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"Penalties against possession of a
drug should not be more damaging to an individual
than the use of the drug itself; and
where they are, they should be changed.
Nowhere is this more clear to me than in
the laws against possession of marihuana
in private for personal use. . . .
Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law
to eliminate all Federal
criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of
marihuana."
-President Jimmy
Carter
Speech delivered to Congress 1977
Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?
-- Milton Friedman Nobel Prize winner for economics (Newsweek, May 1, 1972)
The New Dark Age
We live in the largest Police State Mankind has seen
since Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, and this destructive ignorance is being
spread around the globe.IT IS TIME FOR
CHANGE. Wake up and stand up.It is in the inherent nature of human beings to yearn for
freedom, equality and dignity.Brute force, no matter how strongly applied, can never subdue the
basic desire for freedom and dignity.
-- The Dalai Lama
 
Liberty Wept
The Drug War cannot stand the light of day
It will collapse as quickly as the Vietnam War
as soon as people find out what's really going on.
-- Joseph McNamara, former Police Chief, Kansas City and
San Jose
www.jenssoering.com
With 6% of the world's population, the U.S.
holds 25% of the imprisoned
www.november.org
China, with 1 and 1/2 million
behind bars
dosen't register on this graph
with a
population of one billion!
Once upon a time there was a
farm right across the Potomac, and they raised marijuana plants there, and they
tore them down to build a little building called The Pentagon.
-- Dr
James Munsch, medical consultant to the Bureau of Narcotics from
1930-62
www.prohibitioncosts.org
All laws which can be violated without doing
anyone any injury are laughed at.-- Spinoza, c. 1660
Corruptisima republica plurimae leges.
[The more corrupt a republic, the
more laws.] -- Tacitus
Drug War Tactics Endanger Innocent
Americans
Since the early
1980s, the U.S. has seen a 1,300 percent rise in the number
of SWAT team
deployments, from 3,000 per year in 1981, to more than
40,000 per year in
2001 (the number is likely even higher today).
It's of no
coincidence that this dramatic increase has taken place
over the period the
U.S. has reinvigorated its war on drugs.
full story.. www.cannabisnews.com/news/22/thread22013.shtml
Botched Paramilitary Police Raids
www.cato.org/raidmap/
No-one should be
liable to imprisonment
for simple
possession.
-- Canadian
LeDain Commission Report, 1970
You're asking the government to control
individual morality.
This is a government that can't buy a
toilet seat for under $600.
-- Peter
McWilliams
Jailing Pregnant Women - The Latest
Outrage
"It is difficult to get a man to understand
something
when his salary
depends on his not understanding it."
--Upton
Sinclair
Brazil Says No Jail For Users
Why are third world countries more intelligent and
compassionate?
All the above may not seem strange, after all, evil often
triumphs, but the
following graph presents a bizarre correlation
President Bush said in his television address not long ago: 'Our
outrage against drugs unites us as a nation!' A nation
of what? Snoops and informers? Take a look at the knee-jerk, hard-core shits who react so predictably to the mere mention of
drugs with fear, hate and loathing. Haven't we seen these same people before
in various contexts?
Storm troopers, lynch mobs, queer-bashers, Paki-bashers, racists
-
are these the people who are going to revitalize a 'Drug-free
America'??
- William Burroughs, "The Drug User"
And the cost of all of this 'progress'? Future generations
will bear.
www.brillig.com
Legalizing
drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of
law enforcement. Can you
conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote
law and order?
-- Milton Friedman Nobel Prize winner for economics
(Newsweek, May 1, 1972)
"Figures Lie and Liars Figure"
So the latest word is that "our government" uses a rather selective
accounting method, and has for years.
The budget deficit this year is actually $790 Billion. The national debt
is actually $49 Trillion.
The Clinton Budget surplus was a fiction. It won't be long before every
penny simply services the debt.
  
www.briancbennett.com
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
-- Seneca, AD 65
We owe Japan $700 billion dollars.
We owe Korea and China as well as Britain, Germany and dozens of other countrys.Police states aren't cheap. Have we ruined our country and its future?. Americans don't realize their taxes don't pay for services, they just
service this enormous debt burden. And our wonderful Congress ( the opposite of progress ) has just raised
the debt ceiling to $9 Trillion.
We can afford to continue the War Crimes in Iraq and make the rich richer
as social programs are cut. Sick!
There's a
war going on. It destroys lives and families, spawns violence, suspends civil
liberties, tramples
on the infirm, locks up millions of peaceful citizens, costs
billions, and subjugates reason
with fear. This blog looks at the front lines of the drug war,
with
news, analysis, and the occasional
rant.
