Cannabis Reconsidered

[SHRED]

When pro-death penalty advocates justify their beliefs by claiming, "we taxpayers shouldn't pay to house and feed murderers" they fail, in many cases, to carry that thought process over to the 100's of thousands in prison right now for illegal substances.


Cannabis Reconsidered: A Paradigm Shift – from Escalating Punishment to Least Harm
By: Kathryn in MA Monday September 20, 2010 8:06 am

There is a video online showing a SWAT team invading a home, terrifying a woman and her 7-year-old son, shooting two dogs, shoving a man up against a wall, and cuffing him. He cries out in anguish, “You shot my dog? You shot my dog? She was a good dog!” His cries of anguish must have risen to heaven and God must have heard, because plenty of us here on earth have. And our reaction is that this is wrong. This level of violence on the part of law enforcement is wrong. This is a heinous state of affairs and it shocks the conscience.

Our next reaction is to ask ourselves, “How did we get to this place?” And we find that the genesis of the War on Drugs was in corruption and racism. Two corporatists made their competitor’s product illegal and wrapped that in racial hysteria. By stoking fears of Mexican laborers and black jazz musicians, William Randolph Hearst insured forests would be leveled for newsprint and DuPont insured that BP would ruin the Gulf for plastic bags.

Cannabis prohibition entered a new phase when President Richard Nixon ignored his own commissioned report advocating for legalization and used his War on Drugs as vindictive political retribution against the hippies harshing his Vietnam war.

Our current phase in cannabis prohibition is from President Ronald Reagan’s privatization of prisons – prisons for profit. Halliburton makes prisons and profits from full prisons. And cannabis smokers are an easy bust. One expects that the next phase of the War on Drugs will be the privatization of enforcement duties over to Blackwater.

more:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/72320

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[old mark]

1. A similar case in my region last year, family dogs shot in front of the family and kids

and it was the wrong house.

We now have brutal and out of control police nationwide, and most of it stems from the prohibition on drugs. As with the prohibition on alcohol, the huge amount of cash to be made by selling the desired forbidden has influenced the legislators, banks and, yes,law enforcement to keep it illegal.

I have worked as a drug/alcohol addictions counsellor, and in a mental institution,and a prison and I am a recovering alcoholic. I favor legalizing pot and decriminalizing every other drug used for entertainment purposes. Spend some money on rehabilitation and treatment of addiction, get rid of the crime aspects of it all, make this a better place for all of us, even those of us who don't use.

Sadly, I believe this is a long way off, but one never knows...


mark

[Lint Head]

2. You think it's bad now. Wait until you see

Blackwater / Xe helicopters over your home. Torture by a private corporate fascist army is just around the corner.

[Blue Owl]

3. Legalize it

It's one of nature's/God's own plants, for fuck's sake.

[Scuba]

4. And prisoners make for slave labor too. n/t