Posted on 07/31/2002 8:50:30 AM PDT by Wolfie
Former White House Drug Spokesman Bob Weiner Blasts John Stossel ABC 20-20 Report as 'Distorted, Inaccurate Excuse for Legalization'
Former White House drug policy spokesman Bob Weiner is blasting last night's ABC 20-20 drug piece by John Stossel: "It was a distorted and inaccurate excuse for drug legalization.
It blows off the successes and real reductions in use generated both by government drug policy and efforts by parents, teachers, coaches, businesses, community coalitions, religious leaders, and law enforcement."
Weiner, who was Director of Public Affairs for the White House Office of National Drug Policy May 1995-August 2001 under Drug Czars Lee Brown, Barry McCaffrey, and the Bush transition, pointed to what he calls "radical inconsistencies in Stossel's reporting. He repeatedly ignores or downplays each positive finding about drug policy."
"Stossel throws in the important data point that drug use is down by 50 percent but then says throughout the piece that use is the same and we are losing the war. He never says that crack cocaine -- the primary crime-causing drug in recent years -- is down by two-thirds. He finds one police chief who says it's all fruitless -- understandable in a particular high usage area -- but ignores and does not report the myriad of police who tell experts that crime and drugs are down because criminals and dealers are taken off the streets. He ignores the fact that the governments anti-drug media campaign the last four years has coincided with a 40 percent reduction of youth drug users and 25 percent improvement in parent anti-drug communication with youth -- huge success rates in precisely the intended target audiences.
"Stossel pushes his inaccurate points that the drug war 'creates crime' when it is precisely the opposite: drug use generates murders, domestic violence, and date rapes. He soft pedals marijuana use, with assertions by an archetypical long haired user that 'marijuana hasn't killed anyone,' but has no one pointing out that marijuana is the second leading cause of car crashes as well as the primary drug in teen drug treatment
"He has no understanding of foreign efforts, either," Weiner asserted. He quotes disputed CIA Colombia cocaine increase numbers based on their flawed, cloud-covered data despite Colombia's surveys showing significant drops in cultivation and the success of the spraying of 30 percent of its cocaine acreage. He never mentions that Peru and Bolivia obtained over 60 percent reductions and Colombias five year plan envisions an equally obtainable 50 percent reduction," says Weiner, who has been on two recent Colombia missions with McCaffrey.
"He asserts that Europe is succeeding with a liberalized policy but does not mention that drug seizures in Europe have doubled the last three years and use has gone up, indicating that Europe may face our drug and crime problems of past decades that we have escaped from by the comprehensive education and law enforcement efforts we are now making. Stossel dismisses former Drug Czar McCaffrey's assertions of the 'disaster' of European legalization trends by saying 'not what we heard', hardly a scientific methodology.
"Finally, Stossel barely mentions the concession of his own legalization advocates that 'maybe more would use drugs'. He insists that 'The war on drugs is a war on ourselves.' To dismiss the point that under legalization more would use drugs -- and that hospital emergency rooms would be flooded, crime and dropouts would rise, families would be disrupted, and the toll would be immeasurable -- is like asking Mrs. Lincoln on that fateful day, 'Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln how was the play?'"
Weiner concluded by asserting, "I have never seen a worse piece of major journalism on drug policy other than perhaps a similar one done by Geraldo Rivera years ago when he refused to use interview points by the Drug Czar which disagreed with Geraldo's thesis."
..the opposite of which is this.
EBUCK
Yes, you certainly are a bag of wind.
Speaking as the only true Conservative on this thread:
Drug use is not a Conservative value!!!
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
I don't know if that's true, we don't use pyramids today. It may or may not be a link, but it is certainly possible.
People all over the world like to build things big, especially when religion is concerned. The first attempts at large structures would logically be larger versions of existing structures, round and rectangular huts. The load bearing structures could only support a certain amount of elevated weight before collapsing. Certainly they tried many different theories. And eventually all of them would have come to the same conclusion, spreading the load of upper layer over an increasingly large base, which is the only way (with primative materials) to support large structures, is the way to go. Even the first large pyramid in egypt (the step pyramid) is an adaptation of an earlier, long and low, rectangular flat topped structure.
