Hat tip to Justin Raimondo
Both of theses factor came into play in suburban Fairfax County Virginia where 19-year-old Alicia Lannes overdosed on heroin and died. The Washington Postis reporting that when her “boyfriend, Skylar Schnippel, realized Lannes was in trouble, he didn't call her parents or 911. He dialed some buddies and asked them to check on her, said her father, Greg Lannes. Schnippel's friends crept to the family's windows about 4 a.m. March 5 and saw that Alicia was unconscious. They went to a pay phone and made an anonymous call to 911.”
If heroin were legal and regulated then the chances are that Alicia would not have taken an overdose. However, even if she had overdosed under a legal regime those around her would have sought official help immediately and greatly increased her probability of survival. No doubt those who support and benefit by the illegality of heroin will exploit the sad death of Alicia Lannes to bolster their position but the reality is that if drugs were legal she would most likely be alive today. We as a society may not like heroin use but it should not be a capital offense.
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
The transition team promptly responded to my concerns by sending me an e-mail touting Obama’s new plan to create 2.5 million jobs. This reminded me of something I once heard said by a Libertarian running for a seat in the Michigan Legislature to the effect that, if every job promised by a politician were actually created then we would all have to have three jobs and the dog would have to have a job too.
A press report (note the larger than life picture) on the plan unintentionally suggests a certain disconnection with reality. Obama promises not to raise taxes on the rich and to lower taxes for everyone else while at the same time tremendously increasing domestic spending. This plan brings up the same question that the larger more active military and various bailouts do, where is all this money coming from?
In a misleading article published by The Washington Post, attributing increased violence to marijuana rather than its real source marijuana prohibition, Holder is quoted as asserting that, "we have too long taken the view that what we would term to be minor crimes are not important," as he advocated more active enforcement along with stiffer penalties for marijuana offenses. Also, The Washington Timesreported that, “Eric Holder yesterday said he will seek to make marijuana distribution in the District a felony and reinstate mandatory-minimum sentences for convicted drug dealers. Mr. Holder … said the D.C. Council's vote a year ago to repeal mandatory minimums was ‘misguided,’ leading to a backlog in the court system. He also warned that the city is on the verge of an explosion in violence associated with the sale and use of marijuana.”
The war on people who use certain kinds of drugs is the most racist institution in modern America. How ironic and sad that our first black president has appointed as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer another black man who so enthusiastically supports the racism inherent in drug prohibition.
Cross posted on Trebach Report
Taylor also notes efforts to convince users of cocaine that they are responsible for these bad effects. He quotes Colombia's Vice-President, Francisco Santos Calderon as arguing that, "every time you consume one gram of cocaine you are destroying 4.4 square meters of Colombian rainforest."
All of the problems described by the author would be mitigated or disappear if the coca plant were legal. The reason people plant coca deep in the rainforest is because it is illegal. The reason the chemicals used to make cocaine are just dumped into the nearest stream is because the industry is outlawed and therefore unregulated. Also, let us remember that the herbicides mentioned in the piece are there because of governmental efforts to eradicate the coca plant. If the drug was legal people would be able to partake without causing any more environmental damage than other crops do, so it is clearly not the user’s fault. The blame lies with drug prohibition and anyone who cares about the rainforest environment should be advocating an end to war on people who use certain kinds of drugs.
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
Hat tip Kenny Rodgers
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
The investigation was conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication and the Drug War Chroniclequotes the authors as saying that, “The evidence does not support a claim that the campaign produced anti-marijuana effects. There is little evidence for a contemporaneous association between exposure to anti-drug advertising and any of the outcomes... Non-users who reported more exposure to anti-drug messages were no more likely to express anti-drug beliefs than were youths who were less exposed.” They went on to assert that, "Despite extensive funding, governmental agency support, the employment of professional advertising and public relations firms, and consultation with subject-matter experts, the evidence from the evaluation suggests that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign had no favorable effects on youths' behavior and that it may even have had an unintended and undesirable effect on drug cognitions and use."
Senator McCain has said he wants to take an axe to the federal budget while Senator Obama has said a scalpel is needed. Axe or scalpel, this useless and often slanderous program needs to be eliminated.
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
First off, what people really want is for others to pay taxes. Almost all of those clamoring for a tax increase on families earning over $250,000 make less money than that. It would be interesting to know if Ms Kohn’s income crosses that threshold If Americans like to pay taxes so much why isn’t the system voluntary?
Secondly, a piece of advice for the author, if you are going to extol the virtues of government you might want to forgo the example of roads. As someone who often finds himself parked on the beltway that circles Washington D.C. I do not think it really helps your case.
Lastly, when Kohn is listing all of the marvelous things that government does for us with that tax money she neglects to include many things, such as all of the dead Iraqi and Afghani children the taxpayers have recently purchased or the audio tapes of U.S. soldiers having intimate conversations with their wives collected by the NSA and then shared with other government employees on the taxpayer's dime. I could go on in this vein for quite some time and I resent every penny that I am forced to pay at gunpoint for these kinds of activities. Apparently these sorts of things just do not bother Sally Kohn.
Hat tip Kenny Rodgers
However, Jeffrey A. Schaler and Richard E. Vatz point out in the pages of The Baltimore Sun that this backdoor change to the nation’s medical care system is both controversial and very expensive. They write that, “Quietly slipping the parity requirement into the financial bailout bill legislatively resolves a half-century of contentious debate over the definition of ‘mental illness,’ whether ‘psychiatric disorders’ are medical disorders, and the nature of addiction. What it does not resolve are the many valid objections to the whole concept of parity - objections that have never been satisfactorily answered.”
