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End the War on Drugs
We have recently heard many shocking stories of brutal killings and ruthless violence related to drug cartels warring with Mexican and US officials. It is approaching the fever pitch of a full blown crisis. Unfortunately, the administration is not likely to waste this opportunity to further expand government. Hopefully, we can take a deep breath and look at history for the optimal way to deal with this dangerous situation, which is not unprecedented.
Alcohol prohibition in the 1920's brought similar violence, gangs, lawlessness, corruption and brutality. The reason for the violence was not that making and selling alcohol was inherently dangerous. The violence came about because of the creation of a brutal black market which also drove profits through the roof. These profits enabled criminals like Al Capone to become incredibly wealthy, and militantly defensive of that wealth. Al Capone saw the repeal of Prohibition as a great threat, and indeed smuggling operations and gangland violence fell apart after repeal. Today, picking up a bottle of wine for dinner is a relatively benign transaction, and beer trucks travel openly and peacefully along their distribution routes.
Similarly today, the best way to fight violent drug cartels would be to pull the rug out from under their profits by bringing these transactions out into the sunlight. People who, unwisely, buy drugs would hardly opt for the back alley criminal dealer as a source, if a coffeehouse-style dispensary was an option. Moreover, a law-abiding dispensary is likely to check ID's and refuse sale to minors, as bars and ABC stores tend to do very diligently. Think of all the time and resources law enforcement could save if they could instead focus on violent crimes, instead of this impossible nanny-state mandate of saving people from themselves!
If these reasons don't convince the drug warriors, I would urge them to go back to the Constitution and consider where there is any authority to prohibit private personal choices like this. All of our freedoms - the freedom of religion and assembly, the freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to be free from unnecessary government searches and seizures - stem from the precept that you own yourself and are responsible for your own choices. Prohibition laws negate self-ownership and are an absolute affront to the principles of freedom. I disagree vehemently with the recreational use of drugs, but at the same time, if people are only free to make good decisions, they are not truly free. In any case, states should decide for themselves how to handle these issues and the federal government should respect their choices.
My great concern is that instead of dealing deliberatively with the actual problems, Congress will be pressed again to act quickly without much thought or debate. I can't think of a single problem we haven't made worse that way. The panic generated by the looming crisis in Mexico should not be redirected into curtailing more rights, especially our second amendment rights, as seems to be in the works. Certainly, more gun laws in response to this violence will only serve to disarm lawful citizens. This is something to watch out for and stand up against. We have escalated the drug war enough to see it only escalates the violence and profits associated with drugs. It is time to try freedom instead.
Posted by Ron Paul (03-30-2009, 11:01 AM) filed under Civil Liberties
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Comments: 29
There is a happy ending ( well somewhat ) a friend has bought he and his wife a house to live in.
Clifford, I can see where you are coming from there. I don't think there would be that many who killed themselves with narcotics myself.
I'm glad you and I agree on something.
As far as the drug war - did you see yesterday where the President of Mexico blames corruption on the U.S. side of the fence for the problems ??? !!!!
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977638355&nav=MyGather
(I did a Gather author interview)
Clifford, you are speaking from ignorance, which is all too common. No one in the history of mankind has ever died from cannabis. The same can't be said for aspirin or even water for that matter.
But aside from this fact, ownership over our own bodies is a civil rights issue of paramount importance.
One day people will look back on our drug laws the same way people today look back on slavery or witchcraft laws. Prohibition is an insane policy that no enlightened people should endorse. Fortunately people are beginning to awaken.
leap.cc - Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Weird...and, here I'd foolishly thought all along that the addicted people WERE the public.
The sad fact is, regardless of what is legal or illegal, a certain percentage of any given society WILL seek to alter their state of consciousness through SOME substance, whether it be through pot, coke, meth, heroin, alcohol, paint fumes, glues, aerosol non-stick coatings, gasoline fumes, natural endorphins released through self-mutilation, or any number of other "normal" or "bizarre" variations.
