Tancredo Says It's Time To Legalize Drugs; Former Congressman Says Drug War Lost

KMGH-TV ABC 7 Denver, Colo. ^ | 2009-05-20 | Steve Saunders

[rabscuttle385]

DENVER -- Admitting that it may be "political suicide" former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo said its time to consider legalizing drugs.

He spoke Wednesday to the Lincoln Club of Colorado, a Republican group that's been active in the state for 90 years. It's the first time Tancredo has spoken on the drug issue. He ran for president in 2008 on an anti-illegal immigration platform that has brought him passionate support and criticism.

Tancredo noted that he has never used drugs, but said the war has failed.

"I am convinced that what we are doing is not working," he said.

[Ken H]

It's my assumption that those who wish to legalize drugs would have the common sense to set an age limit under which you could not use these drugs legally.  Okay, since those drugs are now on the street, what happens immediately?  That's right, a black market pops up...

"Pops up"? Do you mean there is no black market now? From CASA:

Marijuana continues to be easier to buy than beer: 23 percent of teens find it easiest to buy compared to 15 percent who find beer easiest to buy.

http://www.casacolumbia.org/absolutenm/templates/PressReleases.aspx?articleid=533&zoneid=66

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You left out one reason often cited for ending the War on Drugs - the belief that under the Tenth Amendment, fedgov should butt out of a state issue. Simple yes/no question: do you think Wickard is in keeping with the original meaning of the Commerce Clause?

[nathanbedford]

Should we decriminalize?

It seems to me the question is not whether you or I should care about what a third party puts into his body, that is afterall a moral judgment, rather, the question is whether the government should care about what someone puts into his body?

Clearly the government has a constitutional right to regulate and criminalize drugs just as it has the right to regulate food and ethical drugs. The question is not whether it's constitutional but whether it is good public policy.

Seems to me that if a government prohibition on the use of drugs actually eliminated drug use, few except perhaps some aging hippies and top models would argue vehemently against such laws which would redeem so many wretched lives. But experience has shown that government fiat does not eliminate drug use. So the real question is, does government prohibition reduce drug use? And if it does, is the price worth paying? It is not entirely clear that the laws against drug use actually reduce their use because the prohibition itself creates a financial incentive which works to subsidize its use. The government has never found a way to eliminate or reduce drug usage without inserting a profit factor. Worse, the more the government is effective in reducing the inflow of illegal drugs, the more it creates a counter incentive of increased profitability by the law of supply and demand. Perversely, since the drugs tend to be addictive there is a physical compulsion to seek more of the drug and, since government efforts to eliminate it inevitably raise its price, users in withdrawal are tempted to finance their habits by becoming dealers. So it is not clear whether the government's efforts to reduce drugs by prohibiting their use actually does more harm than good.

One of the prices we pay for our government's campaign against drugs is certainly a loss of liberty. I tend towards the Libertarian's view that it is none of the government's damn business what I put in my body. However, I recognize that such usage inevitably presents a risk to society. I do not want inebriated drivers plowing into my automobile whether they are drunk on alcohol or drugs. But society has learned a hard lesson, that it is better to make the drunk driving the crime but not the consumption of alcohol itself.

Another price we pay is a loss of privacy. Mandatory testing of both government and private employees is to some degree intrusive. Queries about drug use and application forms are equally intrusive. Undercover agents operating in public bathrooms is an affront to our dignity. Eavesdropping of telephone conversations is unquestionably an invasion of privacy. It is the reduction, or rather the presumed reduction, if any, in the amount of drug usage obtained by these intrusions worth the price?

We pay a great financial price as well. The war on drugs costs us billions of dollars annually in enforcement and incarceration costs. Is this money well spent?

There is an insidious price as well: corruption and its handmaiden, cynicism. Our police, our border agents, our judges, one might say the entire criminal justice apparatus has been infected with a corruption generated by the huge profits to be made-profits which are there only because the government by its policies has created them. Inevitably cynicism results in the whole of the people beginning to despise rather than revere the rule of law.

Because drugs are illegal, the price is high and profits are enormous. Yet we send our boys to fight in Afghanistan to deprive Taliban chieftains of their poppy fields which finance at least indirectly the very terrorism we fight against. Would it not be better simply to eliminate the profits in poppies by legalizing the drug? Can we ever hope to bring sanity to Columbia while we in effect subsidize narcos by billions of dollars a year? Is the damage to our foreign policy, like the damage to our precious rule of law, worth what benefit we get from criminalizing drugs use?

