Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Aaarrgghhh! Bloomin' Idiot of the day: Alan Lupo in the Boston Herald. Look at this -- he has it. It almost appears that he understands it... "It doesn't matter how many millions the government pours in here to stop drugs," a Mexican lawyer told a New York Times [NYT] reporter. "As long as Americans keep buying them, this business is never going to stop." The fellow said that in 1986. One need not have majored in economics to understand that if a market exists for a product, entrepreneurs will show up to sell to and profit from that market. Al Capone, after all, used to insist that he was nothing more than a businessman as he peddled illegal hooch to willing buyers. Even if Mexican drug dealers were somehow stopped at our southwestern borders, they and others would find a way into our lucrative market, just as, during Prohibition, Irish, Jewish and Italian mobsters shipped and trucked in booze, and the Scotch-Irish of Appalachia cooked it up in back country stills. Exactly, you've got it! It's the same issues as alcohol prohibition. So... So... Come on, you can do it... And the very next paragraph is: If we Americans were serious about the drug war, we'd be fighting it not only aggressively at our borders and beyond, as we do, but also at home by treating our addicts with every manner of medical, psychological and social program we could invent. What a moron. 11:42:38 PM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []

Are you a death enabler? If you support drug prohibition policies that make black market drug sales profitable, then you are encouraging violent behavior by criminals and supporting the funding of terrorists. This directly results in the deaths of thousands. You are a death enabler. If you support drug war enforcement, you are giving your government a green light to use military tactics against its own citizens, resulting in the deaths of both cops and citizens, often in the name of the impossible eradication of a drug that has harmed nobody. You are a death enabler. If you support the criminalization of pain medicines and medical marijuana patients, you are preventing doctors from doing their jobs, you are shortening lives, and sometimes, you are driving people in pain to suicide. You are a death enabler. If you support the stigmatization of drug users through criminal laws, then you deny people the information they need to make safe choices about drugs, and you scare people from getting help when they need it, which may result in overdose death or fatal disease. You are a death enabler. 7:37:36 PM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []

Quotable Over at ACLU blog, Jag Davies talks about George Soros' speech at the ACLU Membership Conference this week. Soros is, of course, a lightning rod for hatred from some on the neocon right -- but he understands freedom better than they do. Here are a couple of quotes from Soros' speech: The War on Terror exploited a combination of the War on Drugs and the fear of death. The War on Drugs is one of the most repressive aspects in American life. 7:22:40 AM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []

Barr and the drug war Bob Barr gives a rare (for a poliician) public mea culpa in I Was Wrong About The War On Drugs -- It's A Failure over at the Huffington Post. I'll admit it, just five years ago I was "Public Enemy Number 1" in the eyes of the Libertarian Party. In my 2002 congressional race for Georgia's Seventh District, the Libertarian Party ran scathing attack ads against my stand on Medical Marijuana. [...] For years, I served as a federal prosecutor and member of the House of Representatives defending the federal pursuit of the drug prohibition. Today, I can reflect on my efforts and see no progress in stopping the widespread use of drugs. I'll even argue that America's drug problem is larger today than it was when Richard Nixon first coined the phrase, "War on Drugs," in 1972. America's drug problem is only compounded by the vast amounts of money directed at this ongoing battle. In 2005, more than $12 billion dollars was spent on federal drug enforcement efforts while another $30 billion was spent to incarcerate non-violent drug offenders. The result of spending all of those taxpayer's dollars? We now have a huge incarceration tab for non-violent drug offenders and, at most, a 30% interception rate of hard drugs. We are also now plagued with the meth labs that are popping up like poisonous mushrooms across the country. While it is clear the War on Drugs has been a failure, it is not enough to simply acknowledge that reality. We need to look for solutions that deal with the drug problem without costly and intrusive government agencies, and instead allow for private industry and organizations to put forward solutions that address the real problems. It's a conversion, all right, but the rest of the article is anecdotal and doesn't really say anything about where he would go specifically. In fact, the anecdotal example he uses is about private industry implementing tougher drug policies. It's an important admission by Barr that he has changed his views, but so far it seems weak, especially compared to what we heard from Ron Paul (not that we've heard any better from Obama, and particularly not from McCain). I'm not one of those who feels that Barr has to somehow make up for every past mistake before he's given any support, but I'd like to have some clear sense that he's not just "looking for a better way to handle prohibition." I'll be curious to see how much the drug war factors in the Barr campaign (I'm sure Daniel will help with that) and how that translates into a national discussion. That would be welcome no matter what. 7:19:59 AM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []