Jacob Sullum notes the absurdity: U.S. General Complains That Marijuana Legalization Makes Latin American Officials Less Eager To Join The War On Drugs
General John F. Kelly:
We’ve been encouraging these countries to be in the drug fight for 25 years. The levels of violence that our drug problem has caused in many of these countries is just astronomical. And so when we talk about decriminalizing, the example I would give you is the two states that voted to decriminalize marijuana, or legalize marijuana. Most of the…countries I deal with were in utter disbelief that we would, in their opinion, be going in that direction, particularly after 25 years of encouraging them to fight our drug problem in their countries and, you know, in their littorals. So that’s kind of where they are on it. They’re very polite to me, but every now and again when they’re not so polite, the term hypocrite gets into the discussion. But frankly, the crime rate is so high in many of these countries and the fact that they see us turning away from the drug fight…They’re starting to chatter a lot about, “Well, why don’t we just step back and let it flow?â€
The general’s statement is its own parody, and hardly requires much debunking (although Sullum does that as well).
Dan Freed: Drug Cartels Take Colorado? Drug Enforcer Backtracks
NEW YORK (TheStreet) –Has Colorado’s reckless decriminalization of marijuana opened the floodgates to all kinds of chaos and iniquity?
You might be forgiven for thinking that, if you read this widely-syndicated Gannett story entitled “Feds worry that drug cartels are moving into Colo.”
But the story offers no evidence of a link. Quoted in the story is Tom Gorman, director of the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which, the story tells us, is connected to the White House National Office of Drug Control Policy.
“Our intelligence tells us, and all indications are (drug cartels) are going to move in if they haven’t already,” Gorman says.In a subsequent radio interview Gorman continues to engage in scare tactics, saying Colorado marijuana retailers could easily end up being victims of extortion.
The article points out that Gorman later backtracks on his statement (not that anyone was really buying it).
Freed notes: “The whole scare campaign seems so ham-handed, frankly, it recalls-well-the War on Drugs: a ham-handed campaign that is way past its expiration date.”
what’s the word I’m looking for…? unravel
other key words that fit… collapse, fraud, exposed…
Die beast, die! #%!(#*! drug war… may those who support Prohibition II lose that which they love the most – over and over and over.
ptooey…
Sputtering and contradicting themselves. Belching forth nonsense. Making fools of themselves in front of the people who pay their salaries, and the people they imagine respect them. Just what your drunken Uncle does every Christmas. Good. Their shoelaces are tied together, and they decided to run.
I wonder if anyone will be kind enough to tell them that when they quit hitting themselves with that hammer it will quit hurting so much,,,never mind,,let em whack-a-mole away.
The Gen (the one who ordered his Combat Infantry Ribbon) would be up a creek without a paddle if he told the truth as to why ‘drugs shouldn’t be legalized’. Without drugs, how would private contractors make any money still in Iraq or Afghanistan. For every kilo of dope sold, The Pentagon will hire 3 contract workers to hopefully counteract what that drug money can do for any insurgency. L3 and KBR would have him spouting anything as long as it wasn’t the truth.
I thought id seen some army recruitment ad on the train explaining how education is a must now to be an officer? Is it just that this slack jawed yokel got in before that was policy?
Don’t underestimate his intelligence. He’s well aware that 9/11 would never ever had happened if pot and heroin etc were legal. He knows the 2006 Iraqi Civil War would have never happened without illegal drugs, which means because of the Civil War, we had more contractors in Iraq negotiate for rebuilding, new commerce, new politics, providing security and foreign/non Iraqi–non American contract workers working in large military bases. If there was no illegal drugs, then why would the military show up for a war against an unfunded enemy? He’s smart enough to understands his wallet needs drugs to be illegal. You cannot get a dumb person to force America to spend $3-7 Trillion (NY Times, Brown university Stats) fighting against/rebuilding from a drug money funded opposition. Now, he would be dumb as you stated if he was to go on record and say: How can I get promotion if we don’t have a war . . . how can I make extra money on my Halliburton, KBR, L3, Xe, Exxon, BP, Detroit, Colt etc stocks? Remember the scene from the John Cusack movie, ‘War Inc.’ where the tanks had corporate logo sponsors on them like NASCAR race cars do?
We haven’t reached the nadir of prohibitch absurdity yet. Oh no, not yet.
The screaming, wide-eyed loons are following closely after this latest batch of sleepy-looking, stumbling, mumbling ones.
I mean it. Gibbering, foaming, mad-dog hysterics over ‘The Children’. The more they’re backed into a corner, the more we’ll see the lunacy gush forth.