On balance, I have to throw my lot in with William F. Buckley and say that the war against drugs is lost and we ought to try a new tact.

[Loud Mime]

Look what happened to organized crime when alcohol was legalized. They turned to other vices.

I have been predicting two events from the liberal presidency: legalizing drugs and the lowering of the age of consent. Any bets?

[familyop]

Libertarians should show us where, exactly, the US Constitution says that drug fiends, due to their addictions, have rights to commit so many different crimes against other Americans. They steal, murder, consume far more than their share of tax revenues, entice kids to join them, violate families in several ways...all because of their drug-addled nature. The list of their crimes against the rights of law-abiding Americans is long.

As for “legislating morality,” the Constitution itself legislates morality. So it is with the laws of the states: the laws that are most often used to put drug zombies in prisons. Our legislatures should pass laws to execute them.

[Misterioso]

. . . wants to legalize meth, pot and heroine.

I didn't know heroines were illegal.

[garbanzo]

You have to have a positive reason why drugs should not be a concern for the government

No, the government has to have a positive and compelling reason for interfering with the private lives of citizens. "I don't like druggies" is insufficient.

[familyop]

"I didn't know heroines were illegal."

Heh. Yeah, now we have to call them, "heroes," because so many drug-crazed feminists enforce their linguistic activism and sexual confusion in schools, businesses and government offices. ;-)

[garbanzo]

But since they cannot be processed by the system for their drug use, they will remain on the streets until caught actually committing a burglary.

BS. The idea of drug zombies is nothing more than drug war propaganda with absolutely nothing in empirical evidence to support it. The idea of "precrime" is so foreign and abhorrent to a free society it hardly bears mentioning.

[garbanzo]

Society is negative impacted.

Society doesn't have rights - individuals do.

Okay, since those drugs are now on the street, what happens immediately?...So kids will have easy access to many narcotics.

What universe do you live in where these drugs aren't already on the street and kids don't have access to pretty much any drug they want?

[calex59]

What other people put into their bodies is really none of your, or my, business. Drugs have been around since alcohol was invented, actually before that even. Before the turn of the century(20th) and for a few years after drugs were legal in the US, in fact cocaine was used in making coca cola, not much, a very small, small amount. Drug users were no more plentiful then than they are now, just as people kept drinking when prohibition was in effect people keep using drugs whether they are legal or not. In fact, being illegal and such a great money maker for gangs and other drug dealers, children are more apt to become drug users and addicts simply because dealers push drugs onto children.

It is profitable don't you see? Legalize drugs, take the money out of it and the crime either goes away completely or close to it. No more money to finance well armed gangs, no more shoot outs on the border, drugs cause those shoot outs, drugs finance the gangs such as MS13.

Claiming the high ground is simply BS. Don't want to do drugs? Don't do them, I don't. The only ones who are damaged with legal drugs are the ones taking them, no one else. The people who are damaged when drugs are illegal are too numerous to count, but of course moralistic people can't be concerned about the many victims caused by the war on drugs. They have to make sure everyone lives just the way they want them to.

People who think drugs should be illegal are actually liberals, because they want to control what others do.

I am not a drug user, never have been, I am not a libertarian, never have been. I am a realist and a person who learns from history and I use common sense and not a moralistic desire to control other people.

[ketsu]

There’s too much money involved. Each doper in jail is 20,000+ out of the tax payer’s pocket. Not to mention all the government and corporate bureaucracy that the war on drugs brings in on your dime. Add no knock warrents etc... and the war on drugs is too good a scam to quit.

[roamer_1]

BS. The idea of drug zombies is nothing more than drug war propaganda with absolutely nothing in empirical evidence to support it. The idea of "precrime" is so foreign and abhorrent to a free society it hardly bears mentioning.

Three of my friends are LEOs, two are sheriff's deputies, and one a suburban municipal cop, all in disparate areas of the country... All of them tell me the very same thing wrt crack/meth. Burglaries and petty thefts increase exponentially as users increase. This is extremely easy to see in rural areas where crime is rather low prior to the arrival of "kitchens" in the area.

