Quoting a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, Nicholas Kristof sees the light in the cleverly and accurately titled “Drugs Won the War”:
He said he gradually became disillusioned with the drug war, beginning in 1967 when he was a young beat officer in San Diego.
“I had arrested a 19-year-old, in his
From tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal headlines:
Premier anti-“Drug War” crusader Pete Guither wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.
Guither said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation’s drug issues.
Lose a couple of elections and a senator and the even the muckety-mucks in a party will start publicly talking about change. Unfortunately, the Republicans are so married to some of their bad ideas that they are quite possible missing the boat. From SL&P:
[F]olks on the right often assert that the GOP
A few months ago, Don Fitch started writing Your Blain on Bliss, and one of his first posts “Obama, Cigarettes and Cannabis” caught my eye:
Yet still, of all people, the President-elect is not able to summon the will to not smoke tobacco cigarettes. As much as he would like to quit, as much as Michelle and the girls want him to quit, he will presumably duck out of the White House, furtively avoiding his family and to the chagrin of his Secret Service detail, light up a cigarette.
The Obama administration Wednesday asked Congress to end the disparity in penalties for use of crack- and powder-cocaine crimes, a stance sure to bring on contentious debate from the law-enforcement community.
"The Administration believes Congress’s goal should be to completely eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine," said
Peter Hitchens explaining the difference between alcohol prohibition, universally acknowledged as an abject failure, and marijuana and drug prohibition notes:
Alcohol had been legal for centuries, part of the culture of Christian civilization. You might as well try to make breathing illegal.
But cannabis, cocaine and heroin are alien to our world, and could be driven out by firm action.
Alien to our world? Guither’s response:
Right — it’s not like they just… grow in the ground or anything. They came in spaceships.
We need to be firm and tell the space aliens to load up their cannabis, cocaine and heroin and take it all back to planet Druggie.
Or, maybe not. Identical twins both acquitted because no one could tell which one of them did it.
Because the brothers’ identical features made it impossible for officers who were testifying to point out which one had been found with the key, Judge Ibrahim said she had no choice but to acquit both men.
Face it – most Anti-Marijuana “education” comes down to some sort of variation of this:
Hey kids, if you ever give in to temptation and smoke marijuana, you are immediately doomed to a life of shooting up heroin and prostituting yourself for twenty dollars a pop while living under a bridge.
Take for example the
Hat Tip: Drug WarRant
Noting the absence of any questions in the vice presidential debate about the United States over-incarceration problem (which is driven in large part by the so called War on Drugs), and Ms. Palin’s repeated efforts to court the vote of “Joe Six-Pack”, Paul Armentano, the deputy director of NORML, today writes:
In