Wall Street Journal – drug war unwinnable, consider legalization

I’m still in WiFi wasteland, and I’m not that agile blogging from my iPhone, but I didn’t want to wait til tomorrow to pass on this great article in the WSJ: Saving Mexico by David Luhnow.

Just go and read it.

(anybody know how to copy a block of text from a web page on an iPhone?)

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20 Responses to Wall Street Journal – drug war unwinnable, consider legalization

  1. drewbob says:

    tap a portion of the text box until you get a cursor then spread the dots to cover the entire area you want.

  2. As I’ve said here many times, the WSJ is doing a better job reporting the drug war follies than any other national daily newspaper. In fact, 6 years ago I wrote (in my book) that the WSJ was the only newspaper in the country that could convince conservatives to champion repeal and really make a difference. Anyone waiting for the liberals to make a difference should pack a lunch…

  3. Nick says:

    Once again, Pete finds something that irritates me.
    Thanks Pete.

  4. DavesNotHere says:

    I saw this article and instinctively came here. Waa Laa! Here it is. Good find, you’re awesome Pete, thanks for sharing.

    Conservatives aren’t all bad, it’s true Daniel.

    William F. Buckley Jr. (educated on drug policy by Milton Friedman during Buckley’s run for NY Mayor, with Friedman influenced by Austrian conservative economics, Rand, Hayek, Von Mises, etc.) continues a long list of respected “conservative thinkers” against drug prohibition. Giving, granting, or assuming government has the inherent power to lock up human beings for possessing cannabis (ephedra, poppies, or any other plants in that regard) is the liberal position. It’s just that some liberals believe the government should decide cannabis isn’t bad with their inherent power to decide such things for individual human beings.

    Conservatives can certainly argue that government can only be given the power to control individual behavior through things such as Constitutional Amendments, as was necessary with alcohol. Conservatives should believe a human being has the inherent right to vape a bag of nugs. That is when some religious or “moral” right to outlaw drugs takes over and the “conservatives” start believing in liberal, religion induced mob rule, abandoning their conservative tendencies.

  5. Carol says:

    It isn’t the liberals either-at least not the modern ones. Carter almost decriminalized pot, many activists wanted legalization from the start. The problem isn’t liberal or conservative: it’s religious. The theocons who have taken over the Republican Party are against anything that allows people to legally “sin” whether its smoking pot, reading porn, or drink. It was prohibitionist Republicans along with evangelical Democrats that got us the first Prohibition. On the left there is for some the concern as to what legalization would do to the inner city and to the poor in general, and some middle class NIMBY (and protect the children issues) but I’m hardpressed to find an “under no circumstances” opposed to legalization group on the left.

  6. Duncan says:

    If god doesn’t approve of evil, why does he allow it to exist? I’m betting the pain of hell has been grossly exaggerated. I sure don’t want to end up in the other place with all the religious whackos for all eternity, I can tell you that. With my luck I’d end up rooming with Strom Thurmond.

  7. Just me. says:

    “We must raise the transaction cost, make it too expensive for them to use Mexico as an export platform relative to other countries,” he said. “But the demand itself—well, that’s not going to go away.”

    This action will drive more cartel grown cannabis to US parks and they will ,as they do now, be buying up homes to grow in. With the moves to grow here, wont crime follow? More deaths here in the US from US grown cartel cannabis? Maybe thats what the Mexican officails have in mind. More violence/deaths here to wake up the fficails/people here?

    Its just an obsevation on my part,but this is what I see after reading that paragraph.
    In the end, legalization , of cannabis anyway, is the only solution. As for hard drugs, cross that road when we get to it, we gotta figure out the solution for cannabis first.

  8. Pete says:

    Thanks, Drewbob, but I can’t select part of a web page on the iPhone – you can get the URL, but tapping in the content just zooms in and out.

    DdC pointed me to iCopy. I may check that out.

  9. Ed Dunkle says:

    That’s a nice little Christmas gift from the Wall Street Journal.

    Chomsky once wrote that the most accurate, least prone to propaganda news reporting tends to be in the financial press since the readers demand accuracy. (This is not to be confused with the WSJ op-ed section which ranges from loathsome to egregious.)

  10. claygooding says:

    In September of this year I went to the FBI crime reporting site. I accused the federal government and the ONDCP of genocide of the American people because they mandated the ONDCP to refuse any studies showing medical applications for any schedule 1 drug.

