Candidates aren't candid on the WoD

[firefox]

Everyone seeks to pin what is wrong with politics. In the last election, my saying was that the candidates were not candid. I mean there really is a strong force controlling what comes out of their mouth and that force will not allow for discussion of the fraud we know as the War on Drugs.

The number of drug policy articles has grown over the last few years because the Internet and a call for reality cannot be ignored. But this one article from the Norwich Bulletin in Connectcut is somewhat special. It cites a judge of fifteen years that is different because he becomes candid. It also yields an important first sentence of the last paragraph. From http://tinyurl.com/94n8c

As with many other policies in Connecticut that are never evaluated for results, the "war on drugs" is not meant to be won; it is meant to be waged.

This article is important because it gives us a candid view from a judge on the bench. The WOD is fought with silence and slogans and the thought-stopping cliche. "Just say no" won Nancy Reagan a Medal of Freedom. But this is what we can learn by studying the War on Drugs, that the biggest problem with our political candidates is they are not candid.

Here are paragraphs 2 through 5 of that article-
The judge asserted what can neither be denied nor acknowledged -- that public policy on drugs doesn't work. Speaking from his 15 years of experience on the bench, Scheinblum estimated 90 percent of criminal cases in Connecticut are connected in some way to the pursuit of illegal drugs, and he asserted that society would be far better off to let users of such drugs obtain them by prescription and to be charged for them according to their ability to pay.

That is, the judge said, drugs are not the problem, not the cause of thievery, robbery, and violence; drug prohibitionis.

If now-illegal drugs were available to addicts by prescription, many addicts would waste their lives away, but at least they wouldn't be robbing and killing others for money for drugs, and drug dealers would not be killing others over drug sales territory. Most violent crime would disappear.

Sensible as this might seem -- after all, despite drug criminalization, illegal drugs are more prevalent than ever; the legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, claim so many more lives than illegal drugs; and who really cares how people waste their lives as long as they don't hurt others?-- the judge said any departure from futile drug policy would be blocked by "vested interests." For if drug prohibition crime ended, the judge said, Connecticut wouldn't need as many police, courts, prisons, drug programs and so forth.

Free Cannabis For Everyone