The War on the War on Drugs

Jim Finnel

Fallen Cannabis Warrior & Ex News Moderator
Last Thursday in his Internet press conference with the public, President Obama fielded a question submitted online about the country’s favorite illicit drug: if marijuana were legalized, might the taxes and other fees be a boon to the economy?

His answer provided a moment of levity:

“I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” Mr. Obama said, drawing a laugh from an audience gathered in the East Room, which included teachers, nurses and small-business people. “The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow the economy.”

Among the online audience with blogs, however, his answer fell a bit flat. Andrew Sullivan said it was “pathetic.”

“It’s no laughing matter,” said Norm Stamper, Seattle’s former top cop. “We ought not to let him off the hook for his frivolous dismissal of a widely popular question.”

Scott H. Payne at League of Ordinary Gentlemen was more willing to cut the president some slack, seeing his feeble pot humor as an encouraging sign:

Listen, there was a time in America where the suggestion that prohibition laws around marijuana ought to be revised would be met with bug-eyed, spittle-launching, vein-bursting retorts of indignation and outrage — there are, in fact, some areas of the country where this remains true. But the fact that the President of the United States and most of the mainstream media felt sufficiently comfortable to outwardly express their amusement with issue at hand signals . . . a substantial shift in perceptions about marijuana usage amongst a not insignificant proportion of Americas and indicates that . . . we are in the midst of a generational shift in the people making major decisions about the direction of the country.

But generational shifts take time, as Nate Silver pointed out earlier year. Positing that “we’ll need to see a supermajority of Americans in favor of decriminalizing pot before the federal government would dare to take action on it,” Silver then extrapolated from the existing public opinion surveys and found that “legalization [might] achieve 60 percent support at some point in 2022 or 2023.”

And, really, who wants to wait that long?

If drug-legalizers are slowly gaining traction, drug-war-enders appear to be moving more swiftly to fix things from their end.

Politicians in New York State recently reached a deal to repeal the state’s hard-line Rockefeller drug laws, passed in 1973, which imposed mandatory 15-years-to-life sentences for possession of small amounts of cocaine and heroin.

Last week, Senator Jim Webb announced his intention to take that kind of reconsideration national by introducing his National Criminal Justice Act Commission of 2009. On the floor of the Senate he

Let’s start with a premise that I don’t think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world’s population; we have 25% of the world’s known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .

The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. . . .

African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison.

Webb’s bill calls for a commission to review the country’s criminal justice system “from top to bottom” and to rethink “who goes to prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration.”

Bloggers have mostly applauded. “The bill . . . is what many of us with an eye on criminal justice issues have been eagerly awaiting,” wrote Celeste Fremon at Witness LA.

I knew that criminal justice advocates like Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project had been working with Webb and his staff. But even so, his presentation was more intelligent, more articulate, more informed—and more courageous—than most had dared to hope for.

Glenn Greenwald said, “What’s most notable about Webb’s decision to champion this cause is how honest his advocacy is.”

He isn’t just attempting to chip away at the safe edges of America’s oppressive prison state. His critique of what we’re doing is fundamental, not incremental. And, most important of all, Webb is addressing head-on one of the principal causes of our insane imprisonment fixation: our aberrational insistence on criminalizing and imprisoning non-violent drug offenders (when we’re not doing worse to them). That is an issue most politicians are petrified to get anywhere near, as evidenced just this week by Barack Obama’s adolescent, condescending snickering when asked about marijuana legalization.

“Webb stepped firmly on a political third rail last week,” wrote Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post. “Yet he emerged unscathed, a sign to a political world frightened by crime and drug issues that the bar might not be electrified any more.”

At Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau wondered whether the mostly positive response to Webb’s bill is a sign that “support for the Drug War entering its ‘broad but shallow’ phase.”

Lots of people are muttering something about getting tax revenue from legalized pot during this downturn. Events in northern Mexico give renewed urgency to calls for ending this war before we lose more than we’ve already lost. I suspect that as fighting escalates in Afghanistan we’ll see even more bloody examples of the ghastly human cost of cracking down on opium production. Once in a while I toss out the idea of drug legalization in front of suburban mothers in Republican neighborhoods, and while they don’t sound enthused I’m no longer viewed as a lunatic trying to hook their kids on crack. My mother reports that Republican doctors at her workplace, guys who complain about taxes and have NRA stickers on their cars, are muttering about taxing and legalizing.

The War on the War on Drugs has had its surges in the past, but without realizing any changes in policy. This time around it may achieve results. Even if Obama is not ready to embrace the idea, some in his administration are. Last Friday, David Corn asked Richard Holbrooke about the priority of drug fighting in Afghanistan. “We’re going to have to rethink the drug problem,” he answered. “A complete rethink.”


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Source: The New York Times
Author: Eric Etheridge
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Website: The War on the War on Drugs - The Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
 
Upon close examination , one finds that the " war on drugs " is , in actuality a war on the way people think and what they say . This is a most heinous attack on the 1st amendment of free speach . In order to clarify this statement all one needs to do is watch the documentary A.K.A. Tommy Chong .:smokin:
 
As a further comment , let me say this . As long as this private corporation A.K.A. the U.S.government is in the business of controlling the thought processes of the masses ... there will never be an end to the "war on drugs " . In this land , the only way one is free is when one does as one is told to do . Cross the line and one understands how the rule of intimidation of incarceration works .:smokin:
 
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