    #3 Lifetime Marijuana Use Associated With Reduced Cancer Risk
    The moderate long-term use of cannabis is associated with a reduced risk of head and neck cancer, according to the results of a population-based control study published in August by the journal Cancer Prevention Research. Authors reported, “After adjusting for potential confounders (including smoking and alcohol drinking), 10 to 20 years of marijuana use was associated with a significantly reduced risk of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

    I included the above study and 3 others as proof that marijuana has possible cancer blocking attributes and by keeping marijuana schedule 1 they were allowing people to contract cancers and die from a disease that they might never have suffered from if marijuana was legal and people could use it for blocking.
    As expected,there has been no response,because after all,the FBI is just more of the same crooked government.
    On the other hand,they haven’t arrested me yet for falsely reporting a crime,which they warn you right at the first stage of reporting crimes that they will do,,
    ,,,yet.
    I thought it would make a real interesting trial if they did.
    The above excerpt is from the list of the top 10 events influencing marijuana reform at the opposingviews.com site.

  11. claygooding says:

    About the issue of heaven or hell. I can’t make up my mind if I want to be in heaven with people I don’t know,or hell with all my friends.

  12. DavesNotHere says:

    “but I’m hardpressed to find an “under no circumstances” opposed to legalization group on the left.”

    Carol, you need look no further than the Obama administration for an “under no circumstances” “not in their vocabulary” liberal group opposed to legalization. Greedy government union liberals on the left love giving union dues money to drug warriors.

    Yes, Carol, Carter and Reagan BOTH gave lip service to marijuana decriminalization but neither had the will to stand up to the liberal government employee unions and the campaign cash that comes with them. Same with Clinton and now Obama.

    Follow the money Carol. Drug war money is not coming from churches, its coming from taxpayers and going right through the union drug warriors into liberal politicians pockets where they continue to ignore basic civil rights for the money. Modern liberals are indeed the biggest drivers of the drug war.

  13. Jon Doe says:

    It is unsurprising that liberals/progressives in power still fund the Drug War. Back in the 19th century, Prohibition (specifically alcohol and later narcotic prohibition) was one of the pillars of progressive thought, along with Abolition and Universal Suffrage. Intoxicates were seen as evil in their eyes, the enslavers of the human will.

    And this has carried on into the 20th and 21st centuries. Ask a self-professed Liberal or Progressive who agrees with the principle of Prohibition why drugs should still be illegal despite the disastrous century long history of enforcement failure and you’ll likely hear about how they enslave their users. Of course they’ll also tell you that we need to focus more on “treatment” rather than “law enforcement” but the bottom line is the same: drugs are illegal because they’re “bad” and the users should still be seen as criminals, poor lost souls that they are.

  14. Tom says:

    Pete, you may have older iPhone software (pre-copy and paste). Try updating and doing what drewbob said.

  15. Pete says:

    Tom — I have the latest software and can copy and paste urls or text in text blocks, but I can’t select paragraphs within a web page (such as the WSJ article) in order to copy them over to blockquote them.

  16. DdC says:

    Partisan party loyalist wingnuts keep the Ganjawar going…
    Anyone choosing a policital party over physics is a wingnut.

    “No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. ….the 63% of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, HOWEVER TEMPORARY, to stamp it out.”
    – William L. Shirer, author;
    “The rise and fall of the Third Reich”

    The Nazi Comparison
    Drug War prisoners that I correspond with call themselves POWs. Some write “POW in America” in the corner of an envelope under the writers name and prison number. “Political prisoner” and “gulag” are terms that enter conversation. Solzhenitsyns The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago are works sometimes referred to. America’s vast network of prisons, boot camps, and jails invites comparison with the detention machinery of former totalitarian regimes.

    THE POLICE STATE COMETH by Rep.Ron Paul 03/15/00

    Wall street’s Spontaneous Abortionists
    Pro Life? Not even anti abortionists

    Al Capone and Watergate were red herrings to divert the countries attention from the Fascist acts of eliminating competition. Booze or Ganja//Hemp. While GOP and DNC bicker over nonsense.

  17. Chris says:

    http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v09/n1151/a03.html?134
    What am I looking at here? It looks like the most insane reason against legalization yet.

  18. Bruce says:

    haha that m.a.p. article’s tone indicates how desperate they are. If it were an audio file constipated baby would be the voice effect.
    Whaa, whaa, my ‘happiness’
    whaaa lol jeeeebers

  19. Duncan says:

    It sure seems to me from my observations that the average IQ of those opposed to the drug war has fallen off a cliff in the last year, with a seeming corresponding increase on the side of sanity.

    Fingers crossed as it seems too good to be true.

  20. Dan says:

    Hey Pete. That was a great piece you found there. It really makes me happy to see more and more articles like that. It gives me a bit of hope.

    Don’t have an iPhone myself, but saw this and thought of your predicament. http://tapbots.com/pastebot/ Looks like it lets you store and organize multiple clips for later pasting. Seems like just the thing for these great stories (and the bad ones, too).

    @Chris. Wow. Just…. wow.

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