Violence has become a way of life

Radley Balko has an excellent post on the very violent culture in which we live: a culture in which various governments across the United States conduct something like 100 militarized raids each day in the war on drugs. Certainly, drug addiction is a serious problem.

But the overall approach which criminalizes the sale of drugs, which places people in jail for the purchase or use of drugs, and which dissuades people from seeking help and treatment has failed for the past 30 years.