“Marijuana arrests are half of all drug arrests and we arrest African-Americans at five times the rate of whites. This is wrong and it must stop.”

That is the opinion of John Hanger, a former Department of Environmental Protection Secretary, speaking with seven other candidates for governor in Pittsburgh on Sunday.

Marijuana possession for personal use ought to be decriminalized.

But if we follow Hanger’s reasoning out, we run into a troubling question: Do African-Americans use marijuana at a rate five times higher than that of whites?

We haven’t seen credible research to definitively answer the question.

But if the arrest statistics cited by Hanger are accurate, we — government, church leaders, schools — are doing a lousy job of persuading people to not use marijuana.

How much money and time are we wasting?

Billions and centuries.

Every segment of society spends money eagerly in the hope of lessening the use of illegal drugs by Americans, especially by young Americans.

We include marijuana use in that campaign even though admittedly, marijuana use by itself is not considered life-threatening, and technically speaking, marijuana use is not considered to be physically addicting.

What marijuana use is, however, especially among younger-than-25 people, is stupidity-manufacturing.

Defenders of marijuana can holler until their lungs rupture, “See? It isn’t addictive! It isn’t fatal! So you people are just hoo-haahing us!”

Oh, yeah?

We see the inability to concentrate, the indifference to learning, the antipathy toward hard work, the willingness to exist on handouts, welfare, exaggerated disabilities.

We’ll concede that a joint a week used by a 45-year-old gainfully employed, taxpaying, productive citizen is pretty harmless as long as driving is not involved.

But the stoned dolts we see on our streets, unemployable and functionally illiterate, are another matter altogether.

So we ought to do something about that.

But what we have done, it seems, is “do anything” because it “might do something.”

We have wasted enormous resources in a totally ineffective “war on drugs.” Like the French before World War II, we have put our blood and treasure into the supposed security of a Maginot Line of slogans, programs and activities — while our young people, African-Americans especially but far from exclusively, go right around the anti-drug campaign in their pursuit of the Blitzkrieg of Nirvana.

We don’t pretend to know what, if anything, will work to wean one-fifth of our society off welfare.

But the “war on drugs” does not work.

— The (DuBois) Courier Express