A couple of commenters have complained that I devote too much time to the war on drugs. Maybe so. I am the first to admit that anything gets boring after a while. I often wonder which is more boring: to hear something I disagree with repeated endlessly or to hear something I agree with repeated endlessly. Neither persuades me, but the latter is likely to be more boring, while the former more irritating.
Some perspective is needed. I realize that the War on Drugs is not front and center in people’s minds right now. As the chorus goes, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Neither party wants to grapple over the details of WOD issues. Certainly it is not front and center in the presidential debates. Unfortunately, neither of the two candidates whose drug war positions I like stand much chance of winning the nomination, as this race is coming down to a two candidate showdown between what Michael Barone calls the “polished” Romney and the “unprepared” Perry.
So, at the risk of boring and irritating readers who are sick of yet another WOD post, in this one I thought it might be worth taking a quick look at the WOD positions of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry.
Romney is against legalizing recreational or medical marijuana:
Opposes legalization of recreational or medical marijuana
The former Massachusetts governor opposes the legalization of recreational or medical marijuana, although he endorsed the use of synthetic pot. In his most recent book, No Apology, he attributes the legalization movement to “the passion and zeal of those members of the pleasure-seeking generation that never grew up.”
Not a word about the federal versus state laws. So whether the above statement means he thinks federal laws control, I don’t know. I would like to see some reporters ask him.
As to Perry, he also disapproves of marijuana (and harder drugs), but he also has made it very clear that states should be able to make their own drug policies.
Medical marijuana OK for California, but not Texas
[On states’ rights], there’s a movement I disagree with, while appreciating the desire of Californians to decide for themselves–this is the issue of marijuana consumption. A few years ago Californians legalized the limited medicinal use of marijuana, but the Supreme Court struck this law down in Gonzalez v. Raich, claiming that the federal government has the power to regulate activity that would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Now, I am not sure the people of Texas would want to go down this road.
That is not bad, and I hope he means what he says. I read his book Fed Up! — which was very critical of Gonzalez (a states rights disaster with implications far beyond medical marijuana), so I think he is sincere, and will not back down.
BTW, here’s the rest of the quote from his book:
Now, I am not sure the people of Texas would want to go down this road, but it sure seems to me that Justice Thomas got this one right when he said in dissent:
“The majority prevents California from devising drug policies that they have concluded provide much-needed respite to the seriously ill. The majority’s rush to embrace federal power is especially unfortunate given the importance of showing respect for the sovereign States. Our federalist system, properly, understood, allows California to decide for themselves how to safeguard the health and welfare of their citizens.”
Source: Fed Up!, by Gov. Rick Perry, p.164-165 Nov 15, 2010
I have problems with both candidates for a variety of reasons, but where it comes to medical marijuana alone, Perry is better by far.
There is also the fact that he signed a Western Governors’ Association resolution that states should make drug policy:
States should make drug policy, not feds.
Perry signed the Western Governors’ Association resolution:
- Western Governors agree that states, not the federal government, are in the best position to understand the myriad of drug related issues facing their citizens and to initiate and implement drug policy strategies that will combat the substance abuse problems facing their communities.
- Western Governors support effective law enforcement initiatives and behavioral accountability. Partnerships between enforcement and treatment programs (or efforts) need to be strengthened and supported to enable behavioral changes.
- Western Governors recognize the escalating costs of incarceration and welcome effective common sense options within the criminal justice system that result in lessened drug abuse, healthier communities, and decreased criminal activity.
- Western Governors appreciate the unique problems confronting our communities from increased production, distribution and abuse of methamphetamines. The Governors will continue to attack this problem aggressively on several fronts, including enforcement of current criminal laws and expansion of treatment and intervention programs.
- Western Governors support sentencing laws that retain individual accountability for criminal conduct while administering proportional punishments that are fair and just.
- Western Governors support efforts to staunch the proliferation of illegal intravenous drug use. Common sense strategies aimed at protecting communities against discarded and potentially contaminated injection drug paraphernalia should be explored. Furthermore, the Governors encourage reform initiatives that will help and encourage injection drug users to obtain information, treatment, detoxification and social services.
