war on drugs

It's time for Barack Obama to take legalization seriously

Terry Michael | March 27, 2009

Alcohol did not create Al Capone's gang violence in the hometown of our current president. Prohibition did.

Marijuana does not create murderous drug cartels in Mexico. America's War on Drugs does.

Surely President Barack Obama, one of the smartest men to inhabit the White House, must understand that truth—even if he chooses to laugh-off those of us who want to get serious about the need to end the social insanity of neo-Prohibition by legalizing marijuana and other psychoactive chemicals. Read more »

Huffington Post
Philip Slater
March 18, 2009 | 01:30 PM (EST)

We Americans seem to be incapable of learning from past mistakes. We learned nothing from the debacle of 1929. We learned nothing from Vietnam. And we learned nothing from Prohibition. The neo-conservative movement that Reagan initiated has managed to repeat all three. Read more »

The Guardian
Monday 16 March 2009 20.31 GMT

Dan Glaister

The Obama administration signalled today that it was ready to repudiate the prohibition and "war on drugs" approach of previous presidents, and steer policy towards prevention and "harm reduction" strategies favoured by Europe.

David Johnson, an assistant secretary of state, said the new administration would embrace policies supporting federally funded needle exchanges. The aim, he said, was to establish a policy based on public health needs. "This will result in a policy that is broader and stronger than the one we had in the past," Johnson said on the sidelines of a UN drug strategy conference in Vienna. Read more »

Counterpunch.org

Lost Liberty Blues
March 12 , 2009
By CHRIS FLOYD

1. Ex Nihilo

Lamar Alexander is certainly one of the biggest non-entities in the history of modern American politics. You would have to range far and wide to find a more negligible, pointless, unproductive figure on the national level than Alexander, the senior U.S. senator from Tennessee; indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to find such a one on the smallest school board or city council in the remotest corner of the country. Read more »

The Maine Public Broadcasting Network

March 10, 2009 Reported By: Susan Sharon

The idea of legalizing certain drugs is nothing new. It was suggested long before the official "War on Drugs" was proclaimed by President Richard Nixon in 1970. But nearly 40 years later, federal spending on this "War" has increased to $19 billion a year; the purity of heroin has nearly tripled while its wholesale cost has become dirt cheap. And imprisonment for federal drug offenses has increased by 28 times. Now calls for ending the War and legalizing drugs is coming from an unlikely and persuasive quarter: current and former law enforcement officers who belong to an organization called LEAP. Read more »

Maple Ridge News
Ottawa follows U.S.-style approach in war on drugs
By Phil Melnychuk - Maple Ridge News

Published: March 07, 2009 9:00 AM

Ottawa follows U.S.-style approach in war on drugs

By Phil Melnychuk

Staff Reporter

While bullets continue to fly and bodies fall, the federal government is trying again to make jail time mandatory for drug crimes.

""Gang violence is fueled by competition in the drug trade. We've all seen the results of gang violence over the last number of weeks including incidents that have occurred right here in our community," Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge MP Randy Kamp said in a release.

"We need to take action and impose stronger penalties so that there is a real deterrent to people who get involved with gangs, and with drugs." Read more »

truthdig.com

The Forgotten War on Drugs and Election ‘08
Posted on Jun 20, 2007

James Harris: This is Truthdig. James Harris here again with Josh Scheer and in-studio guest Dr. Troy Duster. We’ve been talking off-air about the relationship between the war on drugs and unemployment in poor and minority communities. Dr. Duster, for the record, why is it critical that we understand the war on drugs as it relates to social progress and perhaps social policy? Read more »

The Huffington Post

by Walter Cronkite

Posted March 1, 2006 | 08:42 PM (EST)

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: "And that's the way it is."

To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

Sadly, that is not an ethic to which all politicians aspire - least of all in a time of war.

I remember. I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost - and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along. Read more »

I have the honour of studying at Simon Fraser University under Neil Boyd. He has been an outspoken advocate on drug policy reform and stood against Bill C-26. Here he presents a well thought out, insightful piece on prohibition, gangs, and how we can begin navigating our way out of this mess.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090306.wcoessay0307... Read more »

alternet.org

Will Obama Pull the Plug on the War on Drugs?

By Silja JA Talvi, In These Times. Posted March 6, 2009.

This is the right political moment for Obama to enact major progressive reforms in all avenues of the drug war and our justice system.

President Obama faces a heap of crises: a major economic recession, crumbling national infrastructure, and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read more »