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Socialist, like you, support the legalization of hard drugs.

Wrong---Cuba, China, and Sweden are harshly anti-drug, as was the Soviet Union.

Has your position on smoking and property rights been correctly reported here?

The New Statesman, which is more typically shrouded in the soft socialist values of George Bernard Shaw or Beatrice Webb than Mill, argued that prohibitionists had not met that burden.

From the open publishing newswire: Many Indymedia readers have been raised on the “War on Drugs.” There were too many socialist-type gains in the 60s and 70s for the taste of President Nixon. With the mind-expansion help of drugs, people were uniting, racial and gender lines blurred and rights were won, communes that questioned land ownership were born, people loved freely and a war was stopped.
From a United States perspective, what has this 30-year war given us? A booming profit-driven prison economy where half of those incarcerated are non-violent drug consumers? An expensive law enforcement system where one half of our “peace officers” are mandated to convict petty sellers and consumers? A drained economy that sends billions upon billions of US dollars to right wing paramilitaries in Latin America to stop drug production, which kills thousands of peasants.

This war has fueled a violent black market, a savage capitalism that will never be diminished because of the enormous profits to be had. And, although our government professes concern for the consumer, thousands die each year due to no quality regulation. A friend of mine died last year because of this.

The war has failed, violently and miserably, and its motivation now as in the beginning is clearly right wing government control. First to slap down US leftists and now to control all of Latin America so the literal superhighways may be paved through such devices as Plan Colombia, Plan Puebla Panama and the extension of NAFTA.