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Willam Buckley also has supported ending the war on drugs for at least 2 decades.

Trotting out that old saw again?

HE also called for the scaffold, but, you guys don't repeat that part - do ya? (DOWN toward the end - in bold.)

-- Making Poloicy As The Crow Flies --
July 15, 1986
In French and Spanish the word "serious" has a meaning that doesn't correspond with any of the synonyms given for that word in English. It means responsible, reliable, trustworthy, reflective. The other day, James Jackson Kilpatrick, who is a serious man, made an unserious suggestion about how we should deal with dope traffickers. It repays hard attention to the meaning of word to understand its ramifications in the current situation.
What we ought to do, said Kilpatrick, is catch a bunch of dope traders, try them, convict them, and then hang them in public squares.
Now if you heard that kind of talk from the mouth of, oh, the early or even the middle George Wallace, you would smile and say: there he goes again, the same man who suggested the best way to deal with protesters standing in the way of a bulldozer is to bulldoze them.
But Jack Kilpatrick really means it. It is an expression of high dudgeaon and also a concrete recommendation. He has heard described, and he has witnessed, the tortures experienced by those taken in the biological and psychologoical death agonies of drug consumption. It is agony whether you go on to die or whether you go on to live. Kilpatrick's point is that if ever there was justification for executing a murderer, there is justification for executing those wanton murderers whp distribute narcotics that cause worsepain by many leagues than anu pain experienced by the mugger's pistol shot.
Ten days ago we saw happen almost exactly that in Malaysia. The executions were not, to my knowledge, public, but they might as well have been, given the attention paid them in the world press. Two Australians, caught with merchandisable quantities of heroin, were tried, convicted and, after due process using up almost three years, hanged.
There was the usual outcry from the anti-capital-punishment set and even a few others, but the government of Malaysia stodd its ground, pointing out that there were signs all over the place potential drug merchants of the fate that would befall them. It is of passing interest that the local equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes capital punishment, announced that drug merchandising was a crime so heinous that opposition to capital punishment was officially suspended when applied to that crime.
But Mr. Kilpatrick's suggestion is not serious. It is not responsible. It is not reputable. It is not viable. Why? because it is absolutely predictable that it will not happen.
This has nothing to do with the entirely different question: Should it happen? If tomorrow I needed to vote yes or no on a national plebiscite, "Shall we adopt the Kilpatrick Proposition ?" I should unflinchingly vote yes. And after, oh, a couple of hundred hangings, there would be a very sharp decrease in the merchandising of drugs. It wouldn't cease, any more than crime in Great Britain ceased when they used to hang you for stealing sixpence. But in modern America death sentences are taken much more seriously than they were two hundred years ago, when executions were commonplace and public floings a regular feature of city life. There are still a lot of people out there who maintain that there are no figures to sustain the proposition that capital punishment reduces incidence of murder. Well, let that one go. But it would be hard to find anyone who would dispute the conclusion that public hangings would dry up the assembly line of drugs passing under the eyes of the American public on a vibrant street corner.
But this is not going to happen. We are too frozen, institutionalized, in our views about executions, let alone public executions. So then why make the suggestion? It it were done in the spirit of fantasy ("One day they passed a law ... the next day, the consumption of drugs dropped 90 percent"), that would be one thing. But Mr. Kilpatrick was being -in the American usage-serious. But not serious in the continental sense.
Cocaine consumption is up 600 percent in many American cities. In Pakistan, the morning paper advises us, the growth of poppies is up 400 percent over last year. A lot of that stuff is destined for American blood vessels. And we can't stop it, and aren't stopping it. We are subsidizing a criminal class, overflowing our prisons, corrupting the police and the courts, depleting our reserves of detectives and judges, and accomplishing nothing. Either bring on the scaffold (which we aren't going to do), or legalize (which we probably aren't going to do either). We can, then, look for more of the same. Much more of the same.