Obama on Drugs →
The repeal of Prohibition was the real reason for FDR’s popularity. Historians credit the New Deal and World War II, but both were negative. The New Deal did not get us out of the Great Depression (neither did WWII) and WWII did not improve living standards, but instead led to massive deaths and destruction.
With Repeal achieved, the entire alcohol industry, including distilleries, breweries, and wineries, were back at work. Workers were rehired. Input suppliers like farmers could feel the surge in demand for their products and services.
Crime dropped; with the murder rate falling precipitously back to its pre-Prohibition level. Violent crime and crime in general dropped significantly. The source of money for bribery, corruption, and street gangs largely evaporated.
The people were happy for the first time in almost four years. Happy Days Are Here Again was FDR’s campaign theme song, and now it is the Democratic Party theme song, but few remember it was written for a movie to celebrate the imminent repeal of Prohibition. The song would appear in 42 other movies during the 1930s.All levels of government (federal, state, county, and local) reinstituted taxes, licenses, and fees on the alcohol industry, but prices for consumers still dropped substantially. Beer was once again available and whiskey became drinkable again.
President Obama should learn this lesson from FDR. Freedom and prosperity are what makes people happy. The cause of FDR’s popularity may have been obscured by court historians, but picking on sick and dying people and prosecuting potheads is no way to build your legacy.
The War on Drugs provides the state cover for malicious acts, and it gives agents of the state license to be cruel.
What the state has done to this family - and countless others - is contemptible. Anyone who advocates criminalizing peaceful behavior - tearing happy families apart in the process - should be ashamed of their ignorance and inhumanity.
Michigan Father Killed in Marijuana Child Removal Incident →
A prosecutor in northern Michigan has cleared the police officer who shot and killed a Grayling man as police and Child Protective Services (CPS) employees attempted to seize his three-year-old. The attempted removal of the minor child came after a police officer who came to the scene on a call earlier that same day reported that he smelled marijuana and reported the incident to CPS authorities, who decided the child needed to be removed. The dead man, William Reddie, 32, becomes the 17th person killed in US domestic drug law enforcement operations so far this year.
A child was removed because someone smelled marijuana? A father tried to keep his son from being taken and you shot him? The pig got away scot-free?
I remember when buzzfeed was just something I did in college around 2AM.
—
President Obama at WHCD.
“Haha, ha. ha.” - the 94,000 federal prisoners and 240,000 state-confined inmates being held for drug offenses.
(via ilyagerner)
91% of D.C. Pot Charges Are Filed Against Black People, Only Six Percent Are Filed Against Whites →
Edit: It’s important to note that while D.C. has a majority black population (50.7%), the white population is still 42.4% (source). And there tend to be more whites who work in D.C. but live in surrounding cities. The population alone cannot explain the vast disparity in charges. Having worked on a couple of cop-centric reality shows, I’ve seen the blatant institutionalized racism within the ranks of police officers in over a dozen cities.
The War On Drugs Is a Failure
(Source: youtube.com)
Crime: Marijuana Possession. Sentence: Death.
This story is from 2008, but today is the first I’ve heard of it — and the time passed has done nothing to lessen the horror.
Jonathan Magbie was ”a 27-year-old quadriplegic sentenced to ten days in jail for his first offense — possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor.” Magbie used marijuana to lessen the pain of his condition, from which he’d suffered since being hit by a drunk driver at the age of four. He was convicted for that use, and died as a result:
Because the Washington D.C. jail was incompetent to meet his special medical needs, including his dependence on a ventilator, that was a death sentence — Magbie was dead within four days.
When he was taken to court, the prosecution maintained that they had no interest in sending Magbie to jail because of his quadriplegia and the likelihood that his death would result from incarceration. The presiding judge, one Judy Retchin, had other ideas.
Retchin understood the implications when she decided to incarcerate someone who used a wheelchair and needed a ventilator to breathe while sleeping. […]
Malek Malekghasemi, associate medical director at the city’s Correctional Treatment Facility when Magbie entered the D.C. jail, called Retchin’s office and asked that she order that Magbie be sent to a hospital because the jail’s medical facilities could not meet his needs.
“Minutes later [Retchin’s clerk] called me and said [the] judge will not issue such an order,” Malekghasemi said.
