Great piece up by Glenn on something we’ve discussed hundreds of times- the failed war on drugs and how similar it is to the war on terror:
It’s the perfect deceit. These wars, in an endless loop, sustain and strengthen the very menaces which, in turn, justify their continuous escalation. These wars manufacture the very dangers they are ostensibly designed to combat. Meanwhile, the industries which fight them become richer and richer. The political officials those industries own become more and more powerful. Brutal drug cartels monopolize an unimaginably profitable, no-competition industry, while Terrorists are continuously supplied the perfect rationale for persauding huge numbers of otherwise unsympathetic people to join them or support them. Everyone wins — except for ordinary citizens, who become poorer and poorer, more and more imprisoned, meeker and meeker, and less and less free.
I was talking to Sadly No’s Bradrocket the other day, and one of the great things about Prop 19, along with it being great legislation, is that it is an issue that also resonates with Democratic voters. Especially young voters. Having this on the ballot is going to bring out a lot of votes that otherwise would have stayed at home, this being a non-Presidential election. Basically, Prop 19 is the saintly counterpart to all the gay bashing ballot initiatives Republicans use to get the bigots out to vote in off years, and this may save Boxer’s ass this election. Good on the people pushing Prop 19, and maybe we could learn from this and have more ballot initiatives that have worthy goals and engage and electrify the base in the future.
BTW- To help the FDL initiative to call people regarding Prop 19, call here.
liberal
Why do you hate puppies, John Cole?
lol
The right people in Dem politics are already paying attention to California and drawing the right conclusions: Pot legalization is going to be for Obama’s re-elect what gay marriage bans were for Bush’s.
(edit: which I just now noticed you already said)
silentbeep
I’m a Californian, and I really can’t stand propositions for the most part, but I’m pretty supportive of prop. 19 in this case. If it weren’t for Prop. 19, I don’t know if Brown would have a chance against Whitman right now (let alone Boxer). We shall see.
Cat
Hahaha, google ad fail. Its showing an add for Right Wing TShirts. Or does google know something we dont???
Stuck in the Funhouse
Yes, a bag of jihadi costs the same as a lid of ganja. They are so like the same thing. it is promising though that GG is doing such yeoman work for the CATO, that bastion of progressivism.
Maybe they can do away with doctor prescriptions and Americans can easily get the anti psychotic medicine so desperately needed.
The Funhouse is Open
Stuck in the Funhouse
make up sex is the bestest
Angry Black Lady
@liberal: i saw him actually punch a puppy just the other day.
jl
Well, I am going to vote in California because of proposition 384b, which is being being funded by ‘Concernedanonymousinterstgroupwithloadsacash’.
Did you know that California legislators are drinking ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR bottles of wine, smoking fancy ceegars, and laughing at us poor oppressed right thinking middle class voters, before they raise taxes and fees, just because they are BAD?
The concern/doom music turned into a happy fun tune just as they said to vote for proposition 10934673e, no matter what, so it must be a good thing to do.
The actors in the commercials sounded very sincere, also, too. And concerned. Sincerely concerned.
signed,
right thinking voter in California.
Edit: I will vote for 19 too.
Editedit: I have no idea at all what propositon 131313000 does (the commercial didn’t have time to really say), but it will stop California legislators from drinking ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR bottles of wine, on my tax dime. And the actors sounded well informed, in addition to sincere and concerned. Thank goodness for these campaign commercials. Without them I would not know what to do.
Bob Loblaw
@lol:
I’m not really sure this is true for 2012. Is there particularly pressing impetus for this movement in Ohio and Florida (and the rest of the Rust Belt)? I don’t think the states that will move on this issue in the next two years are the ones the 2012 team will be especially worried about.
I think this is the beginning of a longer term process, more focused on 2014 and 2016 than on Obama’s reelect.
JG
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Super contribution. Definitely addressing Glenn’s substantive points about this issue. I mean, if he worked with CATO on this he must be wrong and most likely have ulterior motives.