Wanna put meth cookers out of business? Let the doctors prescribe pharmaceutical amphetamines. When I was a kid amphetamines weren’t scheduled narcotics as they are now, and anyone could get them simply by telling a doctor he wanted to lose weight. I’m not saying it’s a good thing for doctors to be prescribing to addicts, but I’d rather have script-writing doctors than criminals cooking up dangerous and toxic chemicals in backyards and garages. (While citizens who have colds are regarded as possible criminal suspects for buying sudafed.)
But I digress. Sorry to be such a bore.
Overall, though, looking at the two candidates solely from a war on drugs perspective, there is no question who wins.
Advantage Perry.
(And while I’m still a fence-sitter, if Romney calls Perry soft on drugs or something like that, I might just reach for my checkbook…)
ADDITIONAL NOTE: My main computer is still down, so this post is being published from my old laptop running Ubuntu Linux. Hope there are no formatting errors.
Comments
24 responses to “Another day, another boring post on an irritating peripheral issue”
Our federalist system, properly, understood, allows California to decide for themselves how to safeguard the health and welfare of their citizens.”
I just want to make sure I understand.
So what you’re saying is that Thomas wants slavery back?
I ask that because I’ve always been told that “federalism” is a code word for “slavery”.
Veeshir, you have touched on an old rant of mine:
http://classicalvalues.com/2010/08/a_revolution_bo/
I hate the way liberals try to chain-link federalists to constitutionalists, to states rightists, to racists, to “neo-confederates” and probably to Nazis, in demagogic connect-the-dots fashion.
The simple fact is, just as it did not prohibit murder or any other non-enumerated activity, the Constitution did not prohibit slavery. It now does. That’s not simply by action of war, but because of the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. So, in addition to having only the enumerated powers that Jefferson and Madison made clear, the Constitution prohibits slavery, allows women to vote, allows taxation of all income from whatever source derived. And for a time, it prohibited booze.
All the rest is unconstitutional.
And we have a truly revolutionary remedy.
All we need to do is assert it.
Part of why alcohol prohibition died is that more than a few states stopped enforcing Federal Law.
And Veeshir – I believe what you meant was not slavery but Jim Crow. Not even the most racist these days want to bring back slavery – OTOH I haven’t looked around on that issue. Maybe the Lew Rockwell guys want that.
I just did a look around and there are some joke pages. And there is an anti-British National Party (BNP) facebook page called “Bring Back Slavery”.
I started up Hippies4Palin so I could get on the blogroll of Conservatives4Palin
It is basically a repost of my recent Drug War and pro-Palin articles.
The Favicon is kind of cute. IMO. I do need a better background for the Title. Any one have any suggestions?
Alaska Marijuana Penalties
In Alaska 24 plants is the legal number.
And of course the notorious Landover Baptist Church.
Where The Worthwhile Worship. Unsaved Unwelcome
http://www.landoverbaptist.net/showthread.php?t=31380
IMO, Jim Crow laws violated the 14th Amendment.
In his most recent book, No Apology, he (Romney)attributes the legalization movement to “the passion and zeal of those members of the pleasure-seeking generation that never grew up.”
Silly pleasure-seekers, there’s no room for you in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Haven’t you figured that out by now?
And, of course, there’s no moral value judgements in that statement. None. We all know that “Pleasure-seekers” is a purely scientific term, wholly divorced from any personal or religious moral codes. Obviously, Romney is pandering to the science vote here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Rohrabacher
Unlike most Republican Party members of Congress, Rohrabacher is a supporter of the medicinal use of marijuana as a right of the state. He and Maurice Hinchey have jointly offered the Hinchey-Rohrabacher medical marijuana amendment to a Commerce Justice and Science appropriations bill that would prohibit the Department of Justice from prosecuting patients in states that have legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes.[7] Rohrabacher said that conservatives should take states’ rights into consideration when they consider the issue of marijuana.
I should have expanded.
Federalism=states’ rights (the code words)=the Confederacy=Slavery(what those code words mean)
As for anything Maurice Hinchey does, it won’t go anywhere.
He’s been in Congress for a long time and he has no leadership responsibilities.
Why is that?
Because, like Jim Moran, the Dem leadership likes him for his ability to be elected and vote the socialist way but they don’t trust him with any levers of power because he’s freaking insane.
