Globally, the issue comes down to the U.S. congress intransigent prohibition against democratic institutions of regulation, licensing and taxation to solve the public health problems posed by addiction.

Last month the Washington Post ran a cogent Op/Ed, 'The Lost War', by  Glenny, a former BBC reporter, about the national security problems caused by the drug war. One vital observation tucked deep in the article said it all.

"The trade in illegal narcotics begets violence, poverty and tragedy.  And wherever I went around the world, gangsters, cops, victims, academics and politicians delivered the same message: The war on drugs is the underlying cause of the misery.  Everywhere, that is, except Washington, where a powerful bipartisan consensus has turned the issue into a political third rail."

This insanity originates in Washington, D.C. on Capital Hill. This war is not maintained to protect the American people from drug addiction or crime. It is for the purpose of imposing a Jim Crow system that keeps white and white pandering politicians and the two party system in control of America.

About 8 years ago I shared an email correspondence with a Colorado state prosecutor who was torn up because the DEA was pushing him to prosecute terminal care physicians under state law so that the Feds would not be as clearly seen as the progenitors of the policy to go after pain doctors. That prosecutor resigned rather than do the dirty work of the feds.

The ultimate irony is that for the first ten years of the drug war, the first years that William Rehnquist was on the court, he was addicted to pain killers. According the Smoke And Mirrors a book by Dan Baum a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Rehnquist was also the White House staff attorney who was tasked to pass on the constitutionality of the Controlled Substances Act as it was prepared for submission to congress. Pain med addict Rehnquist, who worked to prevent minority voters from voting in the 1950's, was put onto the Supreme Court where he spent the rest of his life  rubber stamping his own handy work as a White House lawyer.

"[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to." H.R. Haldeman's diaries.

The brain can initiate pain, sometimes debilitating pain, for what it sees as protective purposes -- in order to distract the person from noxious unconcsious emotions and feelings.  I was poked and prodded by doctors for years, for pain that laid me low.  And they were useless in treating me because they rejected, for no rational reason, the correct diagnosis.  When Dr. John Sarno provided me that diagnosis, that the subconscious brain (the part of the brain that controls ALL the bodies vital systems BENEATH our consciousness) can initiate pain for what it perceives as protective purposes.  Simply learning the brain can do this cured me.  Completely.

People should be a able to medicate themselves if the need to, but the definition of that need is being warped by the malpractice of a medical community that treats the most powerful organ in the body as if it's nonexistent.