EBUCK
The actual story behind the legislature passed against marijuana is quite surprising. According to Jack Herer, author of The Emperor Wears No Clothes and an expert on the "hemp conspiracy," the acts bringing about the demise of hemp were part of a large conspiracy involving DuPont, Harry J. Anslinger, commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and many other influential industrial leaders such as William Randolph Hearst and Andrew Mellon. Herer notes that the Marijuana Tax Act, which passed in 1937, coincidentally occurred just as the decoricator machine was invented. With this invention, hemp would have been able to take over competing industries almost instantaneously. According to Popular Mechanics, "10,000 acres devoted to hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average [forest] pulp land." William Hearst owned enormous timber acreage, land best suited for conventional pulp, so his interest in preventing the growth of hemp can be easily explained.
Competition from hemp would have easily driven the Hearst paper-manufacturing company out of business and significantly lowered the value of his land. Herer even suggests popularizing the term "marijuana" was a strategy Hearst used in order to create fear in the American public. "The first step in creating hysteria was to introduce the element of fear of the unknown by using a word that no one had ever heard of before... 'marijuana'" (ibid).
DuPont's involvment in the anti-hemp campaign can also be explained with great ease. At this time, DuPont was patenting a new sulfuric acid process for producing wood-pulp paper. "According to the company's own records, wood-pulp products ultimately accounted for more than 80% of all DuPont's railroad car loadings for the next 50 years" (ibid). Indeed it should be noted that "two years before the prohibitive hemp tax in 1937, DuPont developed a new synthetic fiber, nylon, which was an ideal substitute for hemp rope" (Hartsell). The year after the tax was passed DuPont came out with rayon, which would have been unable to compete with the strength of hemp fiber or its economical process of manufacturing. "DuPont's point man was none other than Harry Anslinger...who was appointed to the FBN by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who was also chairman of the Mellon Bank, DuPont's chief financial backer.
Anslinger's relationship to Mellon wasn't just political, he was also married to Mellon's niece" (Hartsell). It doesn't take much to draw a connection between DuPont, Anslinger, and Mellon, and it's obvious that all of these groups, including Hearst, had strong motivation to prevent the growth of the hemp industry.
I'm not badmouthing my fellow Freepers. But I'm seeing alot of badmouthing going on without facts to back them up.
IMO, quitting the WoD would be a true demonstration of Compassionate Conservatism.
Stossel's report threw plenty of light on the facts that the Holy Drug Warriors are destroying the very fabric of our nation with the unconstitutional and totalitarian policy of Drug Prohibition.
Let's sum up:
- Inner cities destroyed by gangs profiting from the criminal black market
- Families destroyed by decade-plus incarceration of fathers and mothers for the sake of small amounts of drugs, while the kingpins go free
- Law enforcement officers thoroughly corrupted by black-market money and abuses of the unconstitutional forfeiture laws
- Possession of a comparatively harmless herb that was part of the generally accepted physician's pharmacopeia until 1937 is the cause of over 734,000 arrests in 2000 alone, an absolute waste of scarce law-enforcement resources in a time when America is under threat of terrorist attack
- "Drug education" programs such as D.A.R.E. that tell lies and encourage children and young adults to become informants on their parents
- A new Vietnam just around the corner in Columbia
- Generalized lack of respect for law enforcement: officials are seen as harrassers and oppressors instead of protectors of the peace
and finally
- The stated goal of the War on Drugs (a "drug-free America") is further away from realization now as it was before our politicians decided to trash the Bill of Rights to make it happen (allegedly).
So, given all this, is Stossel the tin-foil hatter, or is it true-believers like you who favor the "liberal" approach of throwing more money at this most egregious of government boondoggles?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.