Drug WarRant
by Pete Guither
www.drugwarrant.com
I suggest a simple experiment. Everytime you hear the
expression
"the war on drugs," change it mentally to "the war on some drugs."
At the same time call up to mind all the Drug Stores and
Bars/Saloons in
your town or neighborhood and all the cigarette shelves in your friendly
supermaket and remember that the
government
has started no war against them.
When you understand that we have no "war on drugs" but
only a
war
on some drugs," consult the passages on double-think and duck-speak in Orwell's "1984"
for further enlightenment on neurolinguistic mindwarping.
-- Robert Anton Wilson
The State of The Union
www.norml.org/index.cfm?
In 1995, African-Americans made up 13 percent of the [US]
population and 15 percent of all drug users, yet they comprised 33 percent of people arrested,
53 percent of those convicted and
74 percent of those sentenced to
prison for drug possession.
-- Marc Mauer, 'Race to Incarcerate,' "In These Times,"
November 1999
Number of People Behind Bars in America Increasing By More Than a
Thousand a Week http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/437/overathousand.shtml
Despite half a decade of sentencing
reform efforts, America's jail and prison population is increasing at a rate of
more than a thousand per week, according to the latest annual report by the
Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. The total number of people
behind bars in the US at the end of last June was 2,186,230, up more than 56,000
over the previous year. Once again, the US retains its title as the world's most
prison-crazy nation, holding onto first place in both prisoners per capita and
total number of people imprisoned.
www.famm.org
Over the past two
decades in Australia we have devoted increased resources to
drug law enforcement, we have increased the penalties for drug
trafficking, and we have accepted
increasing inroads on our civil liberties as part of the battle to curb the drug
trade. All the evidence shows, however, not only that our law enforcement
agencies have not succeeded in preventing the supply of illicit drugs to
Australian markets, but that it is unrealistic to expect them
to do so.
If the present policy of
prohibition is not working, then it is time to give serious
consideration to the alternatives, however
radical they may seem.
--
Australian Parliament's Joint Committee on the National Crime Authority,
1988
In recorded
history there have been no known deaths or harm
attributed
to marijuana use, except maybe coughs.
Yet our
beautiful country, with 5% of the World's
population,
houses 25%
of the prison and jail inmates.
The
Greatest Generations' Longest War, born of racism and fed
by
ignorance and lies must end.
President Raygun warned of MJ
health damages, saying,
"We
don't know what they are yet, but we know that they are
permanent."
First, thanks to Hearst's Yellow
Journalism, we were told that smoking MJ
made you a murderer. Then it was squacked
that it drove you mad.
Then the buzz wuz amotivational syndrome.
Then it grew
tits on males and made one impotent.
Brain damage, mental illness,
lung cancer, where will the lies end. We
can all agree though,
that prohibition breeds deception,
corruption, violence and death.
You can not
tell me that you're a civilized country if you are
incarcerating individuals for smoking marijuana... that's barbaric.
-- Vancouver City Mayor Larry Campbell
Mexico can't even deal
with it's own problemas..
Without US Interference From The Los Angeles Times...
The long arm of the drug war-Washington quashes another mild reform in a
neighboring country.
By Brian Doherty, BRIAN DOHERTY is a senior editor at
Reason magazine and the author of "This is Burning Man." May 12, 2006
THE RISE AND FALL of Mexican drug-law reform
over the last two weeks has been, for drug legalizers, a dizzying high followed
by a painfully abrupt crash. U.S. drug authorities laid down their usual bummer:
No user is going to get off easy on their watch. And thanks to the United
States' overwhelming power and influence, their watch extends
everywhere.
Mexico isn't the first nation to suffer side effects from
America's estimated $30-billion-a-year drug war. A 2003 attempt by former
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to liberalize drug possession laws met
with threats from U.S. drug czar John Walters that the tougher resulting border
security could hold up U.S.-Canadian trade, and the idea soon went up in smoke.
Colombia has been for years the site of what is essentially a damaging and
expensive proxy war in the service of the United States' delusion that it can
wipe out cocaine production.
Still,
both cops and heads must have been hallucinating if they thought Mexico's mild
reform proposals would have ushered in some kind of lotus-eaters' utopia, a
permanent Altered State down Mexico way.
The legislation, which passed
Mexico's House and Senate with President Vicente Fox's initial support, would
have legalized the possession of minute quantities of substances such as pot,
cocaine and heroin (5 grams of pot, 0.5 grams of cocaine — only a few lines —
and 25 milligrams of heroin), in an attempt to focus drug-enforcement resources
on larger-scale dealers. But sales, and possession beyond the tiniest weekend's
worth, would have remained illegal. State and local cops would have been dragged
into a Mexican drug war that had heretofore been federal, increasing the total
resources spent on drug enforcement — and introducing more cops to the lure of
drug-money corruption.
