One thing I agree with Rand Paul about (or should I call him Aqua Buddha?) is that any lawmaker who has ever smoked pot should not allow anyone to go to prison for smoking pot unless they honestly and sincerely believe that they should have gone to prison, too. This isn’t far-fetched. Many of you have driven when you were too intoxicated to safely drive. If you’re honest, you agree that you should have been arrested. You know that you deserved to lose your license. You know what you did was clearly wrong and that it endangered other people. And so you can support strong laws against drunk driving without being a hypocrite. It’s the same with pot. If you sincerely think that it’s a crime against society to smoke pot, then go ahead and support strong laws against smoking pot. But it you don’t think you did anything that warranted a strong penalty, work to change the law. If you don’t, you are a hypocrite.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I am sick of that.
So you agree with Elizabeth Warren about the banks and their laundering drug money(and money for Iran), too? If you agree with her, you do know what that means.
Of course I agree with her. I agree with her 100%. If we can’t put those fuckers and jail and close down that bank, then we need to change the law so that we can hold people accountable without punishing everyone else, too.
We don’t need to change the law. As you know, we need an overhaul of our elite class.
So, do you have a way to “overhaul our elite class” without changing the law, or are you just an obnoxious contrarian?
This issue is there to cement young people’s support of the Democratic Party for a long while, it’s right there to be picked up; maybe they’ll start getting more courage when shown it’s not a death knell to their political careers, but extremely helpful like gay marriage. Or they can allow extremist ideologues like Rand Paul to champion it, and have people adopt his other extremist positions.
Let’s go further, as Copenhagen has demonstrated with heroin:
Legal Pot Worth a Try
Also, Washington’s governor seems to be going for it:
Inslee’s marijuana memo to feds pitches control, prosecution of violators
This issue is there to cement young people’s support of the Democratic Party for a long while, it’s right there to be picked up; maybe they’ll start getting more courage when shown it’s not a death knell to their political careers, but extremely helpful like gay marriage.
They don’t support it because Big Pharma’s campaign cash tells them not to.
There are plenty of bigger players than Pharma, like private prisons, prison/cop unions, the alcohol lobby, and social conservatives/moralizers. Pharma isn’t the first that I think of when it comes to MJ or drug liberalization.
And like the MIC, I can’t totally fault those unions and cops. They will need jobs. Their jobs are mostly harmful, sure, but their livelihood is still threatened.
You can’t fault the cops? Why not? What about stop-and-frisk? I suppose you think that’s okay too, despite it being racist and immoral. Cops need jobs after all!!
I never said it was ok, why do you needlessly strawman me? If anything, on this blog in particular, I’m one of the few commenters who continuously brings this issue up as something that is not only extremely important, but low-hanging fruit for Dems to adopt.
If your livelihood is directly being attacked, you are going to act out in your own self-interest and try to stomp out the people who will destroy said livelihood. The same can be said of coal miners in Kentucky or oil drillers off Louisiana’s coast. Their jobs are a direct threat to the public good, and should be destroyed. But you also have to look at it from their eyes, and imagine some future with jobs to compensate the loss they are likely to incur. It’s why it’s so hard to kill military spending; there is a tentacle in every Congressional district.
their jobs aren’t mostly harmful. For comparison, take a look at a country that tries to function without a police force (hint: Mexico)
Sorry, I meant the people whose jobs will be lost with drug liberalization are mostly harmful, not “police” as a whole. Maybe we won’t need to lose any and they can focus on actual crime (unlikely, but possible I guess); and maybe they will regain my respect as a profession (and be trusted in minority communities rather than seen as adversaries). But for the time being, the jobs of police task forces who perform drug raids are an unmitigated negative on society.
InSite in Vancouver has been operating successfully for a decade.
One of the InSite physicians, Gabor Maté is of the opinion that harm to both the patients and community would be reduced further if the clinic supplied the drugs. Such a policy would put most of the drug pushers/peddlers out of business and reduce criminal activity that users engage in to support their habit.
Heh, now that’s just kooky talk! The gubmint supplying the drugs?!?!
I’m not sure if it would really put them out of business, per se; I guess I’d have to see how the model works.
Anyway, that is the kind of radical approaches I favor. Marijuana legalization is such low-hanging fruit that it’s ridiculous we’re debating it. We need to be spending time debating drug epidemics that actually matter; pill-poppers, dope fiends, and crack and meth addicts.
Speaking of pill-poppers, I always hear from prohibitionists (word to the wise, framing it under “prohibition” polls better than other words) that the biggest drug problem are “legal” prescription drugs, and it therefore shows that drug liberalization isn’t the answer. This is pure nonsense. Prescription drugs are anything but “legal” in any real sense. I’d like to experiment with more radical ideas in this area as well. Not sure recreational pills is a good idea, but we definitely need new ways of dealing with it. It is a big problem, and I’d appreciate it if the prohibitionists would admit as much rather than trying to score points for their failed Drug War.
Government supplies lots of drugs.
Dr. Mate was only addressing the question of drugs for addicts that would use harm reduction injection clinics. The money isn’t in getting a new person hooked on junk but selling to them after their hooked.
We’d be fine handling marijuana the way alcohol and tobacco are handled — with a few production and distribution exceptions such as no advertising, no individual or family fortunes can be made from it, and no publicly traded pot companies.
yeah, I’m with Aqua Buddha too on this one.
This is one of those areas where the Libertarian wing of the GOP has a chance to pick up some of the youth vote. I do not see any Democrat on the national field that has that kind of courage, not even the President.
In PA of course, we have a couple of brave legislators like Marc Cohen and Daylin Leach. And in DC, we have… Blob Casey.
Don’t think you even need to have smoked pot to see how disproportionate and unjust anti-marijuana laws (and enforcement) are. I’ve been hearing the arguments against them for 50 years now, and they don’t seem to have made a dent with the Very Serious powers that be. The anti-marijuana crusade seems to me to be just another form of hippie-punching, and probably can’t be fully put to rest until the old hippie punchers are dead. I’d love to be pleasantly surprised, though — I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how quickly the country seems to be going over a tipping point on gay rights.
The only problem with AB’s pronouncement is that he’s assuming ideas like equal justice, fairness, and the common good have something to do with law and politics in America. Those days, if they ever existed, are long past. Such qualms have no place on the to-do lists of oligarchies.
It’s things like this that worry me, because as others have said, he might win support on one or two such sane positions despite his otherwise terrible views.
John Michael Greer’s definition of libertarianism is perhaps the best I’ve seen, and definitely applies to Rand Paul:
You can’t even bring yourself to agree with a Paul family member without the little snarky dig, can you Booman?
That’s some sick shit.
Sorry, man. You are so media-entranced that you cannot see the truth from a hole in the wall.
This whole leftiness thing is just two or three steps away from being as stupid-sounding to the mass of voters…at the very least, to the younger, relatvely free of media influence voters who will have their say as a majority very, very soon…as does the rightiness conservative foolishness today.
We have spoken of the middle-aged, middle/working class, white right wing as a species headed for the tar pits. You’re only a few years behind them, Booman.
It’s just a matter of time….
Any day now.
Aaaaany day now…
Bet on it.
Watch.
Any day now.
Any year now.
Watch.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
P.S. Despite the best attempts of the media, Rand Paul is going to clean a lot of people’s clocks before he’s through. More than did his father.
Watch.