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
After Mexican President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006 he deployed 30,000 troops in an attempt to break the country’s drug cartels and the Bush Administration has responded with offer for $400 million more American tax dollars to support the effort, a 20% increase in the Mexican anti-narcotics budget. The result has been 3500 drug related murders as opposed to the 2500 that took place last year and in a poll published on October 4th “40% of Mexicans felt less secure since Calderón's drug war offensive began. Another poll published by the Mexico City daily, Reforma, showed that more than half of Mexicans believed that the cartels, not the government, were winning the drug war.”
However, it appears that change may be coming as on, “October 2, Calderón proposed legislation that would decriminalize drug possession, ostensibly for personal use. Not just for marijuana, as one might have expected in a country where pot smoke has not been demonized to the same degree as in the U.S., but for cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin, as well.” This new direction in policy found support in the previous administration of Vicente Fox but the Bush drug war apparatus managed to stifle it. Therefore the question becomes has the level of violence risen enough to overcome the U.S. government’s support for said violence?
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
Gettman comes to three main conclusions:
1. The Bush Administration has failed to reduce or control marijuana use in the United States. Marginal changes in marijuana and other drug use have been distorted to support false claims that incremental progress in reducing marijuana and other drug use has been achieved. Marijuana use is fundamentally the same as when the Bush Administration took office and illicit drug use overall has increased. Drug use data do not support Bush Administration claims that its policies have had a significant impact on illicit drug use in the United States.
2. Increases in drug treatment admissions for marijuana (often cited by officials as"proof" of marijuana's dangers) are driven by criminal justice policies rather than medical diagnosis. These policies increase public costs for providing drug treatment services and reduce funds for and availability of treatment of more serious drug problems.
3. Bush Administration documents acknowledge and document the failure of their national drug control strategy.
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
Perhaps, Walters fears competition in the business of encouraging drug use among the nation’s youth. After all back in 2006 USA TODAY, while covering a General Accounting Office study on the program, reported that the “$1.4 billion anti-drug advertising campaign conducted by the U.S. government since 1998 does not appear to have helped reduce drug use and instead might have convinced some youths that taking illegal drugs is normal.” Also, for all the Drug Czar knows these new videos showing people high and acting stupid will actually discourage drug use.
Lastly, since a great deal of the time, effort and money spent in the government’s war on people who use certain kinds of drugs has always been directed towards demonizing and censoring those with opposing views, Walters’ statement that "Nobody's talking about censorship over the Internet here, what we're talking about is legitimate parental supervision” is likely disingenuous at best.
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
Historian Mary Hershberger has written a fascinating article titled Investigating John McCain’s Tragedy at Sea, which reviews McCain’s role in the event. After presenting evidence that over the years McCain has been less than truthful about his actions and that he may actually have contributed to the severity of the incident, Hershberger states that, ”Whatever the circumstances of the fire’s origins, McCain did not stay on deck to help fight the blaze as the men around him did. With the firefighting crew virtually wiped out, men untrained in fighting fires had to pick up the fire hoses, rescue the wounded or frantically throw bombs and even planes over the ship’s side to prevent further tragedy. McCain left them behind and went down to the hangar-bay level, where he briefly helped crew members heave some bombs overboard. After that, he went to the pilot’s ready room and watched the fire on a television monitor hooked to a camera trained on the deck.” A little later, while fires were still burning, McCain left the vessel by helicopter for some RR in Saigon. This account of McCain’s involvement does not sound very heroic to me.
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
The two leaders, Saakashvili and Hussein, certainly seem to share many of the same ideas about governing. Neither would tolerate a free press or peaceful demonstrations and both have used a brutal prison system, inclined towards torture, to secure power. In The Jewish Daily Forward Kathleen Peratis calls into question the keystone of the mass media’s narrative, that Georgia is a Democracy. She reports that, “in response to these events, Saakashvili called a snap election for January 2008, which the opposition alleges he stole through voter intimidation and media dominance.”
We must ask ourselves are the aims of Saakashvili, who committed the first acts of violence in this latest confrontation, really worth restarting the Cold War? Do we seriously want our children to be subject to duck and cover drills again and to live every day with the knowledge and fear that the world could be destroyed at any instant?
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
We see here the real damage that the terrorists have done to American society. They have made “security” the be all and end all of our values. The most repugnant un-America acts are always justified in its name.
Hat tip to Scott Horton
Ever since the Progressive Era the United States government has pursued a policy relying primarily on punishment to curb drug abuse, with abuse and use being considered largely synonymous. While the program has always been a mixture of state coercion and drug treatment, the bulk of the funding has gone into maintaining prohibition. As a result, this country has a racially biased overcrowded prison system on the verge of collapse. We have a law enforcement system employing often very brutal tactics which accomplish very little in way of ending drug use. Our medical system is denying people in pain the medication they need to ease their suffering. And, the nation’s economic system must come up with billions of dollars each year to pay for this activity.
We are told these sacrifices are necessary to keep drugs in check but what do we really get for our money and our pain? Well, U.S. News and World Report, writing about research done by the WHO, tells us that the United States has “the highest percentage of people who reported using marijuana or cocaine at least once in their lives.” We have achieved this distinction despite the fact that many other countries have much more liberal and humane policies than us. Writing on AlterNetBruce Mirken argues that this study shows the punitive approach to be ineffective and that the people in charge of the policy know this. Mirken quotes the WHO researchers; "The U.S., which has been driving much of the world's drug research and drug policy agenda, stands out with higher levels of use of alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis, despite punitive illegal drug policies. ... The Netherlands, with a less criminally punitive approach to cannabis use than the US, has experienced lower levels of use, particularly among younger adults. Clearly, by itself, a punitive policy towards possession and use accounts for limited variation in nation level rates of illegal drug use."
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
