Posted on 07/03/2011 10:36:29 AM PDT by april15Bendovr
William Bennett was spot on with his article Why Barney Frank and Ron Paul are wrong on drug legalization.
Here is my opinion
A conservatives view on the war on drugs and legalization
With the 2012 election just around the corner, many people on the right are weighing their opinions on the war on drugs and legalization.
Many Republican candidates, while trying to please everyone, have decided to compromise by saying, Its up to the states to decide. Really? Is our country going to be less dysfunctional and less dependent on big government if the states decide how to control addictive street drugs?
If the question is, Have we failed fighting the war on drugs, the answer is yes, but why have we failed? The DEA reports on its website that 60% of all marijuana consumed in America is brought across the borders of Canada and Mexico. Our law enforcement hasn't failed us, but America has, as we have become more and more complacent continuing to witness our once-great nation dumb down on its favorite illegal binkies. Its like watching the levees in New Orleans holding back the Mississippi River during Hurricane Katrina. This shifting of views is nothing at all to be proud of.
As Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine stated about Timothy Leary:
Never too comfortable with politics (he dismissed student activists as "young men with menopausal minds" and proclaimed that LSD stood for "Let the State Disintegrate"), he nevertheless hosted a Los Angeles fundraiser in 1988 for the very buttoned-down Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ron Paul (now a congressman from Texas). Yes, the same Ron Paul running as a candidate for U.S. president for the Republican Party and teaming up with Barney Frank on legislation that would legalize marijuana. Just when the Society of Nuclear Medicine presented an illustrated PET scan study showing effects on the brain as habitual marijuana smokers decrease the number of receptors in the brain.
Maybe Dr. Ron Paul could also enlighten everyone as an obstetrician on the dangers marijuana presents to the reproductive system during pregnancy.
Why ending the war on drugs and legalization is not a conservative issue: Working as a psychiatric counselor for 25 years, I have witnessed countless people who were independent but became addicts, ending up relying on SSI, SSDI and many other federal assistance programs.
Legalization will create a litigation war and fiasco between drug users and their employers. People who had already been prescribed medical marijuana have sued companies like Walmart for their right to work. Every addict knows they can walk into a doctors office and be prescribed a medical marijuana card simply by stating, "I have a pimple on my ass." We also know that trial attorneys love these types of lawsuits, and they are the largest special-interest group that influences the Democratic Party. Who is behind ending the war on drugs anyway?
The Wall Street Journal wrote an article June 2, 2011, titled Panel Calls War on Drugs a Failure. "The global war on drugs has failed, said a report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy released Thursday. The report calls for a frank dialogue on the issue and encourages governments to experiment with the regulation of drugs, especially marijuana, the WSJ article said. The article went on to say, The Global Commission is funded by member Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Group Ltd., George Soros's Open Society Foundation, the Instituto Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the Centro Edelstein de Pesquisas Sociais in Brazil. There are well-known people on this commission who are proven drug legalization advocates and are using this 20-page report as propaganda.
Why ending the war on drugs and legalization itself is unconstitutional: This apathy and Laissez-faire 1960's attitude toward drug use is going to quickly lead us on the path to our own demise. This itself is a major threat to our republic as it stands. There are too many people in the cart, but not enough people pushing. More drugs is just going to add more people to the cart. I am a big fan of the DEA's work to keep drugs off the streets even though they are outgunned and inundated.
Our federal government has the unique role in fighting epidemics and pandemics in an attempt to protect its citizens. Drugs have reached that point in our country. We need candidates who understand that a more dysfunctional drug-addicted society becomes more dependent on that socialist cradle-to-grave system that loves to wipe everybodys bum when they lose brain function as a result of a liberal Amsterdam-style drug policy.
Think about the message ending the war on drugs and legalization sends to children and teens. Its a tacit approval. We are witnessing drug use stats with teens go up. CBS news reported April 6, 2011 Teenage drug abuse is trending upward, according to the Partnership at Drugfree.org. It recently announced results of a new study showing sharp increases in the use of marijuana and Ecstasy after years of declining use.
We need to debate the consequence of use before we degrade just what the war on drugs was meant to represent. There will be more repercussions to these liberal attitudes on legalization. Is that really what America wants?
The term “neoconservative” came from the socialist Michael Harrington in 1973. It was used to describe Irving Kristol, and his buddies. Irving Kristol was on the Hubert Humphrey task force in 1968, but did not support McGovern in 1972.
Just because someone doesn’t support McGovern (60% in 1972 didn’t) doesn’t mean that that person is any type of Conservative. It just means they didn’t like McGovern. They were all Democrats. 30 years before that, Irving Kristol liked Trotsky.
I don’t appreciate a NeoCommunist, or NeoTrotskyite political philosophy masquerading as a type of Conservativism. It isn’t now and it never has been.
Arsenic takes zero processing.
Bottom’s up!
No, the difference was thousands of years of alcohol use and it being a thorough part of daily life and human commerce and interaction and relationships in western Civilization, versus, the recent introduction of dope to our young.
Prohibition is an entirely different subject than drug laws.
Bill Bennett Explains Why Freedom Is Slavery
http://reason.com/blog/2011/07/01/bill-bennett-explains-why-free
The question is: “Whose freedom?” The drug dealers’, surethe drug consumers [sic], no.
As any parent with a child addicted to drugs will explain, as any visit to a drug rehab center will convey, those caught in the web of addiction are anything but free.
Contary to the dominant narrative, the War on Drugs is a great success - it has kept the retail price of drugs high, and thus allowed the entire criminal distribution chain to be adequately paid including the various police authorities who are supposedly curtailing this business.
As is well known, regulatory authority is always employed to increase the margins of established interests and to raise market entry costs for new competition. This is the bedrock of crony capitalism, which replaced the free market about a century ago.
If the War on Drugs were not serving that established interest, it would have been strangled years ago. There is nothing new under the sun.
“They cannot even keep drugs out of prison, so what is the point?”
The point is drugs cause violent crimes.
Read this study titled The Criminal Mind: How Drugs and Violence May Affect the Brain
http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/10/the-criminal-mind-how-drugs-and-violence-may-affect-the-brain/
I haven’t heard many conservatives for legalization and ending the war on drugs strategizing plans on what we should do with the current violence or more violence that most likely will be created as a result.
Liberals create policies and laws without forethought not conservatives.
"Approximately 170 murders were committed in the Netherlands in 2010, a slight decrease from 2009."
http://www.denhaag.nl/de/to/Population-of-The-Hague-rising.htm
That works out to a murder rate of just over 1 per 100,000 population. Compare that to the US murder rate of 5 per 100,000.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
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Record low murder rate once again
2 January 2008
AMSTERDAM - 147 murders were committed in the Netherlands last year, one fewer than in 2006 and therefore a record low, according to the annual report from Elsevier.
http://www.expatica.com/nl/news/local_news/Record-low-murder-rate-once-again_1276.html
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Let's look at Amsterdam:
"In Amsterdam the number of murders decreased from 32 in 2009 to 16 in 2010..."
http://www.denhaag.nl/de/to/Population-of-The-Hague-rising.htm
With a population of 730,000, that works out to a murder rate of 2.2/100,000. For comparison, San Jose is one of the safest cities in the US. According to city-data.com, its murder rate for 2009 was 2.9/100,000.
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Back to the drawing board, Mr. Drug Counselor.
-mark-
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