I’ve enjoyed lots of the posts here about drug prohibition. But thinking about the topic did not result in the conclusion you might expect. My default position was in favor of legalization. Unfortunately, the more I think about it the less I am actually in favor of legalization. Rather, I would advocate a position where drugs are illegal but the government doesn’t work very hard enforcing the laws. Many people don’t use drugs because they are illegal. It is probably a default middle class position. So yes, way more people will use drugs after legalization. Is this good or bad? Might go either way. But I for one am tired of all the experimentation with society which doesn’t work out in the glorious way that all our elites promise. I say, keep it illegal and discourage drug use. Most of the evil that you complain about results from the fact that there is far too much effort put into enforcement.
Rick,
Portugal decrimed (mostly) for users. (similar to what you propose). There was no increase in use.
Since about the early to mid 70s every American generation uses pot at about the 50% rate (slight dip in the 80s) and then use declines as the generation ages. The years of peak use coincide with the high anxiety years. And pot tada is an anti-anxiety medicine.
Legal or illegal in America I doubt use will change much. And that includes all drugs. Why? because Americans don’t obey laws they don’t like.
It is really hard to extrapolate from Portugal. According to Scientific American, only personal use was decriminalized. Likewise according to Wikipedia, drug use increased. (Of course, who knows whether Wikipedia is accurate). So basically, you have your prejudice about the outcome without much data. If you are wrong what are the consequences?
rick –
Appreciate your thoughts, but the tinkering with society isn’t the only issue here. Besides, yours is a just another form of tinkering, although perhaps with smilely face on it. IMO, this issue is also a matter of justice or simple fairness, if you will.
To illustrate, here’s a hypothecial for you-
Duplex apartment building. The two units are each rented to a 25 YO single male and each of these renters have similar jobs and incomes.
The guy in unit A makes frequent stops at a nearby package liquor store. Every night he gets inebriated to one degree or another.
The guy in unit B rarely stops at the package store. Instead, every night he fills a pipe with the dried flowers from a cannibis plant and gets his buzz on.
Our man in unit A has nothing to fear from the law. There are boundaries, sure. But assuming he stays home and gets drunk there, he has nothing to fear from the law.
Not so, our man in Unit B. The mere possession of those dried leaves puts him outside the law from the get go.
Morally, their actions are no different. Yet you’re (still) advocating that legally they should be treated differently before the law. (I’m assuming that you don’t want your version of drug laws to apply to alcohol, too).
When actions that are identical morally are treated differently before the law, you have injustice. And injustice, btw, is immoral. I certainly think so, don’t you? I don’t know how anyone can argue otherwise, but perhaps there is a case to be made somehow, somewhere, someway in some parallel universe perhaps.
Granted, if your scenario would be enacted into law, our guy in unit B might be safe at home for the most part. But even so, is it even remotely fair that he should be in any danger from the law at all, when his neighbor is completely safe from the law? The answer is no, it isn’t fair.
rick,
Let us go with one of the hardest cases in the drug inventory. Heroin.
First – Switzerland voted in favor of a kind of legalization. Twice. With higher numbers the second time.
Second:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2011/03/if-you-dont-quit-harming-yourself-we.html
I am a consultant psychiatrist in Widnes, northern England and prescribe hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Ironically I may not prescribe hasheesh, nor opium nor coca. This is like being able to prescribe cognac but not wine. Nevertheless this policy has eliminated drug deaths, there is no H.I.V. infection, and a police study of our program shows a 15-fold fall in drug-related acquisitive crime. Most interestingly, the incidence of addiction has fallen 12-fold.
the incidence of addiction has fallen 12-fold.
That doesn’t make any sense.
Something can only fall one-fold, nothing can go down more than 100%.
Eric,
I’m still a fence-sitter…
If elected president, Perry will suddenly find lots of reasons why the 10th Amendment doesn’t apply. It has been convenient for him as governor, and that’s all.
The man does not believe in individual rights, period. One glaring example is his veto in 2007 of an eminent domain bill passed overwhelmingly by the Texas legislature. The bill would have cramped his style in trying to railroad the Texas Corridor highway bill.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1852420/posts
He is nothing more than a crony capitalist advocate. He is the fascist good ol’ boy equivalent of a Chicago leftist thug. His fascism is so apparent it reaches out and smacks you in the face. Take his give a shit attitude about executing possibly innocent people, or when cornered about pandering to Hispanics he advocates military type drones on the border, or his executive order to mandate questionable vaccines for 12 year olds. That picture of him as a young man wearing the jack-boots in the study – all he needed was a riding crop and a short little mustache to complete it.
