Posted on 04/11/2015 9:38:43 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., formally launched his presidential campaign Tuesday with a speech in Louisville. Among the notable quotes from Paul's speech was a comment seemingly meant to raise minority support by calling for reform of federal drug laws that disproportionately lead to incarceration of black Americans.
"I see an America where criminal justice is applied equally and any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed," Paul said.
Paul went on to address other topics without expanding much on what kinds of laws he meant. But given his past comments, it's not hard to guess he was talking about the war on drugs. "The war on drugs has become the most racially disparate outcome that you have in the entire country," Paul said in November 2014. "Our prisons are full of black and brown kids. Three-fourths of the people in prison are black or brown."
Lauren Galik, the Director of Criminal Justice Reform at Reason Foundation, said she was excited to hear a Republican presidential candidate campaigning on drug reform. "More than half of our federal prison population right now is there for drugs, many of which are African-American," Galik told the Washington Examiner. "African Americans are more likely to receive a sentence that carries a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment than white individuals."
Mandatory minimums disproportionately affect African American criminals compared to whites and Hispanics. "Although Black offenders in 2012 made up 26.3 percent of drug offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty, they accounted for 35.2 percent of the drug offenders still subject to that mandatory minimum at sentencing," according to the United States Sentencing Commission, an independent federal agency.
(Excerpt) Read more at m.washingtonexaminer.com ...
Your comments take me back to the days when that Nobel Prize winner Shockley (electronics) dared to propose that genetic differences among races is real and demonstrable. The kind and fair world of do-gooders excoriated this honest man of science as few men had/have been treated. Of course these do-gooders want every other person to live by their rules even if the world is different.
Opium wars.
The British made a lot of money shipping in opium from Afganistan to China in the 19th century. When the Chinese resisted, the Brits could count on their technological superiority to defeat a China divided by numerous warlords. The opium made the Chinese docile and an ideal host for parasitic colonialists.
Today, the game is similar in the US. The opium comes from the same place, Afganistan. But it’s the US government that protects the opium trade as demonstrated by the fact that Afganistan opium production has skyrocketed since US involvement since 2001. The US is intentionally not taking down the big Latin American drug cartels or the money laundering banks. Like the mob, Feds take their share of the profits, but keep the racket going. Meanwhile, the US has the highest per capita use of opiates. But that’s OK because it keeps the American peasants dumb or in jail.
The US government is basically acting as an imperialistic and foreign power against its own people. Time to take the power away from the f’ing Feds and repeal the Federal drug laws for that reason alone.
Love it when a noob gets all puffed up and struts around the board
Do you agree with Ted Cruz that it should be up to the states to decide marijuana legalization, or do you side with fedgov?
Your comments are 100% absolute truth.
Cruz says it's the states' decision; whether President Cruz thinks a state made a good or bad choice will be of no practical importance.
http://www.casacolumbia.org/download/file/fid/640, question 44:
Which is easiest for someone your age to buy: cigarettes, beer or marijuana?
31% CIGARETTES
14% BEER
34% MARIJUANA
5% THE SAME
15% DON'T KNOW/NO RESPONSE
Exactly wrong - for most of those ten generations there were no laws against drugs.
I'm not backing down on "anything" I wrote. Period.
Sure, cannabis and opium were all around.
I think you just did back down from your claim that ten generations were 'in a "no legal drugs" world.'
It's just that the people with the "most pivotal" ACCOMPLISHMENTS had the morals (read "horse sense") ...
to NOT be pot heads or opium addicts.
There you go: drugs were legal, individuals were free to choose, and many made the better choice. That's what I advocate.
He was right, though. Doesn't take long to figure out how the moral-statist phony "conservatives" operate.
Laws don’t get passed until problems arise, when drugs became a problem in the 1800s, drug laws started getting passed.
When polygamy became a problem we started seeing polygamy laws.
Then this poll like so many is useless because I have teens and asked them plus asked their friends earlier today after your posts and my wife works with teens.
But hey if you want to believe a poll what suits your theory then go right ahead and I will go with first hand knowledge
Hey how are you, ling time no hear?
So you think a few nonrandomly selected data points are more reliable than a large randomly sampled study? Bask in your ignorance - the intelligent FReepers to whom I'm really speaking know better.
Laws get passed when power-hungry pols and bureaucrats sell the con that a problem has arisen - true conservatism is skeptical of government claims and jealous of individual liberty.
The drug laws started getting passed when they became a problem, for instance Opium in San Francisco.
Just as polygamy wasn’t a problem, until it became a problem, and the same reason that we are now having to look at laws banning full term abortions.
The only "problem" in San Francisco was that Chinese laborers were indulging in recreational substances different from the ones the Caucasian majority favored.
You left out polygamy and full term abortion.
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