuana?
There is a classic idea in Washington, that it's impossible to ever eliminate any kind of program that provides a lot of jobs or a lot of money to state or local entities, or any kind of business in any case. And so, what's one of the biggest pork barrels that we've ever had in the history of this country? It's law enforcement. It's locking people up. It's prisons. It's cops on the street. It's SWAT teams. It's a militarization of SWAT teams with surplus military equipment. You talk to the cops out in some small town in America. They like having those M16's. They like having the kevlar vests from the military surplus. They like having the ability to have their own SWAT team. Just about every town in America has its own SWAT team now. Those are dollars and resources that state and local governments become addicted to and so do the politicians who represent those states and localities. They become addicted to those dollars and they don't want to see them disrupted so there's a very direct monetary interest in this, and at the same time we see record arrests for marijuana. Every year it goes up and we're at nearly a million people. Almost a million people arrested every year for marijuana. And this addiction on the state and local level and among the politicians, to the cash that this drug war brings in, and to the cash that particularly the war on marijuana brings in, because as we all know, marijuana is a very widely used drug.
