Monday, August 15, 2005

What "progressives" want: more drugs

If you are a registered Democrat you need to ask yourself: Do these people represent me?

Arresting the Drug Laws
Cole wants to remove the profit motive from the equation by legalizing drugs and having them supplied by the government. “Organized criminals and world terrorists would be monetarily crippled for many years to come,” Cole says.
Government really needs to start selling drugs. The only side benefit to this is that government would probably do a worse job at delivering the product than the "private enterprise" drug dealers do.

California Superior Court Judge James Gray, author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs, wants to decriminalize marijuana. That would generate $2 billion annually in tax revenues that could be spent on education and drug treatment, he says. The government should regulate the quality of marijuana, he says, so tokers would know their weed won’t be laced with poisons.
Government is willing to sell our souls for tax revenue. Why not tax contract killings while their at it?

“Would it result in more marijuana usage?” Gray asks himself. “Yes, at least for six months, but then rates would be more like Holland’s.”
Yes, the usage of an addictive substance would increase but then magically taper off or decline. That's the way it usually works with addiction right?

He goes on to wonder why so many one-time drug users are imprisoned for crimes that didn’t harm a third party. “What the public doesn’t realize is that when you take a breadwinner out of the family and incarcerate him, it has a ripple effect,” he says. “There is nothing but negative about jailing people.”
Usually the "breadwinner" in the family isn't on drugs. But I guess this just goes to show you what the progressives think the average family is like. As for "nothing but negative about jailing people," how about less crime. Isn't that a positive?

The people who write this can't see beyond the tax revenue and their fond hippie memories. Thankfully a clear majority of Americans disagree with this proposition. (although in the democrat party in Portland they may have a large constituency)

3 comments:

Daniel said...

But what about the enviros? Won't they oppose the wanton destruction of the plants? Oh wait, they are the hippies.

R Huse said...

I’ve always had mixed feelings about drug legalization. In tend to support it because the good outweighs the bad. The corrosive effect on law enforcement is horrendous. The amount of money involved boosts funds available for bribery to an amount anyone would succumb to. The down side of course is more addiction, and it is disingenuous to say that there wouldn’t be more of it. The up side is that addiction would have lower ramifications for the community on the large scale, there would be less crime due to lower cost and availability. I think it’s a little silly to draw some sort of arbitrary line though saying there would be some evil in the government taxing this behavior, there would. However that line was crossed long ago when governments started encouraging gambling and cigarette smoking. Don’t think for a moment government has the slightest interest in decreasing smoking, they have claimed this is a product more addictive than heroin and deadly to all around. Yet they keep cigarettes legal and tax them just high enough so that people wont quit but maximum money extraction is obtained. They are interested in one thing alone – maximum revenue that is politically tolerable. Effective, absurd.

Anonymous said...

“Would it result in more marijuana usage?” Gray asks himself. “Yes, at least for six months, but then rates would be more like Holland’s.”
Has he ever BEEN to Holland? If he could see the effects the liberal useage of drugs has had on the population, and the Dutch society in general, he might be forced to re-evaluate THAT statement!
Or, maybe he is of the school of thought that says: we can eliminate the crime by taking the law off the books. No laws against it, therefore no crime. See? Problem solved! Vote for me next election, if you can remember...