Angry Black Lady
@Stuck in the Funhouse: i’ve heard from a source very close to me that medical MJ has reduced her klonnie and erased entirely her xannie intake.
so i’ve heard. from a source. that is not me. natch.
freeulysses
There is however the danger inherent to the most vocal pro-Prop 19 people …
“dude, the vote was today? I totally forgot to go…”
My roommate when I was about 21 or 22 once declared that he “totally meant to go to this NORML rally” but got high and forgot to go.
Scott P.
Yeah, the metaphor doesn’t really work. It’s weird to read stuff from a guy who apparently would have sided with the British in the Opium War. Keeping the drug trade to China legal sure was profitable for everyone — wait, no it wasn’t, it was profitable for those who sold the product, not so much for everyone else. The result: as many as 50% of the Chinese adult population became addicts.
Eventually, the Chinese government was able to free itself of foreign meddling and crack down on the trade. Today, about 0.5% of China’s population are regular users (though it’s hard to say how reliable that figure is, it’s definitely low).
Of course, the damage caused by legalization will be focused on the same communities currently harmed by the drug trade, but white folks will be able to get their weed, so no one is likely to notice. After all, who cares about 13,000 drunk driving fatalities annually?
I’d much prefer keeping drugs illegal, but stepping up funds for rehabilitation, and paying farmers in places like Colombia and Afghanistan to grow other crops.
The Grand Panjandrum
How can you possibly say GG is right about anything AND send people to FDL? Aren’t you a homophobe? Hypocrite! Hater! DINO!
“… the milkman left me a note yesterday: Get out of this town by noon, you’re coming on way too soon, and besides that we never liked you any way.” — John Prine
Stuck in the Funhouse
@JG:
I got yer substantive points right here.
El Cid
It’s the US’ narcotics consumption market which is turning many locations in Mexico into paramilitary assassin land.
Maybe we ought to take some responsibility instead of continuing to pretend that if we give Mexico a few more billion dollars that it will be able to shoot its way out of the situation.
cathyx
@Scott P.: Would you be for keeping alcohol illegal too?
Bubblegum Tate
@freeulysses:
“I got stoned and I missed it/I got stoned and I missed it/I got stooooooooned and it rolled right by”
El Cid
@freeulysses: At least he was there in spirit.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Scott P.:
You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
Marijuana is a plant. A plant. It’s less addictive than caffeine, less impairing than alcohol, and impossible to overdose on it. Nearly all the dangers of marijuana prohibition stem from illegal trafficking and enforcement itself.
You are completely full of shit. The communities already harmed by the marijuana trade are harmed by the laws, not the drug.
@Stuck in the Funhouse: You never fail to convince of what a truly nasty person you are.
MattR
@Bubblegum Tate: I forgot to go to the rally because I got high
Stuck in the Funhouse
Thank you, I get so little appreciation for my work here.
jl
@Stuck in the Funhouse: I think I would disagree with Greenwald on regulation of Rx drugs, but his position is so vague I am not sure.
If you read that post, at the end, Greenwald explicitly exempts drugs that might have an adverse impact on public health, like antibiotics. And Greenwald invited debate on the subject.
That kind of approach is not CATO. I have read some of their reports on deregulation of Rx drug market, medical care, tobacco control and antiabusive drinking campaigns, and public health programs in general. And most of them dissolve into incoherent rants and innumerate analysis about halfway through.
So, I think there is a difference.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
Haha! Those potheads sure are funny! That’s why it doesn’t bother me at all when they’re sent to prison to be ass-raped for years at a time! Because they’re sooooo silly!
Lysana
@Scott P.:
So how much damage was being done to society by the Sears catalog carrying marijuana candy and adults being able to buy tincture of laudanum?
I’ll wait.
Lev
The moment Meg Whitman lost me for good was when I read her campaign literature and it said that Marijuana was a gateway drug. It seriously said that in 2010. What is it, 5% of users who go along to something harder? That’s one-in-twenty.
