The latest unemployment figures are out and…they are about the same as last time. Five point one or two percent of Americans are unemployed. That’s not as good as Clinton, who had two or three percent unemployment, but it’s definitely better than Carter, who also had double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation. Bush is right in the middle, so he’s fine, don’t you think?

Ok, so that unemployment rate doesn’t include people who have simply given up looking because they’ve given up hope. That’s a million or so, but they don’t count. Oh, and the prisoners. They don’t count either, because they are not looking for work; there are a couple million of them too. It’s probably a good thing they’re not looking for work because they’d be looking for jobs that involved stealing and stealing, and that would definitely be a bad thing, especially since Enron went under and took a lot of stealing and robbery jobs. to the bathroom with them. And all those prisoners create jobs, for the police who have to find them in the first place, for the prosecutors who have to prosecute them, for the defense attorneys who defend them (but not too much, obviously), prison guards to protect them, probation officers to watch them when they leave, intermediate houses to house them, etc.

The thing about our prison population is that half the prisoners there are for drug-related crimes, and the prison population has doubled in the last ten years, making us the largest country in the world with the highest percentage of our prison population. USA! USA! We are number one! What I want to know is: why are we Americans so criminal? Why are there more useless here than anywhere else? Is it part and parcel of the capitalist system that our cult of greed makes us want far more things than anyone else, and is that more important than the laws we make for ourselves?

Drugs, I know, are bad. They have devastating consequences for the people involved with them. But why are we making the consequences even more devastating by sending addicts to prison? I guess I’m pretty libertarian about this and I think what adults choose to do with their bodies should be up to them as long as they’re willing to accept the consequences. Other western countries have decriminalized or legalized drugs and you know what happened? Bit. They didn’t go to hell in a hand basket and about the same number of people who used drugs before decriminalization used them afterward. What happened was that these countries didn’t have to spend their citizens’ tax dollars on extra police and extra prisons.

This is not going to happen in the United States. I know that. But we ended prohibition and a lot of the lawlessness went away when alcohol, which people wanted to drink, became legal. I guarantee you that would happen if we ended our drug prohibition. Actually, thank goodness for prohibition, my grandfather, the bootlegger, got rich and when it was repealed, he had to do a legitimate business. Damn.

Now, (I repeat) drugs are bad. Don’t use them. Don’t tell anyone I told you to use them either, because that’s not my point.

Drug addiction is widely recognized as a disease and is the only disease that is largely illegal. I think it’s because people are very uncomfortable with the voluntary aspect of addiction. Despite the physiological basis of the addiction, the addict has yet to make up his mind to take a drug. Of course, other diseases also have a voluntary component. Lung cancer, for example. People get lung cancer from voluntary smoking. (Mostly. Yeah, that’s okay, people buy it secondhand, too.) Or type two diabetes, which is strongly influenced by obesity (ie people who willingly overeat).

What I think is that we should be fair about it and make all diseases illegal. We should have a war on disease just like we’ve had a war on drugs for the past two decades. Think how successful the war on drugs has been! We could also be just as successful in eliminating disease from the United States! Lung cancer might be the first disease we’d start with, since smoking is criminalized anyway, so it would be easy to make the offender smoking outcome easy too. So we would go with Diabetes because they use needles and that’s like being a drug addict, isn’t it? Then we would make sweets against the law (it leads to Diabetes) and above all… chocolate.

Oh! Every woman reading this just got a chill down her spine, because that would almost be the end of the world for you, wouldn’t it? No. I don’t have any inside information on this one. They have not yet passed legislation criminalizing chocolate. But what if it did happen? What would you ladies do?

I bet you would get it one way or another. Good? There would be chocolate merchants all over the country. Guaranteed. And despite the exorbitant costs and the possibility of lengthy prison time, you’d still make your chocolate. You would have your daily dose. I know. You might want to think about that when it comes time to build more prisons to get all these ‘addicts’ off the streets.