Sad to witness, but this contagion devouring our rights and freedoms must be burned out once and for all, and that won’t happen until the public-at-large gets to see first-hand what we’ve had to deal with for decades.
The public-as-absentee-landlord is finally going to visit the DrugWar asylum where the nut cases have been allowed and even encouraged run things.
(In our defense, we did try to tell them, and were lumped in with pederasts and murderers for our pains.)
The ideological requirements of the DrugWar (authoritarianism) attracts the kind of people whose ideas would have fit very nicely with those of Hitler’s Ahnenerbe, a den of crackpots and zealots if ever there was one, that was used to justify mass murder. The DrugWar attracts the same kind of people who see rights and liberties as impediments to ‘doing their job’, which is not about upholding justice, but maintaining order.
So long as they were able to wave the bloody shirt of The Children they were able to get away with it. But now, with those 1980’s early DARE indoctrinated ‘children’ having grown up and learned the truth on their own ( a truth that many suspected even then) and now becoming the new custodians of the public commonweal through acting on their own experiences rather than indoctrination, I doubt that the new landlord will be amused.
That is why every former drug war machine admin and his assistants and every President since Nixon,,every Judicial Committee member,every Ways and Means Committee member needs a 2 inch “D” lasered on their forehead. Without the support of those two committees the prohibition machine would never have taken off.
I would actually prefer tattooed over lasered (the latter seems to me to be a form of torture, though it would be a LOT less time involved for both the punisher and the punishee, so perhaps I am wrong about that; guess it might hinge on how sensitive the punishee is to instant severe –laser– or prolonged minor –tattoo– pain).
There is an even better way to mark these bovine-headed individuals: cut off their noses. Just the cartilaginous part at the end. No plastic surgeon can ever make them look real, (think Michael Jackson) so they will be branded for the rest of their lives.
“Our intelligence tells us, and all indications are (drug cartels) are going to move in if they haven’t already,†Gorman says.
Or, to put it another way;
“Our intelligence tells us, and all indications are, the sky is going to fall, if it hasn’t already,†Gorman might as well have said.
————–
These people are giving the concept of ‘intelligence’ a bad name.
Our intelligence tells us, and all indications
translation….
All indications tells us our intelligence is going.
“In a subsequent radio interview Gorman continues to engage in scare tactics, saying Colorado marijuana retailers could easily end up being victims of extortion.”
For some strange reason I have a vision of the extortionists. They seem to be wearing big letters on their jackets. Wonder who they might be?
OK, let me get this straight, Mr. Gorman wants to arrest cannabis vendors as criminals in order to keep them from becoming crime victims. Is that about the gist of it?
Today’s scare tactics and excuses to prohibit drugs truly redline in the pathetic zone. Strong evidence of this assertion can be found by comparing today’s anti-drug nonsense with yesterday’s higher-quality loads of crap.
In the beginnings of drug prohibition, the authorities gave far more candid and explicit reasons for their drugs fear mongering. The following excerpt is from the Edict of Faith Concerning the Illicit Use of Peyote, a document that concerned herbs besides peyote, and which was nailed to the doors of churches “in every city, town and village†in and around Mexico City; dated 19 July, 1620:
The inquisitions of the Spanish dependencies, and the Spanish Inquisition, were exceptionally candid as they never expected the Internet.
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I was shocked the other day when I heard about the idiot LEO quoting the 37 ODs from cannabis. I thought that it was extreme outlier unlikely to be repeated. Silly me.
GOP lawmakers move to ban welfare money at marijuana dispensaries
http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/potfoodstamps.asp
Oh well, at least the prohibitionists are good for the occasional belly laugh. Oh my, look! They’ve named the proposed law the “Preserving Welfare for Needs Not Weed Actâ€. That is just so precious!
Completely OT but guess who’s back http://www.pacovilla.com/less-harmful-than-alcohol/
Read on if you dare.
silliness indeed… tried to comment but the “spam filter” bounced me. and it was all text, no links, quotes, profanity…
pacovilla actually replied to Pete’s post saying,
“In any case, ‘less harmful than alcohol’ is a very low bar, wouldn’t you agree? Alcohol is one of the most toxic drugs available.
I actually line up with those who believe THC is less harmful than alcohol–That doesn’t make it it benign or safe.”
The low bar comment is a bit of a red herring considering cannabis is MUCH less harmful than alcohol. That line of thinking reminds me of prohibs claiming one drug isn’t worse than the other because they have different harms. A lot of smokescreen but little substance. Regardless, I would be more interested in Katz’s opinion since he wrote the piece.