Even before this policy, you could beat a possession
rap by convincing a Mexican judge that you're an addict. The quantities allowed
under that definition have been undefined; the new law would have defined them,
in an effort to eliminate judicial corruption.
As the bill came perilously
close to receiving Fox's signature, White House drug officials raised the fear
that Mexican border towns would become out-of-control party towns for
thrill-seeking U.S. youth. (What else is new?) Border city cops spouted nonsense
about how the new policy would lead to unmanageably rowdy public chaos, as if
potheads and junkies are an energetic bunch, or as if any substance creates more
troublesome public inebriation than already available alcohol. Because sales
still would have been illegal under the new law, warnings by U.S. officials —
from the mayor of San Diego to the spokesman for the Office of National Drug
Control Policy — that the proposal would have led to a drugged-out free-for-all
just don't fly.
Trade in other commodities, even damaging ones such as
cancer-causing cigarettes or obesity-triggering sugary soft drinks, doesn't
generate the rampant violence and corruption of the illegal drug business. The
ugly side of drug trafficking isn't inherent in the drugs. It arises because
illegal businesses by definition demand artificially high profits, lack peaceful
institutions for settling disputes (if you can't take your opponent to court
when you feel ripped off, you might feel more compelled to shoot) and attract
risk-seeking, violence-prone types to begin with.
When drugs are outlawed,
only outlaws deal drugs. If it weren't illegal, the sale of narcotics would be
no more prone to violence and corruption than the sale of cola or cigarettes.
Reform far more radical than what Mexico contemplated would drastically
reduce, not exacerbate, the serious problems associated with drug-law
enforcement.
WE ARE fortunate enough not to have rebel armies funded by
profits from the illegal coca market within our borders. And we can afford not
to care about the thousands of murders a year and dangerously rampant police
corruption in Mexico caused by the drug laws we refuse to let it
change.
Americans angry about Mexican immigration complain that the country
is exporting its troubles to us. In fact, with our drug-war bullying, we're
exporting our enforcement troubles back to Mexico, adding to the problems that
make so many people want to come here to begin with.
The White House's
disproportionate panic can't be explained by any actual damage the law could
have caused. Maybe U.S. drug warriors realized that if we saw firsthand, right
across the border, just how unnecessary are the laws against drug possession,
the futility of making 1.7 million drug arrests each year would be exposed, and
that's never a happy thought for any bureaucrat. In Amsterdam, where pot, hash
and mushrooms can be sold freely in certain shops, surveyed use of most drugs is
lower than in the United States, illustrating that legalization does not equal
everyone getting high. The social order still stands.
Experienced drug users
have an ethic: You don't force other people on your trip against their will.
Pity that U.S. drug policymakers can't be that sensible.
When they took the 4th
Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the 5th
Amendment, I was quiet because I wasn't a criminal.
When they took the 2nd
Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
Now they've taken the 1st
Amendment, and I can say nothing about it.
-- Lyle Myhr
 
www.hightimes.com
The government line is that the use of marijuana leads to more
dangerous drugs.
The fact is that the lack of marijuana leads to more dangerous
drugs.
-- David Smith, a doctor running the Haight Ashbury Free
Clinic in San Francisco
Since 1972, started with a $5,000 grant from The
Playboy Foundation, NORML, The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws, has led the fight for your right to choose the intoxicant, or rather, the
enhancement of your choice.
Keith Stroup is My
President.
One may
well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?
The answer
lies in the fact that there are two types of laws:
just and
unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.
One has not
only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.
Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to
disobey unjust laws.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
www.norml.com
It would be a good time to
replace the drug war with something more constructive.
The cure offered the drug
war today has probably been more harmful and done
more damage than the
disease.
-- George McGovern
I'd rather that England should be free than that
England should be compulsorily sober.
With freedom we might in the end attain sobriety,
but in the other alternative
we should eventually
lose both freedom and sobriety.
-- W.C. Magee, Archbishop of York, 1868
The above quote came from a 20 year period when
the upper class (which drank whisky)
outlawed gin for the lower class. Another
failure
The United States
of Incarceration Video
For myself, the only decent man in the White House was
Jimmy Carter.
He alone has spoken sense and actually tried to ease the
damage. Nixon was thought
to escalate the war on Freedom of Choice to draw attention
from Watergate.
Bush 1 kicked it into high gear.
Clinton said he smoked and then oversaw the unprecedented
arrest of
3 million Americans for the wearing of the green
(possession of MJ).
Now the Bush 2 Reich sees three quarters of a million
arrests
for
reefer each year, 90% for
simple possession.
Hard drug arrests are down 35% in the last decade, while MJ
arrests are up 113%,
many more arrests annually than for all violent crimes.
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