They have no reason to lie to me, or to promote any propaganda. I also know the local LEOs pretty well, and the local street. Without a doubt, it is the users jonzin' for a fix that are behind most of the theft here.

And sitting here, I can think of five kids I know personally who have become "drug zombies"... One particularly who had her two children illegitimately (at age 15), and then lost them to the state because she was not capable of caring for them because she was stoned out of her mind all the time. She has been convicted twice of felony theft and B&E, and also illegally selling prescription narcotics... all to support her meth habit.

All of the kids I am talking about were great kids - Bright, out-going, full of life. All were above average in grades until they hit the party scene. All of them now have illegitimate children, and have been through detox at least once, have utterly destroyed themselves and their families, and of them all, only one has a chance in hell of turning it around, and that is a small chance at that.

You may cry BS all you like, but the impact of drugs on this country is deep and wide, and I dare say you will find it hard to find a single family anywhere that has not been damaged by drug abuse in a very intimate way. It is insidious and pervasive, and is not limited to the user, ever.

[Leisler]

True, drugs are self punishing. I don’t see why I should be taxed for yet another big government program that is ineffective.

Some cities have under 50% arrest rates for murder, and of those, near 50% convictions for an effective 25% conviction rate for murder. I wouldn’t doubt that rape, break ins, auto thefts are in the 10% rate.

It would be better if those crimes where solved at higher rates.

Drugs are an easy, make work, time eating event for the many town and city union security bureaucracies. Not to mention part of the Lawyer Income Support Act.

[Leisler]

Libertarians are very anti welfare state, not only seeing it as corrupting of the welfare ‘clients’, but no one has the right to take from you and your kids and give it to another, and also the political control the government welfare industry has over people. Entire cities are now human welfare farms who’s main reason for existence is to supply urban voters to state and federal Democrat politicians.

[Kent C]

What universe do you live in where these drugs aren't already on the street and kids don't have access to pretty much any drug they want?

If the gov't can't keep drugs out of maximum security prisons, they'll never be able to keep them off the street.

That said, drugs are harmful to individuals who rely on their mind to survive... who don't have the claws and teeth of tigers or the agility of the gazelle. Taking drugs is analogous to pulling the tigers' teeth and breaking the gazelles' legs.

[Leisler]

About five years ago I was superving remodeling a waterfront estate. I had a few white homeless guys that cleaned up, lumped, did grunt work.

I was driving them back to their ‘camp’ and asked them if they wanted a 12 pack of beer. They said no thanks, they were getting meth and heroin cheaper than beer.

This was five years ago. State and Federal are doubling the taxes, at least, on beer, wine, spirits.

It is getting to the point that illegal drugs are less expensive than legal drugs.

In Massachusetts a carton of Marlboro’s have gone from 25$ to 75$ and soon 90$

Oregon has proposed doubling the cost of beer. Not doubling the tax, the cost. So too yesterday Senator Grassly (R) proposed doubling the federal alcohol tax. Look for a PBR to cost 5$ in a bar.

[garbanzo]

drugs are harmful to individuals who rely on their mind to survive

Fatty foods and lack of exercise are harmful to the health of productive individuals. The government has no right to tell me what to eat or when or how much to exercise. My body, my choice.

[garbanzo]

They have no reason to lie to me, or to promote any propaganda.

Please. Law enforcement is the least reliable entity. Their jobs depend on the War on Drugs. There are certainly people who ruin their lives on drugs, but people ruin their lives on bunches of other stuff too. And guess what, it's their lives to ruin.

[Kent C]

>> ...drugs are harmful to individuals who rely on their mind to survive

> Fatty foods and lack of exercise are harmful to the health of productive individuals. The government has no right to tell me what to eat or when or how much to exercise. My body, my choice.

Look. I implied the validity of your former statement by saying that the gov’t can’t even keep drugs out of prisons. My point on the effect of drugs on one’s mind/reason was just to show that it isn’t prudent to use drugs if you want to maximize your survival. And yes, it’s not prudent to harm your body either... and yes, it is your choice, as long as the rights of others are not violated. A very stupid choice, imo, but yours nonetheless.

[rman04554]

Tancredo’s right...time to legalize it...it will bring the prices down leading to less crime (fewer break-ins and robberies by addicts) and put the narco-terrorists out of business..oh yeah, also generate some taxes