Issue A) The War on Drugs.

[Rusty Edge]

I haven't been a big fan of "Presidential Wars" over the years- LBJ's War on Poverty, Nixon's War on Crime, Reagan's War on Drugs, G.W. Bush's "War on Terrer". I think there was another one or two, but I forget. They usually seem to be calls for massive spending, more government or presidential authority, and the squelching of criticism, because "We're at war". Worse than that, they seem to be open ended entities with no clear victory or defeat.

Not that I think drugs are a good idea. My thinking on marijuana over the years has evolved from "relatively harmless, relative to alcohol and possibly tobacco" to "Foolish, because it makes people stupid and forgetful and generally unproductive" to "Worrisome, because heavy users seem to have long term short term memory incapacity, and possibly birth defects" as growers selected a more potent product, to "Why isn't this available at the pharmacy for cancer and AIDS patients?!" to thinking Gary Johnson was right all along.

What does Gary Johnson think? That government exists to protect us from others, rather than to protect us from ourselves. That victimless criminals shouldn't be incarcerated. That the War on Drugs is a social disaster. It's just a repeat of Prohibition ( which gave us the notorious Al Capone, a drug store bombing, and the St. Valntine's Day massacre). That drugs are a wellness problem, rather than a warfare problem, and need to be treated as such.

Let me restate that, since it's a radical concept from the one we've lived under most of our lives.

Drugs are a wellness problem, not a warfare problem.

At first I had reservations, but as I've begun to see it from that perspective, it makes more sense. We've spent maybe a $Trillion and a half on this beginning with Nixon, and where has it gotten us? We are right back in the middle of a narcotics epidemic. Aside from some of the Super-Maximum Security facilities and solitary confinement wings, I don't believe we have achieved much in the way of drug free prisons and jails, much less a drug free America.

What we have achieved is an adversarial relationship between police and minorities, the world's highest prison population ( no pun intended), a monstrous murder rate, and untold amounts of identity theft, prostitution and other crimes to pay for the habits.

26 states and the District of Columbia have medical marijuana laws now. Colorado, Washington, etc. have recreational use laws. California will have it as a referendum this fall. It's time the Federal government dropped their laws on marijuana and allow the states to regulate as they see fit.

Meanwhile in Zurich-

http://www.globalpost.com/article/6730859/2016/02/09/zurich-heroin-treatment


Anyway, it seems to me that regulation works better than prohibition. Then we'd be taxing or fining non-violent people instead of paying to maintain them in prison.

[Rusty Edge]

I asked my sister, who lives in the Seattle area about how the marijuana approach was working out for them.  1) The local drug dealer got undercut and fled her neighborhood. 2) second hand smoke is annoying, 3) the tax $ haven't lived up to the promises, but there is still a lot of it. Colorado probably had a better approach. 4) The city did not go to hell, no other complaints or noticeable effects.

[Buster's Uncle]

1) Sounds wonderful enough to make up for 2), maybe.

[Rusty Edge]

Yes, annoying as it may be, it's merely a second hand smoke problem, and we have rules for that.

Meanwhile, local police are starting to say things about a drug war not working against opiates, and are stating to carry narcan and are experimenting with amnesty- that is if you turn yourself and your stash in, you go to a treatment program rather than jail.

[DrazharLn]

It's incredible to me that the war on drugs has lasted so long given the complete lack of success and the clear evidence that decriminalisation works so much better.

The war on drugs has might even have caused about as much misery as a real war by now.

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't hold with any intoxicants at all, personally, and don't approve of it for others - and I still agree that drug policy has been pretty cloud-coocooland for a long time, as regards the maryhootchie at the very least.  I spent a lot of time around drinking in college, and a lot around people smoking the dope in renfairs, and it's pretty plain which results in more dangerous and antisocial behavior and which merely made some people useless - and the wrong one was legal, if either was to be...

[Lord Avalon]

The war on drugs has been great for the prison industrial complex.

Probably hasn't been legalized at the federal level because Congress critters don't want to appear to be soft on crime.

[Rusty Edge]

Maybe that's about to change. California will have a referendum on recreational use this election.
The Presidential nominees are more liberal with regard to marijuana than ever-

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"[Sleezebag], Clinton, Stein, and Johnson on Drugs

All four presidential candidates say states should be free to legalize marijuana, but they differ on whether that's a good idea.

Jacob Sullum | July 11, 2016

The last time the Democratic Party's platform mentioned marijuana was in 1984, when it cited "25 million regular abusers of marijuana" and "15,000 tons of marijuana" entering the United States each year as "clear evidence that we are losing the effort overseas to control the production and transshipment of…dangerous drugs." The draft for this year's platform mentions marijuana half a dozen times, and the context is notably different:


We believe that the states should be laboratories of democracy on the issue of marijuana, and those states that want to decriminalize marijuana should be able to do so. We support policies that will allow more research on marijuana, as well as reforming our laws to allow legal marijuana businesses to exist without uncertainty. And we recognize our current marijuana laws have had an unacceptable disparate impact, with arrest rates for marijuana possession among African Americans far outstripping arrest rates among whites, despite similar usage rates.

Assuming something like that language is included in the final version of the platform, the Democrats, after three decades of silence on the subject, have gone from advocating an escalation of the war on weed to facilitating more tolerant approaches, including outright legalization. What's more, every presidential candidate you are likely to see on your ballot this November agrees that states should be free to legalize marijuana—a remarkable development attributable not only to the landmark 2012 initiatives in Colorado and Washington but to a concomitant shift in public opinion nationwide.

