[420 Girl]

Where are the liberals when you need them?

Out trying to outlaw cigarettes and fatty foods.

An obscure challenger to an incumbent faces a mountain of disadvantages. Incumbents typically get re-elected 97 per cent of the time. An incumbent Representative who can’t raise a million dollars from organized special interests isn’t even trying. He can communicate with his constituents (i.e., voters) at public expense. Newspapers print his (i.e., his hired hack’s) most banal thoughts.

The list goes on and on.

But a challenger who has no ambition to start a political career, does not crave popularity, and is not counting on a congressional salary, has an advantage which serves a different kind of ambition: He can raise any issue he thinks needs public attention, regardless of established political taboos.

That, in fact, may be the most useful function a long-shot challenger can perform.

This brings me to the war on drugs.

This war has gone on for years. It has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and filled our jails. Criminal gangs prosper and proliferate. It has eroded our civil liberties. The drug trade has seriously destabilized Mexico, Columbia and Bolivia. There is no victory in sight.

The economics of the drug trade are clear. Demand remains undiminished. The cost of production remains low. Arrest a horde of producers, smugglers, wholesalers and retailers and all that can happen is that the profit margins go up. That is what must take place when supply diminishes while demand remains steady. Higher profits brings more recruits into the trade.

More: When the flow of one drug is reduced, alternative drugs seem always to spring up to take its place. I suppose you could round up the millions of users and execute them, but I think the public might be a little hesitant to resort to such extreme measures. I know I am.

These appear to me to be the plain facts at issue.

Those who wish to continue the war on present terms must decide how many wasted billions, how many prisoners, how much erosion of civil liberties, how many gangs and how much narcoterrorism they are willing to tolerate. These calculations must be made and balanced against the benefits as a foundation for rational discussion.

Isn’t it possible that we would be better off putting a fraction of the money spent on the war on drugs into faith-based addict services?

I’ve spoken with a number of police and corrections officers. No one, so far, is arguing that the war is winnable. Some believe that the effort must continue along present lines as a form of containment. Others favor a partial legalization or a measure of what may be called "normalization" for those drugs that are no more harmful than alcohol, so they are freed to concentrate on truly serious matters.

I'm in some very good company with prominent conservatives in questioning this policy -- Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley, to name just two. And this year the drug enforcement people are upset because they are finding fewer plants in northern Maine. It seems that the number of helicopters available to search is down, because they have been transferred to Afghanistan.

Personally, I prefer pursuing Osama Bin Laden to pursuing some Maine organic farmer.

My point is -- why isn’t anybody talking about this? The people of Maine voted to legalize medical marijuana a decade ago, yet it remains illegal. Who’s in charge here? Is every elected official in Maine such a spineless weenie that they can’t talk about the very real costs of prohibition?

http://www.420magazine.com/forums/in...war-drugs.html