CROSS POSTED FROM MY BLOG: A Left Independent
In an effort to maintain a high level of critical thinking when looking at Democrat and Republican candidates, especially presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I have had some intense and in-depth debates with some war policy reform advocates who I have the greatest respect for. I know they have decades of experience with this atrocity of a policy and their perspectives are informed not only by a passionate antipathy toward the policy but also by their own aggressive investigative research into the causes and effects of the war on drugs.
(I don’t waste much time with the authoritarian Jim Crow Republican candidates. Except for the much maligned and Republican Party subverted campaign of Congressman Ron Paul Republicans have nothing to contribute to social justice, human rights or civil liberties in America in terms of drug war policy. Republicans are, even more than the Democrats, the problem not the solution.)
One such debate has happened on a couple of essay threads at Lee Rosenberg’s Blog Reload. Lee is no fool. Passionate, informed and articulate more like it. No fool at all.
Lee’s argument:
The argument that has really put me on the fence about Sen. Obama is one I received from good friend and drug reform hero, Al Giordano, the publisher and editor of Narcosphere.Narconews.com. No one has done more to expose the international anarchy fostered by the $ 322-billion global black market economy created by the drug war prohibition of intoxicant drugs. He has gone into the countries where bloody and deadly atrocities are commonplace in order to journalistically expose these horrors to us all as we sit comfortably in our homes here in the U.S. This man has a strength of character that the rest of us only fantasize about. And few of us are willing to aspire to.
Al’s recent email to me, responding to my criticisms of Obama, is fact based and succinct. And I can do it no better than to simply copy it for you here.
Hi Pat,
So we’ve got, among those that have a shot at the White House, a clearly prohibitionist Republican in McCain, a prohibitionist Democrat in Clinton that says outright she doesn’t want to reform drug laws and from the first Clinton White House which escalated federal imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders by tens of thousands in Clinton, and a Democrat, Obama, that states clearly he’s not for legalization but he is for reform: getting nonviolent offenders out of prison, decriminalizing marijuana, defending medical marijuana, ending disparate sentencing re cocaine vs. crack, and a longtime supporter of clean needle exchange. I don’t doubt what you say about him being a staunch prohibitionist regarding meth. But, then again, I have low expectations of presidential candidates that have a real shot at winning (it’s easy to be Ron Paul when you’ll never have to wage a general election battle).
But you can’t look at this video, for example, and not acknowledge that Obama is far and above any US presidential nominee since George McGovern on wanting to make some pretty damn serious reforms and get many of the “two million people” he mentions here out of prison:
Update [2008-2-8 13:10:25 by aahpat]:This video, for some reason, returned a “video no longer available” message for awhile today. It seems to be working now. If need be here is the YouTube page where the video resides.
You know, Franklin Roosevelt was an opponent of repealing alcohol prohibition until the position was forced upon him by a platform vote at the 1932 Democratic National Convention, and he became the biggest most effective force for repeal. The question is not what a candidate says (because campaign promises are broken) but what his or her instincts are if we provide the objective conditions from the grassroots level for a big change to really happen.We can’t expect any politician to simply legalize meth or any other drug unless we build a strong enough movement to create the context through which they can. You and I have been involved in making that happen for a long time. And we’ve created the context in which, this year, a presidential candidate could admit having inhaled, could support marijuana decriminalization without backing down, could support needle exchange, and could explain, as in that video, how he plans to get nonviolent offenders out of the prisons. But to expect a US president to go further than that before we’ve done our job at changing public opinion for the rest of the anti-prohibitionist agenda is, in my view, an unattainable goal in 2008. But the guy would certainly move us forward, whereas the others that have a shot at the presidency will clearly stall us for another four to eight years.
I try not to insist on purity from regular human beings. Why would I then insist on it from politicians who, in the act of running for office, are already not “pure”? But then again, nobody is.
best,
Al
While I still harbor serious concerns about Obama’s depth of understanding of the Jim Crow subversion of our democracy as well as the international anarchy and terrorism that is fostered by the war on drugs I now admit a better appreciation of Barack Obama’s comprehension of domestic policy issues relating to criminalization of young people. Especially urban minorities.
I have a better appreciation of Obama in spite of his being a Democrat. The Democrats, especially the right-wing white thug Clinton Democrats, have betrayed everything that the Democratic Party ever represented in America. Everything the Party represented to me as a third generation Democrat. It is hard for me to accept, let alone trust, any ‘leader’ in the Democratic Party. While I still don’t trust Barack Obama I am coming to a point of accepting him as better than any of the current leaders of either of the two white dominance parties, the Democrats and Republicans.
In the near future I will write again about the lingering concerns that still bother me regarding Barack Obama, as they stand at this point in the election cycle.