When the Soviet Union banned alcoholic beverages some years ago, there was an epidemic of people getting gravely ill, going blind, and even dying from drinking isopropyl alcohol, mouthwash, after shave, or anything else that had a hint of alcohol in it.
People have literally killed FOR nicotine, not just FROM it.
We really need to reach the point where we, as a society, finally put an end to banning what people can or cannot do to their own bodies. If your neighbor wants to get high in the evening, so what? Why should that habit hold the potential for landing him in prison?
We incarcerate 25% of the entire world's prisoners, probably the majority of whom are in prison for drug-related charges of one form or another. The number of persons imprisoned has risen by over 500% since Redink Ronnie turned the managing of prisons over to private companies, surprise surprise.
Jim Webb is introducting legislation to re-structure our disastrous, sub-human prison industry. Those efforts could be greatly enhanced by repealing our existing drug laws, and making all drugs legal, but regulated.
The moment we legalize it all, we automatically decriminalize it all as well, taking away the profit incentive, stripping away the core power element of organized and gang crime today, and dramatically reducing the prison population. The savings each year would be monumental, but would be dwarfed by the revenue stream created through legalization.
It's not the drugs themselves that are necessarily bad for society. Some of them may not be all that good for the person actually ingesting them, but even the hardest of currently illegal drugs is not nearly as harmful to society as say alcohol or tobacco.
What harms society from drug use is the criminality of them. The criminality of drugs creates a staggering amount of horrific societal damage, whether it be the small-time pot user who gets popped, sent to jail for 6 months, and loses his job and family as a result, or the crack head who mugs a person on the street, in order to get the cash to obtain his next fix.
You legalize it all, regulate it, tax it, and then create a public awareness movement to teach people about the dangers of addiction, and set up a widescale network of treatment facilities to address that end of the equation.
In the end, we'd be far better off handling it this way. Like I said, regardless of whether the drugs are legal or not, people WILL get high. It's human nature, and something that is simply unavoidable for some. Making them illegal has NOT ended addictions. By legalizing it all and creating a national public awareness campaign and widely-accessible addiction treatment centers, we would likely see a REDUCTION in addictions, not an increase.
Don't believe me? If you are one who has never tried any illegal substance, has never smoked, and has never drank to the point of intoxication, can you honestly say that, if all drugs were made legal tomorrow, you'd rush right out and try coke or heroin? Get real. The people that would are already doing them, and those that aren't surely aren't going to instantly become addicted, simply because they're legal.
We need to speak and examine this in an open, honest, intelligent manner, and we truly need to carve out a new path for this society. The nearly 100 year old path of intolerance and prohibition has clearly not worked.
Clark is righlt. Leagal for otherwise people will kill themselves or mess up their lives with one form of drug or another. It has happened throughout history and the strange thing is that it seems to happen more during good times than bad.
People need to have the right to make decisions about their own lives, good and bad ones. They will make those decisions regardless of what the government says.
I am not sure of my position on the harder stuff. I understand that Switzerland decided to clean up their urban parks by establishing centers were heroin addicts could go and get their fix with clean needles and pays them a frugal stipend to live with their addiction. Seems like this might be a way to phase out in one generation some of the bad side effects of the drug.
Clark, it was my understanding that marijuana was a drug used primarily by the African American community in preference to alchohol until Viet Nam -- possibly that is a white fantasy since Huck Finn was puffing it as he rafted down the river. It is also my understanding that there were trade war aspects to the banning of hemp as well.
One example I like to use is meth (a horrible drug like alcohol.) However, it didn't become an epidemic until after 1988 when it was added into the Controlled Substances Act. Prior, it could be purchased legally. Afterward, the incentive was created to manufacture, market and distribute. When is making a bad thing like meth or alcohol ever a good thing by making it so extremely profitable on the black market?
