Yet another reason to end the failed War on Drugs: by far most U.S. wiretaps are for that one reason. Sure, a wiretap helped catch a Mexican drug lord. But without the War on Drugs, there would be no drug lords, just like alcohol bootleggers vanished after Prohibition ended.
Brian Anderson wrote for Motherboard 15 July 2014, Almost 90 Percent of All US Wiretaps Listen for Suspected Drug Deals,
Earlier this year, Continue reading
Alcohol Prohibition didn’t work. Prohibition of marijuana and other drugs actually failed in much worse ways than alcohol prohibition did. I don’t always agree with The Economist, but about this I do: it’s time to end the failed War on Drugs and ramp down the expensively bloated U.S. prison system.
Uncle Sam Will Enforce Prohibition,
Our September 22nd 1923 issue examined the impact of America’s experiment with alcohol prohibition. The newspaper encourages a similarly liberal approach to drug control today.
We wrote: “A law is not necessarily a good or wise law because it aims at doing something which is desirable. If it is impossible of strict administration, it will not only fail in its object, but, what is far more serious will bring both law, legislature and executive into open contempt.”
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This is what eventually happens in a country with 5% of the world’s population yet 25% of the world’s prisoners, in a state that has 1 in 13 adults in the prison system (jail, prison, probation, or parole): prison violence the prisons can’t deal with, possibly including the mysterious violence at Valdosta State Prison. When we stop locking up so many people by ending the war on drugs, we’ll have plenty of money to adequately secure the few remaining real violent offenders.
Rhonda Cook wrote for the AJC Saturday, Gang violence in prison is increasingly deadly,
In a little more than 10 months, 12 inmates and a guard have been stabbed to death in Georgia prisons, a dramatic uptick in violence that law enforcement officials and human rights advocates agree points to increased gang activity.
“We cannot remember a time like this when we were getting this volume and severity of violence,” said Sara Totonchi, executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which monitors prison violence.
People who go into such prisons, if they aren’t already violent, are likely to be taught to be violent, and some just don’t come back out. Yet those that do get out can be bad for the rest of us:
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5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners,
which is
seven times our incarceration rate of 40 years ago,
while the crime rate is about the same,
and Georgia has
1 in 13 adults in the prison system (jail, prison, probation, or parole.
We can’t afford that.
The money we waste locking people up could be sending people to college
or paying teachers.
And the root cause is still the
failed war on drugs,
which is also one of the biggest problems with human rights around the world.
LEAP wrote 16 March 2012, Human Rights is a Foreign Concept in the UN’s “War on Drugs”
“Fundamentally, the three UN prohibitionist treaties are incompatible to human rights. We can have human rights or drug war, but not both,” said Maria Lucia Karam, a retired judge from Brazil and a board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).
Richard Van Wickler, currently a jail superintendent in New Hampshire, adds, “I suppose it’s not shocking that within the context of a century-long bloody ‘war on drugs’ the idea of human rights is a foreign concept. Our global drug prohibition regime puts handcuffs on millions of people every year while even the harshest of prohibitionist countries say that drug abuse is a health issue. What other medical problems do we try to solve with imprisonment and an abandonment of human rights?”
Good point.
We don’t lock up people for drinking. We only lock them up for endangering other people while drinking. And we tax alcohol sales and generate revenue for the state. Let’s do the same with drugs: legalize, regulate, and tax. That’s what we did with alcohol in 1933, and it’s time to do the same with other drugs.
-jsq
My darling 22 year-old daughter wound up with a second DWI, becausePresumably this was for driving while intoxicated (DWI) with alcohol. We tried Prohibition for alcohol back in the 1920s, and repealed it in the 1930s, because it produced criminal gangs while failing to stop people from drinking alcohol. So instead we criminalized the misuse of alcohol such as while driving and legalized, regulated, and taxed purchase of alcohol. And now we mostly don’t actually lock people up for DWI: we put them on supervised probation.the first one was a wrist-slap. Don’t hate me as a parent because of it. But she went to DWI Court in Austin. The year of intense supervision and no-nonsense attitude and her willingness to not fight it (much) has turned her attitude and Life around. Did it suck for her? Why, yes. But, who knows but what it saved someone else’s life? And maybe it saved her own. I have become a Fan of Very Supervised Probation. If she’d gone to jail for six months, I suspect she’d have just come out hating society and gone right back to what put her there.
-Robert Nagle
It’s time to do the same for other drugs. We can’t afford to continue to spend more taxpayer dollars on locking people up than on education.
