Tancredo Says It's Time To Legalize Drugs; Former Congressman Says Drug War Lost

KMGH-TV ABC 7 Denver, Colo. ^ | 2009-05-20 | Steve Saunders

[rabscuttle385]

DENVER -- Admitting that it may be "political suicide" former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo said its time to consider legalizing drugs.

He spoke Wednesday to the Lincoln Club of Colorado, a Republican group that's been active in the state for 90 years. It's the first time Tancredo has spoken on the drug issue. He ran for president in 2008 on an anti-illegal immigration platform that has brought him passionate support and criticism.

Tancredo noted that he has never used drugs, but said the war has failed.

"I am convinced that what we are doing is not working," he said.

[roamer_1]

Please. Law enforcement is the least reliable entity. Their jobs depend on the War on Drugs.

My point was that I know these men personally. They have no reason to lie to *me* in our conversations, and they do not know each other. Yet their stories are remarkable in their similarity. I dare say *any* cop would have a similar story to tell. The ones I know would say that drugs are involved in almost every aspect of their work, and without the influence of narcotics (incl. alcohol), most of the nasty crap they see every day would not happen.

There are certainly people who ruin their lives on drugs, but people ruin their lives on bunches of other stuff too. And guess what, it's their lives to ruin.

So who picks up the pieces? Who accounts for the broken homes, the bastard children with no supervision, the next generation, who will only be worse than the first? What about the muggings and robberies, the victims of those, and their families? What about flop-houses burning to the ground, taking other buildings with them? It is not as simple as *their* lives alone. The impact of the drug user goes out like ripples in a pond.

One will only increase the welfare state by leaps and bounds by your solution, along with a spiraling crime rate, which is the precise reason opiates and cocaine were outlawed/controlled in most states early on - We've been there, and done that.

[PGalt]

I have been predicting two events from the liberal presidency: legalizing drugs and the lowering of the age of consent. Any bets?

I've been known to be a gamblin' man, but will not make that bet. It's a lose/lose.

[PGalt]

True, drugs are self punishing.

BTTT!

I don’t see why I should be taxed for yet another big government program that is ineffective.

I don't like being taxed for much of anything. I don't like paying insurance for socialized risk. We pay for individuals who wittingly/unwittingly attack/cause damage to themselves in a myriad of ways or cause damage to others. I don't like paying for any (through police or medical or firefighters or insurance) irrational, anti-self behavior.

[ReignOfError]

I don't think anyone will argue against the proposition that meth is horribly destructive. The question is whether prohibition is an effective way of minimizing its impact on individual lives and on society at large, and the empirical evidence is that it isn't.

Prohibition kills effective regulation. Do you see illegal liquor stores on the block where the meth labs are? No, because licensed establishments can be told where to locate. Do you see crime waves carried out by drunks who need a fix? No, because they can obtain their drug legally, and have a disincentive to break the law. Meth addicts are already criminals by virtue of their addiction, so that line is already crossed.

Prohibition also makes rehabilitation more difficult if not impossible, first by making addicts afraid to seek treatment for fear of getting busted, and then by sucking up all the available funding for law enforcement, leaving none for rehab.

The kids you know who are addicts -- obviously, the threat of prison hasn't kept them from becoming addicts. Would imprisonment help them kick? Maybe, but it usually doesn't. If the goal is to prevent addiction, it certainly would help to devote resources to -- wait for it -- helping addicts, rather than devoting unlimited resources to punishing them and treating rehab as an afterthought.

[east1234]

“He's right. The federal war on drugs is a failure.”

Buy that doesn't mean you legalize them, you change the way you are fighting the war. Look into 19th century China, when about 1/2 the population was addicted to opium. Not a pretty picture.

[Ken H]

Here's a better example closer to home which shows what an utter failure a century of prohibition has been:

"By 1900, about one American in 200 was either a cocaine or opium addict."

--http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/demand/speakout/06so.htm

______________________________________

"There were an estimated 980,000 hardcore heroin addicts in the United States in 1999, 50 percent more than the estimated 630,000 hardcore addicts in 1992."

--http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/heroin.htm

______________________________________

"Among those using cocaine in the United States during 2000, 3.6 million were hardcore users who spent more than $36 billion on the drug in that year."

--http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/cocaine.htm

______________________________________

The US population in 2000 was about 280,000,000. So according to the DOJ, the combined addiction rate was about 1.6% in 2000 vs 0.5% in 1900.

[CharlesWayneCT]

Where in the constitution specifically does it say the federal government can ban murder?

So long as you will accept that banning murder is a legitimate federal interest, I will go with that as an assumption.

Presumably, the right to legislate punishment for crimes against others comes from the principle that people’s persons are legitimate objects of protection, and that the government can protect a person’s life.

Some would argue that this power of government would naturally extend to harm against one’s own life, the most obvious example being a law against suicide. Many otherwise good limited-government conservatives support a law against suicide, but I won’t argue from that basis.

So the question is, can the government legislate against a behavior that can clearly be linked to harm against OTHERS, even if there is not a certainty of that harm?

To explain: I’ll assume you are OK with government passing a law saying you cannot drive the wrong way on a one-way street. What gives government that right? because driving the wrong way puts other people in danger. Now, you could well drive the wrong way and be good enough at it that you do not hurt anybody. But we know that allowing people to drive the wrong way increases the changes of hurting people.