After Magbie’s death, the ACLU represented his family as they sued the city of Washington. The family received a large settlement, but Judge Retchin maintained to investigators that she had no idea Magbie needed a ventilator to live, despite the fact that court records show she very obviously knew exactly that.
Judge Retchin was cleared of wrongdoing and retains her judgeship — in fact, she was promoted to senior judge in 2010, two years after essentially sentencing a paralyzed man to death for smoking a joint.
Of course, there is one sense in which this tragedy should come as no surprise: Magbie was black, and in DC (as in many places in America) that means he was far more likely than average to get in trouble with the police for his drug use:
More per capita marijuana arrests are made in the District than in any other jurisdiction in the country, [but] even with a high arrest rate, some people in D.C. can probably safely get high without worrying that the cops are coming. Those people are white people. In 2007, 91 percent of those arrested for marijuana were black. In a city whose population demographics are steadily evening out, that’s odd. In fact, adjusting for population, African Americans are eight times as likely to be arrested for weed as white smokers are.
Since Magbie’s death, Washington has legalized medical marijuana, meaning that were he alive today his use of pot to alleviate pain would be completely legal, as it should be. What Judge Retchin did, however, should never be legal — and it’s beyond indecent that she is still on the bench.
Unconscionable.
[I]f you want people to accept your right to possess private property, guns, you had better consider accepting the right of other people to possess private property, drugs, if they so choose. Liberty is seamless and does not allow for exceptions. Liberty is doing what you wish with what you own. Doing what you wish with what you own. In fact, the war on drugs has proved to be the major driving force behind the war on guns. Same war, different name. … Progressives don’t hate guns; they love guns. They love them so much they want to be the only ones who have any. They want a gun monopoly. Again, a progressive is a person who has this fantastic dream of creating a utopia on earth by threatening people with government guns if they don’t comply with their utopian schemes. The difference between progressives and us is this: [t]hey want to use guns aggressively, to make peaceful people do things they don’t want to do; [w]e wish to use them only defensively, to stop a government that gets out of control and engages in mass murder, or systemically tramples [our rights]. … The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, sport or target shooting, or collecting antiques, and its main purpose is not to allow you to protect yourself from criminals although that is a secondary and important purpose. It is an undeniable historical fact that the central purpose of the right to bear arms is to allow the people to protect themselves against the government.
The most politically encouraging event on the horizon — which is a very bleak one politically — is the possibility of fusion or synthesis of some of the positions of what is to be called left and some of what is to be called libertarian. The critical junction could be, and in some ways already is, the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is an attempt by force, by the state, at mass behavior modification. Among other things, it is a denial of medical rights, and certainly a denial of all civil and political rights. It involves a collusion with the most gruesome possible allies in the Third World. It’s very hard for me to say that there’s an issue more important than that at the moment.
—
Christopher Hitchens (via prettayprettaygood)
The War on Drugs does indeed present the ultimate “liberaltarian” issue. American liberals and libertarians may disagree on the proper role of the state, but I can think of few political issues that unite these two ideologically distinct groups like the perfect storm of horrible policies that comprise drug prohibition.
(via letterstomycountry)
(Source: prettayprettaygood, via letterstomycountry)
Mostly, ultimately, they are wars waged on innocent/peaceful people.
Though the third point may be too gracious: I’m not sure I’d call those consequences “accidental” when the risks to innocents are calculated beforehand and deemed acceptable collateral damage. Truly: most who suffer are innocent. A full 25% of people in jail - not just among drug-related offenses, but overall - are there for non-violent drug possession - which is a higher percentage than those who committed violent drug-related crimes. And for every terrorist killed by drones, 50 civilians are killed. Fifty-to-one. How can it be an “accident” when it’s the most typical outcome?