I don’t care if the country goes to utter hell. I will never, under any circumstances vote for him. I am so sick of this shit of voting for the lesser of two evils. What does it get us? Buy a little time maybe, for what? If this is the best the Republican Party can come up with, a man who can’t hold a thought in a debate, who is on the take, is as slimy as they come, screw them.
And while it was just a little thing, giving assholes like Sullivan a field day with it, that little episode of the gay soldier in Iraq getting booed last night at the debate, AND NOT ONE OF THE CANDIDATES MAN ENOUGH TO THANK HIM FOR HIS SERVICE, turned me off to the entire Republican Party so much that I doubt if I will even vote for my local shithead bigot of a Republican congressman.
OK. Veeshir. I think you are being intentionally obtuse.
The meaning is obvious if inartfully stated.
He means reduced to 8.3333333333333333333333333333333% (roughly) of the previous value.
[…] Frank is discussing a certain Republican candidate. I think it applies to almost all of them: I don’t […]
No, saying “reduce by 12-fold” does not mean “reduce to 1/12”
OK. Veeshir. I think you are being intentionally obtuse.
Man you are some kind of asshole.
You have to personally attack people constantly, fuck you. I have always tried to respond to what you say and not attack you personally. You have rarely afforded me that luxury.
So in parting, fuck you. I’m done with you, I avoid assholes who just have to personally attack instead of responding to what people say.
I am truly sorry to see this dispute develop. I am beginning to wish I hadn’t written this post.
Eric – your writing and this post is not the problem.
Part of a comment I made on another thread:
I am going to pit brother against brother. Fathers against sons. Mothers against daughters.
We will be lucky to escape a full blown civil war.
=====
Here is a bit I put in a recent e-mail:
…let me tell you what I have found by stirring the pot on my blogs.
Neither our allies nor our enemies on the right are ready for what is coming. Our allies say “Not now. It is the economy, stupid.” And of course our enemies say “Not ever.” It is my belief that only Sarah Palin can bring the right around. She commands respect and the last thing she said on the subject was roughly: “We have better things to do.”
I have contacted her (through several avenues including Jews For Sarah) and I think she will be prepared when the issue breaks on a week from this Sunday. Note: the vast majority of replies I get from postings at “Conservatives 4 Palin” are supportive. In fact no negative ones so far. I keep posting links there. Maybe I will find an objection yet.
I am so pumped up waiting for 2 Oct. BTW on the left I’m sure Peter Lewis is getting ready (a recent article in Forbes that was very understated re: numbers), George Soros and Mrs. Kerry have been at it for years. And Mrs. Huffington has been at it since at least 2001 (she and I traded e-mails for a while on the subject). That is a lot of money and pixels in the wings waiting for the fires to start raging.
I’m sorry to tell you I am a member in bad standing of the stupid Party. I’m rather proud of the bad standing though.
====
And Veeshir,
If I think you made a mistake is it a personal attack to point it out?
And I cop to being an asshole.
And yes reduced 12 fold or 15 fold is impossible in the circumstances.
So I take it from your point of view there was no reduction. Or what? There is no way to figure out what he meant?
====
Funny thing I have noticed and mentioned above. The subject of the WODs scares my allies on the right to death. Why? Isn’t it obvious?
If it is a big component of the next election the Republican Party as it is currently constituted stands a good chance of losing. I agree.
My attitude is not about winning or losing. Given the choice between socialism now or socialism later what is the point?
Though the heavens fall, let justice be done.
====
The fear on the Right that the WODs will come up in the next election is so palpable that you can taste it. (how is that for mixing metaphors?)
Even my enemies on the right when it comes to the the subject of the WODs believe that if it comes up in the next election cycle they stand a good chance of losing.
I do understand that fear. So I ask them? Why not retreat and take the issue off the table? Silence.
[…] added a comment to Eric’s post Another day, another boring post on an irritating peripheral issue. I think it deserves a wider audience So here it is amended with some links […]
[…] to be a bore again, but such tyrannical thinking does follow quite logically from the basic premise of the war on […]
[…] violating the rights of citizens in any way it wants. They think they can do anything. And sorry to be a bore again, but if they can do the war on drugs, if they can criminalize every last thing they want, if they […]