Nick Gillespie highlighted one of the better moments in last night’s debate. Rand Paul did something few Republicans would dare do: he criticized the war on drugs.
Paul couched his argument in 10th Amendment terms, saying that states should be allowed to experiment with different approaches to medical and recreational pot legalization, a radical idea among the Republicans on stage and drug warriors such as Hillary Clinton:
The bottom line is the states. We say we like the 10th Amendment, until we start talking about this. And I think the federal government has gone too far, I think that the war on drugs has had a racial outcome, and really has been something that has really damaged our inner cities.
Not only do the drugs damage them, we damage them again by incarcerating them and then preventing them from getting employment over time.
So I don’t think that the federal government should override the states. I believe in the 10th Amendment and I really will say that the states are left to themselves.
Paul was alone among last night’s participants in touching on the racial disparities visited like a plague upon the country by the drug war. It’s of a piece with his ongoing efforts to reach out to new constituencies for the GOP, especially lower-income minorities who bear the brunt of drug laws that are not only odious by themselves but are used much more intensely against blacks and Hispanics. Indeed, one of the most electrifying moments in the debate for me came when Paul told Jeb Bush, the son and brother of presidents and an argent drug warrior, to check his privilege:
Under the current circumstances, kids who had privilege like you [Jeb Bush, who has admitted to smoking pot in high school] do, don’t go to jail, but the poor kids in our inner cities go to jail. I don’t think that’s fair. And I think we need to acknowledge it, and it is hypocritical to still want to put poor people in jail.
Despite the drug war losing ground at the state level—a couple of dozen states allow medical marijuana and three allow for recreational pot with more sure to follow—it’s a brave stance to embrace the idea that people might be free to choose their intoxicants.
Excellent. I am reminded of a picture that’s floating around on Facebook.
Unfortunately, too many conservatives think the war on drugs is Reagan’s baby, so they are loathe to criticize it, lest they be seen as “liberal,” or “soft on drugs,” or “pro-hippie.”
A government that uses massive military force against its citizens for putting unapproved substances into their bodies is Orwellian, not conservative.
NOTE: The above image is not my design, but I should note that it has a minor error. Anslinger was head not of the DEA, but of its predecessor agency, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, from 1930-1962.
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22 responses to “A ray of hope?”
You have to admit he got that right, I’m a pot-smoking jazz musician.
Without the smoke we’d all be listening to crapola like “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?”
Hit and pass it, Jack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGCz1E2nlYg
Most of the time the 15 stooges were seeing how far they could stick their heads up reagan’s rear end. Each one saying I worship reagan more then you do! How pathetic. Fortunetly 100,000 minority kids turn 18 voting age every month and almost all hating republicans and 20,000 reagan worshipers die off each month. Now that is some real heavy dope!
I wonder how much Warren Drugz was Ronnie’s operation, and how much was just a ploy to keep Nancy happy.
This is your brain, this is your brain on anti-drug propaganda. DARE and so on.
Was Anslinger a loony or a paid shill for the liquor industry? Not that those are exclusive categories.
CNN turned on Paul’s mic a couple of times for a minute of sanity – then it was back to the 3 hour clown show.
Paul is in the same boat as Adlai Stevenson back in the ’50s:
Odds are that one of the four governors at the big table Wednesday night is going to be the next POTUS, Fiorina or Rubio VP, and Cruz the next Supreme Court justice.
man molehill the war on drugs started by the traitor nixon in his southern strategy and continued by the traitor reagan was to get drug convictions against minorities so they can’t vote against republicans. same now on voter suppression under the guise of stoping illegal aliens voting (they don’t even when republicans try to bribe them to vote so they can arrest them) the only ones they find voting illegally were ann coulter and convicted republican felons who they don’t prosecute as the republican party needs every vote it can get!
Cap’n, Reagan had a partner in crazy Uncle Joe, along with a another Democrat by the name of Strom Thurmond:
In 1984, he [Biden] worked with Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond and the Reagan administration to craft and pass the Comprehensive Control Act, which enhanced and expanded civil asset forfeiture, and entitled local police departments to a share of captured assets. Critics say this incentivizes abuse, citing countless cases of unfair and unaccountable seizures….
In 1986, Biden co-sponsored the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which created new mandatory minimum sentences for drugs, including the infamous crack-vesus-cocaine sentencing disparity….
Biden would also play an important role in crafting the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which strengthened mandatory minimums for drug possession, enhanced penalties for people who transport drugs, and established the Office of National Drug Control Policy, whose director was christened “drug czar” by Biden.
[Biden’s broadest contribution to crime policy was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, commonly called the 1994 Crime Bill. Written by Biden and signed by President Clinton, it increased funds for police and prisons, fueling a huge expansion of the federal prison population….[I]t also contributed to the rapid growth of militarized police forces that used new federal funds to purchase hundreds of thousands of pieces of military equipment….”
Clinton and the Democrats, more than Reagan and the GOP, are responsible for locking up more black teenagers on victimless drug charges, although both parties have a shitty record on civil liberties. What a waste of human life.
strom was republiscum by this time. biden has a problem with black voters over this and finds it hard to run for president because as those democrats have left the party. and bubba and hillary can’t beat bernie sanders. but! republicans have done far more in states to put black people in jail rand paul is a outcast in republican party.
Don’t kid yourself… they don’t like the War on (Some) Drugs because of Reagan. The Conservatives love it because it lets them have control.
Taking assets is just the icing on the cake.
They love the control just as much as the Liberals do – they just focus in other places.
The WOD really began in the USA back in 1914 with the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act. The bill was introduced in Congress by Francis Harrison (D-NY) and signed into law by President Wilson, also a Democrat.