[E]very known form of government is inefficient but nevertheless exists primarily to grow and protect itself. We Americans have witnessed in the short space of eleven years a government that has metastasized built around a fiction that the American people are somehow under serious threat from foreign enemies. This has produced two large and a number of smaller wars coupled to a US military and intelligence footprint that now extends to every corner of every continent. The festering sore of Afghanistan is like the story of Uncle Remus’s tar baby – easy to get stuck to but damned hard to get away from. Under Bush and Obama the cost and size of government have doubled, and Washington has added a massive new bureaucracy that has a primary function of monitoring the American people in the Department of Homeland Security. And to our eternal shame as a nation, it has all been done on a credit card with Asian governments picking up the tab and the US treasury printing money that has no actual backing, running up the national debt to hitherto unimaginable levels while doing grievous damage to the economy. Government never thinks far enough ahead to appreciate that any action on its part will result in unforeseen and sometimes catastrophic consequences, whether in the form of unacceptable collateral damage or blowback. The war on drugs has been disastrous for Mexico while the incursions into Iraq, Afghanistan[,] and Libya are prime examples of a structural inability to look over the horizon. The United States supported both Saddam Hussein and also Osama bin Laden before they became designated enemies. Government never admits failure and its response to shortcomings is to throw more resources at the problem in an attempt to either make it go away or delay the day of reckoning. Witness how the Transportation Security Administration, which has never caught a single terrorist, responds to incidents by engaging in panic buying of screening machines being hawked by former senior bureaucrats only to find that they don’t work well and eventually wind up in a warehouse in Omaha.
— Philip Giraldi - How Government Grows
Who Goes to Prison Due to Gun Control? →
Perhaps the most telling data concerns the racial makeup of who goes to prison for gun violations. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, for Fiscal Year 2011, 49.6% of those sentenced to federal incarceration with a primary offense of firearms violations were black, 20.6% were Hispanic, and only 27.5% were white.
This is how gun laws actually work—those caught violating them go to prison. For the mere act of owning an illegal weapon—not necessarily for using it, not for threatening anyone with it, not for being irresponsible with it—people who have harmed no one are locked up in prison for years at a time. As with the rest of the criminal justice system, particularly the war on drugs, these laws disproportionately harm the poor and minorities. That is the inescapable reality of gun control.
It makes sense that blacks and others living in the inner city would rely more on private, illegal guns for self-defense. The police are unreliable at best in many of these communities. It also makes sense that minorities would be disproportionately hurt by these laws, because so many of the dynamics in play are the same as with the drug war—people are being punished for what they own, rather than what they have done to others; it is easier for police to go after those in poor neighborhoods than to search middle-class folks in nice neighborhoods; jurors approved by prosecutors tend to believe police testimony over the word of minority defendants; prosecutors tend to use discretion in possession crime cases that fall more painfully on the disenfranchised; public defenders offer inadequate services for those loads of court-appointed clients, and so forth.
(Source: hipsterlibertarian)
States Thumb Their Noses at the Drug War →
Colorado and Washington voters legalized recreational marijuana and now Obama must decide: will he be remembered as the president who let states pursue drug reform, or who desperately enforced an unpopular and futile policy against the will of the people?
The Drug Enforcement Administration has about six thousand agents and limited resources. Without state cooperation, the drug war is hopeless. As more states legalize pot for general adult use, the federal government’s headaches will only worsen. For fifteen years, three administrations have failed to stop medical marijuana, although not for lack of trying.
When campaigning in 2008, Obama consistently vowed to stop the medical pot raids. “Obama supports the rights of states and local governments to make this choice,” his campaign spokesman Ben Labolt said during the primary season. In his first year, President Obama made excuses for the continuing raids, reiterating his promise. In four years, the administration has now conducted four times as many raids as Bush’s administration did in twice the time. …
Obama won in 2008 promising a different approach to drug policy. He then escalated the medical marijuana raids, sent Marines to Guatemala, beefed up the notorious Byrne drug task forces through stimulus spending, and with tiny exceptions continued to enforce a drug policy that has resulted in immense human tragedy, civil liberties violations, and tens of thousands deaths in Mexico.
This year, some hopefuls speculated that Obama would finally push for reform in a second term. Yet even if Obama does the right thing with respect to Colorado and Washington, we should remember that it was not the federal government that took the lead in scaling back this awful federal crusade. Individuals, voters, and local officials made it happen through non-compliance, civil disobedience, and nullification. Thank goodness, for it is about time someone took a stand against this nightmare.
Why haven’t we given up on the drug war since it’s an obvious failure and violates the people’s rights? Has nobody noticed that the authorities can’t even keep drugs out of the prisons? How can making our entire society a prison solve the problem?
— Ron Paul, Farewell Speech to Congress (Nov. 14, 2012)