Jerry Brown pretty much won my vote by saying he wasn’t going to send any more money from education to the prison system.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Lysana: Look, marijuana was fine until those dirty Messkins and those negro jazz so-called musicians were seen smoking it. After that point, it became more “inchoate evil force” than weed.
Therefore, just having the stuff in your neighborhood releases evil demons to, like, lower the property values and make the banks refuse loans. You might have thought there was some kind of racism involved, but nope! It’s just the weed!
Damn jazz singers, ruinin’ everything…
jl
Re dope. I remember one of my very old timer great uncles who farmed in the CA Central Valley way way back.
He remembered that work gangs used to smoke dope all the time back in the day (early 1900s). Especially Mexican work gangs, but others too.
Of course, if he ever caught one of us kids using it, there would be hell to pay.
He also talked about a several currently fine upstanding local citizens (this was back in the 1960s, and they were geezers then, and probably all gone by now) who got sent to jail for selling dope back in the 1930s. They did not adjust their line or work quickly enough after it became illegal.
Funny that none of those people had any stigma around town. They ran stores and restaurants and were pillars of the community..
Sometimes it came up when people talked local history. “yeah, ol’ Joe spent some time in the slammer back in the 30s, selling that there Mary Hwana.”
Whether Greenwald is a stooge for CATO or not, I think he is right on this one, and he has provided links to good reports on legalization and decriminalization in other countries.
I look at decriminalization of marijuana like going back to the good old days when America was great and Americans were FREE!
Epicanis
Given the way the “War on Poverty”, “War on Drugs”, and “War on Terror” have each gone, could we please start a “War On People Giving Me Money”?
I’d appreciate it.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@jl: I really don’t need GG and his glibertarian bullshit to tell me the war on drugs is crap and needs to go. Linking it to the WOT might give leg tingles to his cultists but is utter nonsense with the sensibility of a carnival barker imo. Glenn has long called for doing away with doctors prescriptions what ever his contradictive mutterings are from one day to the next. I maintain such a belief is quite literally insane. You can read his loony tea leaves for pearls of wisdom all you want, and revel in the shit he tells us that we already know. I will snark it, and return to sender. The fucking CATO institute.
Barb (formerly gex)
@Lev: And even then, it can only be counted as a gateway drug if you omit that those people had alcohol and/or tobacco first. If you don’t count everything leading up to it that is. And then we find that being born is the gateway drug of all gateway drugs.
And now I’m confused about the drug warriors and the pro-lifers coalition.
jl
@Stuck in the Funhouse: OK, fine. Noted.
Please post some links or give references where Greenwald reveals his true face and writes full Monty CATO style insane rantings on Rx drugs and doctors.
Seriously. If you post them I will look at them.
Shinobi
@Lev: I love that one of the early gateway drug studies they did the essentially asked a bunch of heroin users if they’d ever smoked pot. The obvious conclusion being that since all of them had smoked pot, pot was the gateway that lead to heroin.
But really, that’s like asking a bunch of alcoholics if they’ve ever had water.
Bubblegum Tate
@Epicanis:
Drugs Win Drug War
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Stuck in the Funhouse: So, basically, even though you refuse to read what Greenwald wrote, you just know his article wasn’t really about the topic at hand, but about an unrelated bugaboo you pulled from your ass.
Look, idiot, it’s simple: both wars on whatever are self-perpetuating and unwinnable. That’s his point. That’s what he said, not whatever bullshit about prescriptions you imagineered up with your tinker toys.
Jesus, it was right there in the blockquote in Cole’s post. Do you even refuse to read a Greenwald excerpt, you sorry excuse for a human being?
That reminds me, though. You do realize that Cole linked to an FDL project, don’t you? Maybe you missed it when you were avoiding reading about the actual point of the post. Just scroll up and you’ll see it. That’s right, Cole is one of them. Run away, the demon has infested Balloon Juice. Run away and never come back!