You’re right; we must change the semantics. I suggest that instead of ‘less harmful than alcohol’ we say ‘less harmful than coffee or tea’. That ought to get their attention, and it has the added benefit of being demonstrably true.
My comment was filtered too. It was only three sentences. No links, no profanity. Maybe it flagged the word “ignorant” in my comment. Whatever. Judging by the zero comments, that must be some stringent filter.
Hmm, at first I thought he simply filtered out responses from drugwarrant (he knows people here have frequented his blog in the past) but now I’m not so sure. My comment got through.
A little (and hopefully final) update on Katz’s blog. He finally responded to Pete’s comment indirectly and this is what he had to say.
“Neither had a history of cardiovascular problems or channelopathies.â€
and
“Paco, if you believe that pot is less harmful than alcohol, you have been badly misinformed. The DEA has a library full of documentation from scientific studies that show marijuana is not less harmful than alcohol. You’ve been conned by NORML and other advocates and defenders of pot.
As for Pete Guither’s comments, I must point out that if you look objectively at the study in question, the three deaths attributed to marijuana by itself were discovered in a study of 15 marijuana-related deaths. This would indicate that in the hundreds, if not thousands, of marijuana-related deaths, there will be a significant number of those deaths resulting from the use of marijuana by itself. So we’re not talking about just ‘two or three presumed deaths from marijuana.’ That crack about ‘two presumed deaths from overdosing on alcohol throughout history’ appears to be the contemptuous attempt by a person trying to defend the phony propaganda put out by the proponents of pot.”
Unfortunately, the study that he mentions, which he DID NOT link to btw, is behind a paywall. http://www.fsijournal.org/article/S0379-0738(14)00054-1/abstract
Now, I’ll be fair to him and reserve judgement, as I can’t review the article right now. However, if the Associated Press article has anything to say http://bigstory.ap.org/article/german-study-finds-cannabis-use-triggered-2-deaths
Both men had underlying conditions, the younger- heart disease and the older- abused cocaine. I’m getting conflicting reports on this article. Pete should definitely monitor that blog since Katz is so insistent in being right.
I am wondering just how long it will be before marijuana legalization in Colorado & Washington (and many more to come soon) will make General Kelly less likely to keep trying to export The US WOD to other countries.
About as likely as when they didn’t listen to the people telling them it was a bad idea to start.
“Join the DEA! Travel to exotic, distant lands.
Meet exciting, unusual people, and kill them.”
Exporting DEAmocracy, 207 offices around the globe.
Charlotte Figi had her first seizure when she was 3 months old. Over the next few months, the girl, affectionately called Charlie, had frequent seizures lasting two to four hours, and she was hospitalized repeatedly.
http://oi58.tinypic.com/2qkjqfc.jpg
Marijuana Stops Child’s Severe Seizures
Now Charlotte is allowed to be a little girl again.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bhq_LRUIUAAUuY0.jpg
But not if the Generals get to keep their wars.
The question is. Who’s side are they on?
Seems the Generals drug worrier army also have an interest in Seizures.
Seizures By Police Help Fund Drug War
Government Property Seizures out of Control
Another Pyrrhic Victory in the Pointless “War on Drugs”
http://tinyurl.com/n5udkje
English definition of “Pyrrhic victory†: a victory that is not worth winning because the winner has lost so much in winning it: She won the court case, but it was a Pyrrhic victory because she had to pay so much in legal fees. http://tinyurl.com/mlto68e
“lucrative and power enhancing”
forbes mag nails the wod motivation for pols and cops in the final paragraph. so long as the trough is still there these pigs will keep feeding no matter how costly or pyrrhic their “victories” are for the rest of us.
JOIN OUR LEGALIZATION TOWNHALL MEETING
ATTN SOUTH CENTRAL TEXAS,,,or is it time to go to the aid of the Alamo on time?
http://tinyurl.com/llnfnun
Most important for you to know, YOU are invited and YOU can ask your questions to the panel. The Town Hall will be held on Thursday, March 6 at Texas A&M-San Antonio Brooks City-Base Campus located at 2601 Louis Bauer Drive. See map below. We ask that you arrive and are seated by 6:00pm. We will be begin our televised and web broadcast at 6:30pm. The televised format will conclude at 7:00pm, but you can keep watching live on News4SA.com through 8:00pm.
I wonder what they will do if a million show up?
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Great TV commercial from Marijuana Doctors.com
I need to pay better attention. Who knew that they had criminalized Sushi?