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August 02, 2004

Priorities

The "War on Drugs" has killed more Americans than the Vietnam War - and thus, fifty-odd times as many Americans as the Iraq war.

And unlike Vietnam and Iraq, none of those Americans died to make anyone free. In fact, the WOD has decreased our liberties as Americans; most of the repressive rules that the Democrats want to pin on Ashcroft were started under Clinton, for use against drug dealers and importers.

I've long stepped away from my fellow conservatives by advocating ending the WOD. Although I've never smoked so much as a joint in my life (it took me four months to finish a bottle of Bushmills, for crying out loud), if I were the absolute ruler of this nation, the War on Drugs s we know it would end tomorrow.

According to Matt Taibbi of the New York Press (think City Pages), the only thing worse than the Bush Administration would be a Kerry administraiton.

Taibbi starts:

A short, bald man with maniacal eyes extended his hand, breathing loudly through his mouth.

"Isn't this great?" he said.

"I guess," I said.

"Bob Weiner," he said.

I shook his hand. "Matt Taibbi," I replied.

He smiled proudly. "I'm with the Office of National Drug Control Policy," he said. "Well, I used to be, anyway. Used to be the Communications Director. I worked with Barry McCaffrey!"

"Oh," I said, recoiling a little. "No shit."

"Yeah, no shit!" he said. "What do you do, Matt?"

"I'm working for Rolling Stone."

"Oh," he said. "Good magazine. We did some things with you folks a couple of years ago."

In the state I was in, it suddenly seemed entirely possible that the ostensibly countercultural Rolling Stone was in some kind of cooperative, collusive arrangement with the White House Drug Czar. It later turned out that Weiner was referring to some RS pro-legalization article that he had provided dissenting quotes for. But at the time I didn't know this, and the Orwellian realization that I myself might be indirectly working with the drug- enforcement apparatus just bounced harmlessly off my flatlined psyche.

"Gosh," I said, "that's nice. The thing is, Bob, I'm not feeling too well right now..."

"Yeah, it's a good magazine, despite it all," he said, ignoring me. Then he waved his hand in the direction of the podium. "But you know what's great about this?"

"No," I said honestly. "What?"

"We're going to have a president with sense again," he said. "This current guy is a disaster. Right now, all domestic law enforcement goes through Ashcroft and Ridge. It's all about terrorism now. I mean, the War on Drugs isn't even a priority!"

"Wow," I said, "that's just self-defeating."

"Thank God for Kerry," he said. "It's going to be like the old days again."

Someday soon I'm going to go through the civil liberties implications of the Dem platform and the Kerry website.

Posted by Mitch at August 2, 2004 04:15 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Hear! Hear!

I, too, am a non-user of controlled substances who thinks the time, money, and jail-space wasted on the WOD is absurd.

I think that there are some bad things that can be expected from widespread drug use, and as proof, I'd point to the present tense. There's ALREADY widespread drug use. So what? There are a lot of other things that cause "some bad" to happen.

Declaring defeat in the WOD would have several benefits; some huge portion of the prison population (made up of drug users & trafickers) could be freed for better use of their time and our resources. Treating drugs like we treat alcohol and tobacco has a lot to commend it, and whatever the result, it could hardly be worse than the present results.

I say this not as a libertarian (although I'm somewhat libertarian in my leanings), but instead as a student of economics. If you try to do something and it doesn't work, at all, simply trying harder to do the same thing is perhaps not the most sane response one could have.

Posted by: Patton at August 1, 2004 11:42 PM

Gee... it is nice to know that the immoral and disasterous WOD has had bi-partisan support for so long.....

Although it does seem that the WOD is coming under more scrutiny from both the left and the right these days. One can only hope that sometime in the near future this insane policy will end.

Posted by: RandMan at August 2, 2004 05:06 PM
hi