Angry Black Lady
awesome.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@jl:
You’re kidding, right? the article I linked was from 2007, 3 years ago, and here is a continuation of it.
And CATO unbound. GG edition.
Cris
@Scott P.: The problem with the opium analogy is that there’s no analogy. Prop 19 isn’t about the libertarian holy grail of “drug legalization,” it’s about cannabis legalization. And this should be obvious, but let’s say it: cannabis is not opium. It has no known fatal dose. It produces no physiological dependence to speak of. It simply doesn’t belong on Schedule I.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Jrod the Cookie Thief:
It’s a free country. You can be a GG cultist all day every day. As is your wont. I mock you, you mock me. As the blogs turn. And that is the way it should be. Always.
Now run along and steal a cookie from yo mommas jar, give one to Cole, or whatever it is you do.
Lev
@Shinobi: Correlation vs. causation. Something that every first-year college freshman should learn but some don’t. Evidently those ones end up working for DARE or whatever.
That was a real folly. Every kid knows someone who smokes pot, be it a friend or older sibling or what have you. Telling them a bunch of bullshit about pot just makes them think the government is lying to them. One year my high school brought in this guy who worked for the DoJ to talk about it, and it was surprisingly refreshing, since he basically went over a bunch of drugs and what their effects were, no hyperbole or hysteria, just the facts. Easily 100x more effective than the other ways they had tried to broach the subject.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
If you apply the same criteria that supposedly makes marijuana a “gateway drug” to other psychoactive substances, I’m pretty sure tobacco is the greatest gateway drug of all.
There’s a bit of a case to be made that being around weed users increases the likelihood of running into the harder stuff, but again, this is a consequence of both drugs being illegal, not that smoking weed gives kids a flavor for smack. Really, this is another argument in favor of legalizing marijuana if you stop and think about it.
But, you know, drug war propaganda doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to fill morons like Scott P. with doubt and fear. Scott P. just knows that legalization would be a disaster, because… um, like, it just would, OK?
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Stuck in the Funhouse: Shorter Stuck: I have no argument, and as a simple troll I don’t need one.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Jrod the Cookie Thief:
You wouldn’t know an argument if one crawled up your firebagger ass with bells on.
Citizen Alan
@El Cid:
Here, here. The final factor in my decision to support legalization was the realization that our drug policy risks turning a nation with which we share a 2000 mile border into a failed narco-terrorist state.
Pay through the nose to prosecute marijuana smokers. Pay through the nose to incarcerate marijuana smokers. Pay through the nose in lost tax revenue for marijuana smokers who will never work again after they get out of prison. Pay for drug interdiction around the world. Pay for timber for our paper needs when hemp would be cheaper. And now, we’ll need to pay for an army to invade Mexico by 2025?
Legalize it. Tax it. Move on to some other issue.
mantis
and one of the great things about Prop 19, along with it being great legislation,
Not to rain on the parade, but it’s not great legislation, at least not if your goal is to produce tax revenue for the state, which is most certainly one of the goals. The way the proposed law is structured puts the responsibility for taxation on local governments, which will create a race to the bottom similar to the one South Dakota won with the banks. This will not only very likely decrease tax revenue well below the optimistic projections of supporters, but will also push most cultivation into a few specific tax-friendly areas of the state, creating problems for those areas (which could lead to tougher restrictions, movement of cultivators to new low-tax areas, etc.).
Don’t get me wrong. I support Prop 19, because it will provide revenue for the state, in taxes but more importantly in money saved by not needing to prosecute nonviolent drug users and dealers. And marijuana prohibition is just stupid, obviously. But Prop 19 isn’t great. It’s just kinda ok, and a bunch of work will be needed to fix it in the coming years, should it pass.
Cris
I’d argue that any psychoactive can act as a gateway, because it opens you up to the possibility that ingesting some substance can change your mental state. But it really depends on the personality of the user.