Once you get beyond the question of how the federal government should respond to states that legalize marijuana, there are some notable differences on drug policy among the four parties with wide ballot access. Here is a summary of where they stand, arranged from least to most tolerant.

Republican Party

Unlike New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former rival for the GOP nomination who is now a supporter and potential running mate, Donald [Sleezebag] has never promised to stop marijuana legalization in its tracks. To the contrary, he says "that should be a state issue," although he also says legalization is bad idea (albeit one he used to support, not only for marijuana but for other drugs as well).

Marijuana federalism aside, [Sleezebag] sounds like an unreconstructed drug warrior. "I'm going to create borders," he promises. "No drugs are coming in. We're gonna build a wall. You know what I'm talking about. You have confidence in me. Believe me, I will solve the problem."

That's how most Republicans and many Democrats have been talking about drugs for as long as I can remember: If only we put our minds to it and spend enough money, we can stop the flow of drugs that threatens to turn us into a nation of dope fiends. A century of failure with this approach should have demonstrated its folly even to those unfamiliar with the economics of black markets.

On the question of how to treat Americans who manage to obtain arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants despite the best efforts of border-blocking drug warriors, [Sleezebag] sounds at least as sympathetic as Richard Nixon. "The people that are in trouble, the people that are addicted, we're going to work with them and try to make them better," he says, "and we will make them better."

Democratic Party

Hillary Clinton is down with "laboratories of democracy," as long as the experiments involve cannabis. "I want to wait and see what the evidence is," she says. Unlike Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who ran against her in the Democratic primaries, Clinton is not ready to repeal federal prohibition, although she thinks marijuana should be moved from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act to Schedule II, which she says will facilitate medical research.

Clinton's promises regarding addiction treatment are at least as grandiose as [Sleezebag]'s plan to stop drugs at the border. "There are 23 million Americans suffering from addiction," she says. "But no one is untouched. We all have family and friends who are affected. We can't afford to stay on the sidelines any longer—because when families are strong, America is strong. Through improved treatment, prevention, and training, we can end this quiet epidemic once and for all."

Despite her compassionate pose and her support for sentencing reform, Clinton is not forswearing the use of force and violence to discourage drug use. When Clinton says "our state and federal prisons…are no substitute for proper treatment," when she talks about "ensur[ing] every person suffering from addiction can obtain comprehensive treatment" and "prioritiz[ing] treatment over prison for low-level and nonviolent drug offenders," what she has in mind is, at best, giving consumers of politically incorrect intoxicants a choice between a treatment slot and a jail cell.

Although Clinton's addict estimate includes alcoholics, that is not a choice even the heaviest drinker has to confront unless he commits a crime. Drinking itself, unlike the use of illegal drugs, does not qualify. A corollary is that even casual drug users with no addiction to treat may still have to choose between treatment and jail if they happen to get caught.

Clinton does not bother to defend this blatantly unequal approach, because it is indefensible. It is therefore hard to take seriously her pose as an enlightened public servant who only wants to help "sick people that deserve to get well." This medicalization of drug policy may take some of the rough edges off the war on drugs (or not), but only at the cost of denying the moral agency of drug users, which justifies the government's shabby and often brutal treatment of them.

Green Party

Jill Stein, the Green Party's presidential nominee, thinks we should "treat substance abuse as a health problem, not a criminal offense." Yet she also says "we wouldn't remove all laws against all drug use." Still, Stein goes further than Clinton, saying we should "end the failed war on drugs," "replace drug prohibition with harm reduction," and "legalize marijuana/hemp."

The Green Party, which nominated its first presidential candidate (Ralph Nader) in 1996, has opposed criminal penalties for marijuana use since 2000. "It's time to get rid of the black market and bring marijuana sales under a legal regulatory framework," Stein said when she ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2010. "In this way, we can staunch the flow of money to illegal drug networks, generate new funds for our communities, improve public safety, and create new jobs in growing hemp for food and fiber."

Libertarian Party

The Libertarians' position on drug policy is clear: They are against it. The party's platform says, "We favor the repeal of all laws creating 'crimes' without victims, such as the use of drugs for medicinal or recreational purposes." Opposing the criminalization of consensual adult activities covers a lot of ground, and as it relates to psychoactive substances the principle cannot logically be limited to marijuana. Yet Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who was the Libertarian nominee in 2012 and tops the ticket again this year, is trying to do just that.

"We are not espousing the legalization of any drugs outside of marijuana," Johnson, the former CEO of a cannabis company, said during a CNN town hall last month. Pressed about whether he and his running mate, former Massachusetts governor William Weld, want to legalize drugs such as heroin, he said they would "keep the drugs illegal" while trying to reduce the harm caused by prohibition, which sounds similar to Jill Stein's position.

Johnson's campaign website likewise says "Johnson and Weld do not support the legalization of other recreational drugs that are currently illegal." But it also says, referring to the Founders, "Imagine their shock to learn that the government has decided it is appropriate to tell adults what they can put in their bodies." That, of course, is exactly what the government is doing when it "keep the drugs illegal."

This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

[Bearu]

I cannot tolerate the promotion of drugs for recreational, or even certain medicinal purposes, because the side effects remain worse than the disease in specific instances. I do not support the criminalization of the drugs because the process supports the explosion of the prison population. The number of people under the supervision of the American Justice department equals, as of 2013, approximately 7.3 million.