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.
And the costs of The War are staggering, up to over $40
Billion each year.
There is no end in sight.
The advance of Medicinal Use has created a chink in Rome's armor. Rhode
Island legislators recently voted in Med MJ as the 11th state to do so. More to
follow.
Boston Lesislaters are hoping to save $23 Million a year by
decriminalizing, for the youth. Nevada is working on growing and selling, this
is their government doing this, mind you.
And startling changes are happening now that students are repeatedly
dying from Alcohol. Colorado has seen the success of Safer, part of the
Marijuana Policy Project.
Denver in 2005 became the first city to relegalize. Oh, no, say the city
fathers, Not that kind of democracy, we'll arrest for state and county laws.
Safer's success with a student referendum to equalize MJ to alcohol
penalities at the University of Colorado has led to similiar statements at ASU
as well
as schools in Texas and Florida.
And next is state legalization. 100,000 signatures will place the
initiative
on the ballot this November.
www.safercolorado.org
cannabis? or can of beer?
All penalties for drug users
should be dropped...
Making drug abuse a crime is
useless and even dangerous...
Every year we seize more and
more drugs and arrest more and more dealers
but at the same time the
quantity available in our countries still increases...
Police are losing the drug
battle worldwide.
-- Raymond Kendall, secretary general of INTERPOL,
1994
www.mpp.org
At DEA, our mission is to fight drug trafficking in order to make
drug abuse the most expensive,
unpleasant, risky, and disreputable form of recreation a person
could have. --
Donnie Marshall, Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)
www.ccjrc.org
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.
[Who will police the
police?]
-- Latin proverb
www.drugpolicy.org
www.legalizationofmarijuana.com
Liberty Wept