On its surface, the Harrison Act doesn’t read like a prohibition law. The law allowed doctors to use narcotics for disease treatment. However, to law enforcement, addiction wasn’t viewed as a disease. So when doctors issued narcotic prescriptions to addicts, it was deemed by the police to be outside the law. And 101 years later LEO’s still view addiction as a crime and not a disease.
So it’s not like drugs where legal before Nixon and Reagan came to power, as a certain commenter here would have us believe. It was the Nixon administration that coined the phrase “War on Drugs” but he didn’t invent drug prohibition. But Nixon did reinvigorate drug prohibition as an issue and politicians in both major parties have supported periodic escalations and vigorous enforcement of the drug laws ever since.
Fortunately, attitudes are changing, particularly with regards to cannabis. Hopefully the WOD will soon end and drug abuse problems experienced by individuals will be treated as a medical problem, which is what it’s been all along.
@Cap’n: You’re right. I mixed up Strom Thurmond—who switched to the GOP in 1966—with Democrat Bob Byrd. In my defense, all those Klansmen look alike to me.
Thank you for pointing out the error.
@capitalist road kill byrd atoned for his early days when he voted against the iraq war vote.
And now we have a light-skinned African American president with no Negro dialect, unless he wants to have one…I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy—that’s a storybook, man.
CapitalistRoader, you also probably know about Biden’s crony capitalist ties to the financial industry. He is the person most responsible for the current student loan debt fiasco.
Biden’s political fortunes rose in tandem with the financial industry’s. At 29, he won the first of seven elections to the U.S. Senate, rising to chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, which vets bankruptcy legislation. On that committee, Biden helped lenders make it more difficult for Americans to reduce debt through bankruptcy — a trend that experts say encouraged banks to loan more freely with less fear that courts could erase their customers’ repayment obligations. At the same time, with more debtors barred from bankruptcy protections, the average American’s debt load went up by two-thirds over the last 40 years. Today, there is more than $10,000 of personal debt for every person in the country, as compared to roughly $6,000 in the early 1970s.
That increase — and its attendant interest payments — have generated huge profits for a financial industry that delivered more than $1.9 million of campaign contributions to Biden over his career, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
http://www.ibtimes.com/joe-biden-backed-bills-make-it-harder-americans-reduce-their-student-debt-2094664
Biden is nothing more than a paid shill of the credit card industry. More from the lengthy article referenced above:
Despite opposition from Wellstone and other liberals, Biden became a prominent Democratic supporter of legislation in 2000 to further restrict bankruptcy protections. The initiative was backed by one of Biden’s top supporters: Delaware-based credit card titan MBNA. Not only had the company’s employees collectively become one of his largest campaign contributors, the firm had employed Biden’s son Hunter right out of law school and later paid Hunter Biden consulting fees while his father pushed the bankruptcy bill. MBNA’s top executive had purchased Biden’s Delaware home for a price that Biden’s political opponents depicted as a sweetheart deal to a powerful legislator.
But while the bill was primarily viewed as an initiative for credit card firms, it included a little-discussed provision to continue the crackdown on student debtors. Buried in the 400-page legislation was a section designed to make it more difficult for students to get bankruptcy protections not just for their government and nonprofit loans, but also for the educational loans they received from private financial firms.
I thought the reason to crack down on hemp is that it might be used to make rope for hanging politicians.
Frank, I wasn’t aware of Biden’s ties to the finance industry, although it doesn’t surprise me. Clinton’s efforts to reduce lending standards by modifying the Community Reinvestment Act was the major cause of the housing crisis and subsequent recession. But other crony capitalists were right there with him. One in fact recently scored a sweet gig on New York-based Signature Bank’s board.
CapitalistRoader, I missed the YouTube of Barney Frank when it came out. Hilarious! And so true.
Only problem is, Harry Anslinger doesn’t appear to have said that.
This link says that quote is disputed:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger
Beyond that, I’ve read Harry Anslinger’s testimony to congress during their hearings, and I could not find that quote in there anywhere.
They guy that claims Harry Anslinger said that was known as the “Emperor of Hemp”, and does not adequately cite his reference as to where he found that quote.
But kudos for your efforts to spread a useful (to your pet cause) piece of propaganda around the internet. We need more bullshit floating around for foolish people to believe.
There is a difference between “disputed” and “unsourced.” The link you supplied gives three sources for the quote:
“As quoted in Legalizing Marijuana : Drug Policy Reform and Prohibition Politics? (2004) by Rudolph Joseph Gerber, p. 9; also in Hawking Hits on the Information Highway : The Challenge of Online Drug Sales for Law Enforcement (2008) by Laura L. Finley , p. 28, and “The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record of Cannabis and the Conspiracy Against Marijuana” (1994) by Jack Herer, Jeanie Cabarga, and Jeanie Herer, p. 29.”
It is possible that the above sources might all be wrong. I have not checked them, and don’t have the time. Regardless of whether Anslinger uttered the above statement, there is plenty of material documenting the racist origins of the war on drugs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judge-frederic-block/war-on-drugs_b_2384624.html
We don’t even need to look at the racist origins. Although they are not difficult to find “Cocainized Negroes – New York Times”. Just look at the racially biased effects.
And it may not be racism per se. Just government’s usual war on poor people. Why the poor? Because they can’t afford to defend themselves.
A former DEA Agent discusses the war on the poor: http://youtu.be/HmgeCeGk–I – in the first 5 minutes of the video.
A Bush will not get attacked for drug use or small sales because it is too expensive to prosecute him. The War will go after easier targets. The easy targets will get their five or ten minutes with a public defender and their 3 minutes in court. And then NEXT.