Well, we also know that recreational drug users do increase the risk of harm to others. Many do not, but some do. Just as many speeders don’t cause accidents, but some do, and some drunk drivers don’t cause accidents, but some do, and some people building large explosive devices in their homes don’t ever blow things up, but some do.

The courts have generally taken a position in these cases that government can act if the rights they are limiting are less severe than the gain from the limitations.

Now, if you believe government has no right to regulate drunk driving, shooting guns in your back yard, driving the wrong way down the street, or dropping pennies from the empire state building, you could well argue government has no right to limit recreational drug use either.

Instead, you could argue that we should only punish people for ACTUAL harm. So the drunk driver gets punished if they hit another car or destroy someone else’s property, the penny-dropper only gets prosecuted if they hit someone, you can shoot guns anywhere and only go to jail if you actually harm someone else, you can let your pit-bull run free so long as it doesn’t attack another person.

But it is not required by the libertarian philosophy that actual harm be done before something can be controlled by government, just that the government be limited in the application of it’s power to protect people from one another.

If there was a way to legalize drugs and ensure that those taking drugs would do no harm to anybody else, I would entertain the argument that the government would have no constitutional authority to do otherwise. I would note though that laws such as this were on the books at the time our country was founded, so it is clear the founders themselves did not see “limited government” in the same light.

Now, if we restrict our argument to the federal government, I think a strong argument can be made that, so long as the drugs to not cross the borders, or any state border, that the feds have no authority to regulate their use. But the STATES could still make drugs illegal.

I have no doubt people of reason can rationally take a different position than this, but that is my quick take on a justification for making certain recreational drugs illegal.

[CharlesWayneCT]

Why can the government regulate food? Well, I guess so that the food companies do not harm others. But that wouldn’t allow them to ban foods they don’t think are good for us, or that hurt us but in known ways. Except the government did that with artificial sweeteners.

Now, I would argue that for society to work, the people in the society have to be of sound mind, and that using drugs is therefore a harm to the common society that we all depend upon for our liberty. However, that doesn’t mean government has a right to do anything about it — it just means that I can argue that, if government is ALLOWED to regulate drugs, they SHOULD do so for the good of society, at least so far as harm to society can be reasonably predicted from the use of a drug.

But since we allow people to drink, and being drunkards harms society, that isn’t really the only rationalization being used.

I welcome a serious debate on the topic, I simply disagree with Tom’s argument that “we aren’t winning the war, therefore we should surrender”.

[mysterio]

I agree with Tancredo.

Also I find it interesting that all these public servants only come out against the fWO(s)D after they are out of power.

[DoughtyOne]

If you have a statement to make, I would urge you to make it.

I’m not going to debate each of you on the subject.

[CharlesWayneCT]

If Tom’s argument was “it doesn’t matter that drugs are bad, we have no constitutional authority to stop them”, then your response to me would be a good one.

But Tom was arguing that “we haven’t won the war, so we should surrender”, and for THAT argument my response is that you don’t surrender simply because your current approach isn’t working, you stop the war if there is no good reason to WANT to win the war.

BTW, regardless of whether drugs can constitutionally be criminalized, I think the government has EVERY RIGHT under the constitution to be CONCERNED about illegal drugs. There are things government can do short of making something illegal, and I don’t think many of the “legalization” supporters are saying government should simply eliminate all the laws on the books about drugs.

If it would be OK with you constititutionally for government to regulate, control, and tax drugs, then you are saying government has a legitimate concern about the issue.

[Antoninus]

Tancredo has done some nutty things in the past. Add another inane statement to the tally.

[ItisaReligionofPeace]

If the cost of the war exceeds the benefit of the war then it is not only a good argument, it’s the moral thing to do.

[CharlesWayneCT]

The idea of "precrime" is so foreign and abhorrent to a free society it hardly bears mentioning.

IF that were true, we would oppose laws that kept mental patients from getting guns, blind people and drunk people from driving cars, people driving heavy equipment without a license, and a host of other laws that restrict what free people can do NOT because of direct harm, but simply because of an INCREASED POTENTIAL for harm. Now, if you actually do oppose any law that restricts people's actions unless those actions lead to actual harm, you would be consistant in applying that belief to drugs. But you would be wrong to suggest that such laws would be abhorrent to a free society -- the argument generally isn't whether we can restrict activities that have potential for harm to others, but instead at what degree of potentiality we should set the bar. Otherwise, you would have no recourse if someone built a meth lab in the apartment next to yours, unless it actually blew up and killed you.

[CharlesWayneCT]

I should think that what is happening in our country today would be clear enough evidence that what happens to society as a whole IS a great concern for individual liberties.

[bamahead]

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[gargoyle]

...Let’s hope so, I need a laugh. BTW, Bravo, Mr. Tancredo...

[Abundy]

My 15 years and counting of law enforcement experience compels me to agree with Tancredo.

[SoDak]

I agree with him.

[Tired of Taxes]

I used to think ending the WOD was a terrible idea, until someone pointed out to me: We're spending billions every year to save people from themselves, and we're risking the lives of law enforcement and other people in the process.

There should be laws against forcing or tricking someone to take drugs, and laws against giving drugs to minors. There also should be strict laws against driving under the influence, etc., and drug addiction shouldn't be considered an excuse for committing a crime.

But, spending billions to save people - who are willingly buying and taking the drugs - from themselves doesn't make much sense.

Plus, economists point out that the WOD has led to harder drugs on the streets because it's far easier to sneak some powder across the border and around the streets than bags of marijuana, for example, and a smaller amount of powder can yield more money.