-jsq
Anita Singh wrote for the Telegraph today, Carlos Fuentes: legalise drugs to save Mexico,
Nobody is winning except the profiteers in arms andFuentes, Mexico’s greatest writer and a former diplomat, addressed the contemporary problems of Latin American — in particular, Mexico’s drug problem.
He said: “The drug traffickers are in Mexico, they send the drugs to the US and once they get across the border what happens? We don’t know who consumes them. We can’t prosecute, we can’t defend. It’s a very difficult situation for us Mexicans. The governments of the US and Mexico have to fight drug trafficking together.”
Fuentes believes that decriminalising drugs is the only way to end the violence that in the past five years has claimed nearly 50,000 lives of gang members, security forces and innocent bystanders.
“It is a confrontation. Sometimes we win, sometimes they win. But there are 50,000 killed and the relatives of those people don’t care who is winning.
pesticides, such as
Monsanto.
And even mighty MON is losing to
Boliviana negra.
Alcohol prohibition produced Al Capone and other gangsters;
the failed War on Drugs produced drug gangs and ever more
vicious militarization of police forces,
right up to the Mexican failed “solution” of calling out the Army
into the streets.
We’re all losing through lack of money for education and militarization of our own police.
We can’t afford this costly failed experiment.
The real solution is the same today as in 1933:
legalize, regulate, and tax.
That will also drop the U.S. prison population way down,
saving a lot of money that can be used for education.
It’s going to happen eventually, so building more prisons that will end up being closed is
a bad idea.
-jsq
The article illustrates what I learned over my 30-year career as a federal agent: Cracking down in one place doesn’t make drugsAnd that will pop the incarceration bubble, as well, according to CCA’s own 2010 report to the SEC. -jsqdisappear, it only moves the trade elsewhere. This so-called “balloon effect,” combined with the insatiable demand for drugs across the globe, means that no level of law-enforcement skill or dedication can make a significant dent.
The only way to pop the proverbial balloon is to legalize and regulate the drug trade, which would eliminate the opportunity to make enormous black-market profits. It wasn’t easy for me to come to this revelation after dedicating so many years to enforcing drug laws, but it is common sense. Law-enforcement officers don’t have to chase gangsters selling booze from town to town because we ended the failed experiment of alcohol prohibition decades ago. It is time we do the same for other drugs.
Terry Nelson
Executive Board Member
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Granbury, Texas
Richard Orange wrote for GlobalPost yesterday, A win-win on drugs? Fighting gangs by legalizing pot,
Not just drug toleration. Legalization: Continue readingCopenhagen’s city municipality voted in recent weeks, 39 votes to 9, to empower its social affairs committee to draw up a detailed plan to legalize cannabis.
If that plan is approved by Denmark’s new left-of-centre parliament next year, the city could become the first to legalize marijuana, rather than simply tolerate it, as police do in the Netherlands.
“We are thinking of perhaps 30 to 40 public sales houses, where the people aren’t interested in selling you more, they’re interested in you,” Mikkel Warming, the mayor in charge of social affairs at Copenhagen City Council told GlobalPost. “Who is it better for youngsters to buy marijuana from? A drug pusher, who wants them to use more, who wants them to buy hard drugs, or a civil servant?”
Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, wrote in the Washington Times 5 August 2011, JOHNSON: Hitting the cartels where it hurts: Legalization of marijuana would end drug profiteering and violence
As a Republican, he manages to say legalize and regulate but forget to mention tax, and he didn’t mention Jimmy Carter or Javier Sicilia calling for an end to the drug war, but he did mention (I added the links): Continue readingImagine you are a drug lord in Mexico, making unfathomable profits sending your illegal product to the United States. What is the headline you fear the most? “U.S. to build bigger fence”? “U.S. to send troops to the border”? “U.S. to deploy tanks in El Paso”? No. None of those would give you much pause. They would simply raise the level of difficulty and perhaps cause you to escalate the violence that already has turned the border region into a war zone. But would they stop you or ultimately hurt your bottom line? Probably not.
But what if that drug lord opened his newspaper and read this: “U.S. to legalize and regulate marijuana”? That would ruin his day, and ruin it in a way that could not be fixed with more and bigger guns, higher prices or more murder.
Here’s the video: Continue readingWe cannot duck this issue. I couldn’t duck it any more. I couldn’t sleep, if I wasn’t out advocating getting rid of the War on Drugs. You can’t get to end the War on Drugs that the whole bureaucratic institution of the United States of America has declared, unless you end prohibtion. They couldn’t do it with alcohol, and you can’t do it with drugs.
—Alice Huffman, President, California NAACP