If you try marijuana, and find you have a general taste for “deranging your senses” (as Dennis Hopper put it) then sure, you might say “wow, what else can I find that will fuck me up?” And then anything goes (including legal-but-harmful methods like huffing).
But I don’t think most drug users react that way — the more common response would be “what else can I find that will make me feel similarly?” And somebody who enjoys a euphoric isn’t necessarily going to want to branch out to stimulants (like cocaine or meth) or depressants (like the opiates). They might very well be interested in hallucinogens like LSD and psilocybin, and to that extent I grudgingly acknowledge some truth to the gateway hypothesis. (Whether we want to consider those hallucinogens “harder stuff” is another topic.)
Cris
Damn, this is like the recurring theme of the last two years of legislation.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Cris: I agree with all of that. However, I suspect that the number of people who get into drugs because they want to explore their heads is dwarfed by the number who get into it because their buddy offered them a joint. Not that keeping the Burroughs reading population in line is a good reason for weed to stay illegal, but it’s worth some thought.
This is another reason our current drug strategy fails. Through programs like DARE and the regularly running TV ads, the message is that marijuana and heroin are just two sides of the same coin. If that’s true, and you enjoy smoking weed, then why not give the junk a try? Of course, in reality heroin is about a thousand times more dangerous than marijuana, but Officer Friendly in your DARE class never told you that.
You’d think that the necessity of lying in a constant propaganda stream would be a hint that the war on drugs is a miserable failure. Of course, that assumes that public health and safety is the goal, rather than funneling tax money to law enforcement and filling up private prisons with minorities.
Cris
@Jrod the Cookie Thief:
It kills me how DARE leads to even old hippies lying to their children. The parents don’t want their kids to rock the boat (they know it will come back to bite them), so they don’t fill them in with the counter-narrative.
Wile E. Quixote
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Shorter Stuck in the Funhouse: “I’m a weak-willed junkie piece of shit and Rx laws are the only thing that keeps me from scarfing down Oⅹycontⅰn, Aⅾⅾeraⅼⅼ, Ⅴⅰagra, Ⅽⅰaⅼⅰs pills like they were M and Ms.” Look Stuck, if you think that there’s any rationality behind current Rx laws you’d better ask the doctor to up your dose of whatever anti-psychotic you’re on because you’re obviously quite literally insane, or just McMegan McArdle stupid.
Wile E. Quixote
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Wile E. Quixote:
Come on Wily, stop making my arguments for me. You are better than that. Write yourself a Haldol script and call me in the morn. Maybe give one to the cookie monster also too.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Stuck in the Funhouse: You don’t actually know what the word “argument” means, do you?
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Jrod the Cookie Thief:
relief is on the way grasshopper
mantis
@Cris:
Damn, this is like the recurring theme of the last two years of legislation.
No kidding. Real progress is messy.
Shune
The irony is that Boxer will ride the wave with Prop 19 and she’s against it. As is Feinstein…
to Scott P…really? So archaic and strange…
HyperIon
@Jrod the Cookie Thief wrote:
If only he would….
Wile E. Quixote
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@HyperIon:
You love me, you know you do, admit it. Come run away and be my Princess Bride. Wile can be our best man, long as he takes his meds.
cookie monster can watch. if he behaves himself.
HyperIon
@Lev wrote:
I saw Rick Steves (PacNW travel guy who is everywhere on PBS) recommending coming out of the weed closet. He is serving on the board of NORML now and getting more assertive in his speech. He used to say “If I smoke in the Netherlands, I am not breaking any law.” Now he says “If I want to smoke a joint before dinner in my own living room, why is that anyone’s business?”
I think he’s right about coming out of the weed closet.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@HyperIon: Well, we’re on our third president in a row who’s admitted to smoking weed. If it’s good enough for the leader of the free world eighteen years running, then by Jove it’s good enough for me.
kindness
Re: Marijuana the gateway drug.
