President Reagan's Sec. of State Against the Drug War
by Loretta Nall - Tuesday, October 13 2009This is a great piece from a very respectable and influential person.
Wall Street Journal
George Shultz on the Drug War
The former secretary of state has long doubted the wisdom of interdiction.Ottawa
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADYWhen George P. Shultz took office as Ronald Reagan's secretary of state in 1982, his first trip out of the country was to Canada. His second was to Mexico.
"Foreign policy starts with your neighborhood," he told me in an interview here in the Canadian capital last week. "I have always believed that and Ronald Reagan believed that very firmly. In many ways he had [the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement] in his mind. He paid a lot of attention to both Mexico and Canada, as I did."
Mr. Shultz, now a co-chair of the North American Forum—which pulls together members of the business and government community for an annual pow-wow—is still paying a lot of attention to the American neighborhood.
These days that means taking seriously the problem of drug-trafficking violence on the Mexican border. "It's gotten to the point that . . . you've got to be worried about what's happening to Mexico, and you've got to realize that the money that's financing all that comes from the United States in terms of the profits from the illegal drugs. It's not healthy for us, let alone Mexico, to have this violence taking place."
Mr. Shultz carries weight on this issue, in part because he has been thinking about it critically for decades and listening to our neighbors' viewpoints. He has long harbored skepticism about interdiction as a solution to drug abuse in the U.S. Those doubts were prescient.
Write to O'Grady@wsj.com
Mr. Shultz was President Ronald "Just Say No To Drugs" Reagan's Secretary of State. I like how Mr. Shultz points out that the political space to discuss this issue just doesn't exist in most cases.
It's up to us to carve out that space and claim it as our own. The drug war cannot go on forever, even though that is exactly what it was intended to do. We can stop it if we stop being afraid of what our neighbors, church members and co-workers think of our opinion that the drug war is wrong and completely counter-productive to our aims of reducing violence, demand, and addiction.
Have you ever seen such dancing?
"They can do anything
we can't stop them from doing."
-- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
George Shultz on the Drug War
US: Column: O'Grady, Mary Anastasia WSJ 12 Oct 2009
..."We need at least to consider and examine forms of controlled legalisation of drugs. I find it very difficult to say that. Sometimes at a reception or cocktail party I advance these views and people head for somebody else. They don't even want to talk to you. I know that I'm shouting into the breeze here as far as what we're doing now. But I feel that if somebody doesn't get up and start talking about this now, the next time around, when we have the next iteration of these programs, it will still be true that everyone is scared to talk about it. No politician wants to say what I have just said, not for a minute."
-- former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Oct. 7, 1990, addressing an alumni gathering at the Stanford Business School
where he had returned to the faculty.
Walter Cronkite on the Drug War
Hugh Downs on the Drug War
BW: One of the arguments against even talking about decriminalizing drugs is that you're condoning their use. If you say, for example, the war on marijuana causes more problems than it solves, it's not uncommon for the Drug Czar to say, "Ah-hah! You're encouraging kids to smoke marijuana!" Did you get any of that reaction?
HD: Yes, I did. I got some. And some from viewers. Although, I repeat, it wasn't like the whole public rose up against what I had [to say]. There was a lot more sympathy out there than I expected. That didn't mean that the powers-that-be weren't upset by it.
Hugh Downs interview with Bill Winter
Advocates for Self-Government
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Salem-News.com (October 13, 2009 15:16)
Medical Marijuana: Dangerous and Addicting?
No Medical Evidence!
Dr. Phil Leveque Salem-News.com
“Lets get Leveque” was the chant of the Oregon Medical Board during the early years of medical marijuana.
(MOLALLA, Ore.) - Dr. Phillip LevequeReaders maybe startled to read this title as I was when it was scathingly thrown at me at a Kangaroo Court by the Oregon Medical Board – FBI (Foolish Beyond Ignorance). I couldn’t believe my ears.
I couldn’t believe my eyes either as I saw some ten members of the Oregon Medical Board sit there like dunces with their pointy hats ostensibly believing and agreeing with every word of the Board Chairman Dr. Frank Spokas of Ontario, Oregon. Other members of the board seemed to be sitting there dumbly taking this all in.
Celebrity Stoners: American High Society
Hugh Downs speaks on Marijuana at retirement from 20/20 show
ABC News, 1 minute (September 1999)
Have you ever seen such dancing?
Pete Guither
Mary Anastasia O’Grady has always been one of the brighter lights in the Wall Street Journal opinion section. She understands that supply side efforts in the drug war are incapable of success. It’s a simple matter of the laws of economics.
Yesterday, she writes about the subject again in George Shultz on the Drug War:
The former secretary of state has long doubted the wisdom of interdiction.
It’s a positive piece and valuable, I guess, but what strikes me in the article is how furiously everyone mentioned in it is dancing around the solution without quite being able to say it, even while bemoaning the fact that people aren’t able to talk about it.
What a strange and dark world it must be to have power, know the truth, and be afraid to tell it.
The High Cost of Empty Prisons thread
2.2m x $25k = $55 billion per yr.
The High Profits of Full Prisons