Posted on 01/30/2003 6:38:26 AM PST by MrLeRoy
America's war on drugs is costly, ignorant and doesn't work, a federal judge said Tuesday.
Denver U.S. District Judge John Kane Jr., who has been speaking and writing against the nation's drug policy for about five years, won a standing ovation from a packed City Club luncheon at the Brown Palace Hotel.
"I don't favor drugs at all," Kane said.
"What I really am opposed to is the fact that our present policies encourage children to take drugs."
Ending the present policy of interdiction, police action and imprisonment would eliminate the economic incentives for drug dealers to provide drugs to minors, Kane said.
He said the government has no real data and no scientific basis for its approach to illegal drug use.
Since the policy began in the early 1970s, drugs have become easier to obtain and drug use has only increased, he said.
Last summer, Kane said, a friend in his 60s was being treated for cancer. The man joked to his family that he wished he knew where to get marijuana to help him bear the effects of chemotherapy.
The next day, the man's 11-year-old grandson brought him three marijuana cigarettes, Kane said.
"Don't worry, Grandpa - I don't use it myself, but if you need any more just let me know," the judge quoted the boy as saying.
Although officials vow zero tolerance for drugs, even children know that's not reality, Kane said.
"Our national drug policy is inconsistent with the nature of justice, abusive of the nature of authority, and wholly ignorant of the compelling force of forgiveness," he said. "I suggest that federal drug laws be severely cut back."
The federal government should focus on keeping illegal drugs out of the country and regulating the manufacture of drugs transported across state lines.
Each state should decide how to regulate sales and what should be legal or illegal, he said, and the emphasis for government spending should be on treatment.
Let us join Dane, Roscoe, and robertpaulsen in kowtowing to the Almighty State.
So altering you brain chemistry so that you are relaxed with a heightened sense of creativity and humor is an illegal socialist cause. But altering your brain chemistry so that you lose motor skills, puke, pass out, or in many cases become violent, is a legal conservative pastime.
I see you failed to mention that Milton Friedman and David Kopel signed it as well. As Orwell once said, omission is the most powerful form of lie. Thanks for demonstrating such.
You're saying that growing your own has no effect in interstate commerce.
No, he said "no commerce occurs."
And where in the Constitution is Congress empowered to regulate whatever might "affect interstate commerce"?
No, I'm saying that it is NOT interstate commerce. Period. Me growing a plant in my backyard has the same effect of an acorn falling and becoming an oak tree. Saying that the effect is what matters, not the actuality, has been a liberal justification for federal uspration for decades, but SCOTUS is starting to peel back that over-application, such as overturning a law regarding guns in school zones that relied on such an over-zealous bending of Commerce Clause reasoning to justify its constiutionality - that if someone was shot in a school, their parents lost time at work, which affects interstate commerce.
SCOTUS no longer buys that liberal nonsense, but you, apparently, are a willing consumer of such.
Does growing your own pot affect interstate commerce? If not, why not? (Just kidding on the last question.)
Thanks for making the case that drug warriors and FDR liberals are cut from the same political cloth, as you both are attempting the same argument to justify federal usupration.
Yes. So what? The plain language of the Interstate Commerce Clause gives Congress no authority over intrastate activities that "affect" interstate commerce.
"The answer can only be found in the racism and prejudice that permeate the 'war on drugs' from start to finish..."It reads like a DNC talking points memo."The 'war on drugs' is rooted in racial bias. It is racially unequal in its implementation. And it is racist in its disproportionate impact."
Kane, Kunstler, Elder, Soros, et al
This is what I based my statemnet on.
There is no basis there for your lie that "he rules from the bench consistant with his opinion."
Kane, Kunstler, Elder, Soros, et al
It reads like a DNC talking points memo.
OK, then, explain why there is a sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine, when both are essential the same intoxicant. One does not need to be a Democrat to see racial bias in the sentencing laws here. But I don't expect someone blinded by their zeal for the drug war to ever acknowledge such.
And Republican governor Gary Johnson.
And George Zimmer, CEO of "Men's Warehouse". I knew he was a great guy for offering such low prices, but he really stepped up to the plate here.
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