Jeez….first thing I did was smoke tobacco. Yea, you say illegal but I was like 12 or something. Second thing I did was alcohol. Again, Jr Hi, still illegal.
No, pot is third in line. It didn’t open doors. It did introduce me to those that did other drugs, but that’s because it was illegal, not because pot led me there. Well that and it was the 70’s. When I was a Sr. in high school, literally 85% of my class had at least tried smoking pot. Many didn’t do it many more times than that, but many did. Course, the drinking age was 18 then too. We had a really good time all in all.
Vote Yes on 19. Screw the people making money off pot, that includes the police and the bad guys. Sometimes, pissin’ off the man is still a bunch of fun AND the right thing to do.
John Bird
Thanks for the links. I was an extreme skeptic about decriminalization/legalization in America up until recently. I was also a strong, even angry, supporter.
That is, it was always obvious to me that decriminalization and legalization, at least of marijuana, was the right policy practically and the right thing to do morally, but I thought it quite likely that I’d never see it happen during my lifetime, considering the strong pull of quasi-Puritanism on electoral politics here.
(It’s one more comparison worth making in these wars: what’s a good way for a Democrat to prove his bonafides as a non-hippie? Promise stiffer penalties for pot, and then declare he wants more troops in Afghanistan. Both are terrible ideas, but they will prove that you are willing to entertain terrible Republican ideas.)
I’m not such a skeptic anymore; if Prop 19 passes, we’ll be on down the road. And Portugal – it’s funny to me that the Latin Catholic countries of the world are becoming the test case for policies too socially liberal for America to try first, from gay marriage to drug decriminalization.
Of course, decriminalization, or legalization of limited home grows, will not effectively curb the bad effects of the black market. When it comes to marijuana, full legalization is the only true solution, and that’s why Prop 19 is so important – but decriminalization policies are the foot in the door and should be promoted as well.
Interesting fact: marijuana possession in North Carolina is effectively decriminalized up to a half-ounce; marijuana is its own Schedule, and possession of under 0.5 oz is a misdemeanor, carrying a 30-day sentence that MUST be suspended whether or not you have a previous criminal record. Past that, it’s similar ridiculousness to many other states, but at least it’s a start, and at least it’s not Florida.
Stan
John,
You’re a trooper. Despite your feud with Jane, you support her/your/our cause. I’ve sometimes thought you slow on the uptake, but I’ve never doubted your sincerity or your quest for what is fair and equitable. You and Jane are not so different. Just hot-headed in different ways.
chopper
@Jrod the Cookie Thief:
the reason grass could be considered a ‘gateway drug’ is because you more often than not buy the shit from a dealer. a dealer who often has, and is trying to sell, harder shit. hey, wanna try some coke? i got some.
if alcohol or cigarettes were illegal and you had to buy them from a drug dealer, both of those would end up ‘gateway drugs’ as well.
if grass is legal and you grow it yourself or buy it at the equivalent of a licensed liquor store, ‘gateway’ goes poof.
Corner Stone
@Stan:
Understatement of the Year candidate right there.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@chopper: By that reasoning, ‘gateway’ also goes poof if your pot dealer doesn’t deal in anything harder. Which is the vast majority of them.
If you really think weed dealers “often” have harder shit to sell, I’ll have to assume you knowledge of the drug trade comes from prime time television, rather than facts or personal experience. Weed has a lower profit margin than harder stuff, so generally if someone is selling pot it’s because they don’t want to deal with the constant stress that comes from a cracked out clientele.
In any case, that’s not the justification for the gateway canard. That’d be a stupid argument for drug warriors to make, since it’s an argument for legalizing marijuana. You know, to keep innocent stoners away from the ravages of heroin.
DMD
I was gunna vote for nine-teen, but I got high.
I would have voted for the Democrat team, but i got high.
Now we’re ruled by Whitman, and I know why (why man?)
’cause I got high, ’cause I got high, ’cause I got hiiiiiiiigh.