This summer, I wrote an article with my boss Ken Silverstein about then-Senator, now-VP Joe Biden's cheerleading for the war on drugs, with a particular focus on this weird little earmark Biden, Chuck Grassley and Ted Stevens tried to gin up for DARE, the anti-drug program that has won accolades from the surgeon general ("does not work") and Perspectives on Psychological Science, the journal of the Association for Psychological Science (which in a 2007 article listed DARE as among "potentially harmful therapies").
Now it turns out that Biden's daughter, Ashley Biden, is in a bit of hot water for past instances of drug use (some proven, some alleged). The problem here is not the fact that Ashley Biden took drugs, or got arrested for possessing them, but rather that her father has been a major advocate for the kind of legislation that has thrown large numbers of low income and minority Americans in prison for many years over a few grams. That his daughter managed to avoid any serious repercussions from her marijuana arrest is good for her, but also evident of an extreme double-standard that exists in the United States when it comes to the prosecution of drug law violations.
Vanity Fair has a nice post up that says just about as much and then some. The roots of the war on drugs run beneath the surface of the current Mexican instability and America's huge prison problem-- that we have more incarcerated citizens here than in any other country on earth, more than China, more than Russia, more than all the countries of the Axis of Evil put together, not per capita, but total, says something. That President Obama and Robert Gibbs have to stifle their laughs when talking about drug legalization says something too. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that we have our first president who freely admits to having used drugs in the past (as opposed to the predecessor who denied his cocaine use and another who didn't inhale), but it looks like when it comes to one of America's most shameful and costly problems, "change" isn't worth a dime.
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