Drugs should be treated as a health issue and not one for the criminal justice system. If someone breaks the law while under the influence then they should be punished. However, the possession and use of any substance itself should never be considered criminal.
This is undoubtedly a holdover myth from the highly invasive misinformation campaign that the government conducted after the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. The government conducted a massive propaganda effort at the time to steer people away from the drug. Much of the propaganda centered around blacks, tapping into the rampant racism and fear amongst whites of the black community at the time.
Pot has been around and in use for centuries, by all races and cultures. Washington was a known hemp farmer, and lamented in his diary once about the chore of seperating the male and female plants. The only reason to seperate the plants is to produce the THC-laden females, for intoxication purposes. This would seem to indicate that even the "father" of our nation was an herb smoker.
Hemp was banned the same year that Dupont came out with nylon, a fiber produced from...oil. Big shocker. I'm sure that's just a wild coincidence, though!
The dead giveaway as to why hemp is still banned is the fact that the male plant, which is hemp, doesn't contain enough concentration of THC to cause intoxication. If the ban were strictly over intoxicating drugs, it would only pertain to the female plant.
I was not dealing with cannabis or hemp. I was talking about the subject of "drugs" as used in the beginning of the article.
In any event, I indeed have known of several people who killed themselves during the course of supporting drug habits of many kinds. If not the drugs themselves, then the effects the drugs caused. Cannabis or hemp included.
I meant that the drugs eventually lead to the demise of the user and if we give them all they want, maybe they will do it sooner and help end the problem. For themselves and the rest of humanity.
Hemp, by the way, raised commercially by Washington was for making ropes and weaving into sacks or other packing cloth, not smoking.
You represent such typical Christian love...
Washington made specific notes about separating the male from the female cannabis plants, which is only useful when harvesting to smoke.
Regardless, people have been using cannabis for thousands of years, Washington and Jefferson notwithstanding.
Finally, I'm going to call you out on your B.S. - "I indeed have known of several people who killed themselves during the course of supporting drug habits of many kinds. If not the drugs themselves, then the effects the drugs caused. Cannabis or hemp included."
I repeat, no one has died from cannabis or hemp use. Ever. And most of the problems drugs are blamed on is a result of the prohibition, and not the drugs themselves.
If there were not such high profits for the pushers of drugs, the incentive to involve new users would be greatly diminished and is a relatively short while, we should see a huge improvement in the number of people addicted. I believe this trend would eventually solve the problem.
I am not so naive as to believe human weakness will ever cease to be exploited, for it will not, but that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about addiction to drugs that can be used to exploit our whole society. It makes no difference to me if people have smoked pot for 50,000 years. That is not what the discussion was about.
I would argue that the deaths you've witnessed were connected to the criminality of drugs, not the drugs themselves. Remove the criminality and you remove the need for users to engage in risky criminal behaviors, and remove the risk of overdose from unregulated drugs cut in dangerous ways, or with lethal additives. You also make it much easier for an addicted person to reach out for help.
"I am not so naive as to believe human weakness will ever cease to be exploited, for it will not, but that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about addiction to drugs that can be used to exploit our whole society."
Again, a certain percentage of any given society WILL abuse and become addicted to SOMETHING, whether it's legal or not, and whether it's harmful or not. Doesn't matter. You can NOT remove human addiction from a society by banning drugs or addicts.
"Hemp, by the way, raised commercially by Washington was for making ropes and weaving into sacks or other packing cloth, not smoking. "
You're mistaken. There is simply no valid justification for separating the male and female plants, if the hemp is being raised solely for it's commercial fiber applications. The ONLY reason to separate the plants is so that the females can produce higher levels of the key intoxicant, THC. Either Washington was intentionally raising pot that was intended for human consumption, for intoxication purposes, or he was an utter fool that just liked to saddle himself with extra, unnecessary work.
As to Drugs killing people I say yes sometime that happens but a vast majority of drug related deaths are from the drug trade not the drugs themselves.
Totally true.
Roll it up I won't tell.