A Dose of Reality

From www.thedaily.com

 

Legalize it

War on drugs a failure – just like all laws against consensual acts

By Michael Maiello Wednesday, June 8, 2011

The Drug Enforcement Administration asked for $2.4 billion to run its fiscal 2011 operations. Maybe it’s time to “just say no” to that and add the money to the list of cuts that Republicans are demanding in exchange for raising the country’s debt ceiling. As revealed last week by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which includes such luminaries as former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, the war on drugs should absolutely end right now.

This isn’t a bunch of college kids sitting in a muddy field on the campus of Reed College talking about bringing down the man. This is a study by people universally regarded as serious. If we’ve learned anything since the financial crisis, it’s that if Paul Volcker’s name is attached to something it is immediately credible. The former Fed chairman, most widely known for breaking inflation by taking the proverbial punch bowl away from America’s economic revelers, now says it’s okay to smoke a joint.

Actually what he (and former president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo and former president of Colombia Cèsar Gaviria) and the rest of the commissioners are saying is that turning the world into a battlefield hasn’t actually worked to stop people from taking forbidden mind-altering substances. Since 1998, use of cannabis is up 8.5 percent, use of cocaine is up 27 percent and use of opiates is up 34.5 percent.

The commission detailed the myriad ways in which global drug prohibition has violated human rights (drug trafficking is a capital offense in some places), costs taxpayers tons of money (in enforcement, court and prison bills), and has had a negative impact on public health (HIV and hepatitis run rampant among intravenous drug users who can’t legally buy clean gear).

But there’s something deeper at work here that touches on the best insight conservative thinkers have brought to the theory of government: We should only have laws that are truly necessary for society’s collective well-being, and we should resist the temptation to stretch our imaginings of how one individual’s choices affect everybody else. Sure, drug addictions can wreck lives and families. But so can televised golf and dead-end jobs, and we don’t ban those.

It in no way matters to me if my colleague at work unwinds this evening by drinking a beer, smoking pot, going for a jog or watching food-oriented television shows. If my colleague wants to shoot a gun out the window to unwind, then we need some laws. Want a drink? Fine. Have a drink. Want to drink and drive? No. This is easy stuff, and yet we spend billions of dollars and ruin the lives of our fellow citizens doing just the opposite of the easy, right thing to do.

Some people like to go online and play poker for money. The Department of Justice says this is a crime. You can day-trade stocks if you want, which is possibly a greater financial risk, but you can’t spend your money playing cards. You can also, by the way, spend your money on idiotic games about fake fish tanks and farms by the game-maker Zynga, but Texas hold ’em somehow offends our national sensibilities. The government recently shut down several poker sites and is prosecuting the proprietors for money laundering. Zynga, meanwhile, is planning a public offering of its stock.

Gambling, we’re told, has to be tightly controlled because its players are exposed to financial risk and because it’s potentially addictive. Zynga sells people little drawings of sheep for money and depends on those people getting addicted to repetitive games that appeal to their basest instincts for progress and reward. The plain fact is that you or I or the government has no vested interest in whether or not somebody wants to play poker or Farmville. When we inject ourselves into that choice and say one is okay and the other isn’t, all sorts of absurd arguments and contradictions emerge.

Oh, and let’s not leave hookers out of this. I proudly voted for Eliot Spitzer to be New York’s governor. And my choice for governor should not have been negated because the guy used a high-end escort service to buy top-shelf sex from a prostitute who was a completely willing and unapologetic participant in the transaction.

Human trafficking and forced sex work and the like should absolutely be illegal but what Spitzer did with Ashley Dupré just doesn’t matter to me.

If we had fewer laws, fewer jails, fewer prosecutors and prisoners, and smaller law-enforcement agencies that concentrated solely on crimes of violence, theft and confidence, we would save billions of dollars at all levels of government, we’d be a freer society, and we’d set the best example for the rest of the world. The purpose of lawmaking should be to enhance individual freedom, not to encourage a busybody bureaucracy.

Letter to the Editor, March 10, 2011

To the Editor:

Harmon Rezoning was back on the Village Board’s agenda last Monday, as the Village Board directed the Village Attorney to draft a third version of the Harmon Rezoning Law. Among the new provisions to be added are the reinstatement of a special permit for mixed use, and a provision that limits the number of two-bedroom apartments that may be developed, and prohibits the development of three-bedroom apartments.

These provisions are dangerous. The village’s consultant has made it clear, in a memorandum written to the Board of Trustees, that the motivation behind the provision limiting the development of two and three bedroom apartments is to discourage families with children from moving into the rezoned area. However, restricting the development of two and three bedroom apartments for the purpose of discouraging school age children from living in Harmon is a clear violation of the federal Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination against people on the basis of familial status (defined in the law as, essentially, children living with parents). Liability for a violation of a federal civil rights law, such as the Fair Housing Act, could subject the Village to having to pay punitive damages and attorneys’ fees for not only its own attorney, but for the plaintiffs as well. Such an outcome would have devastating consequences for the Village. Likewise, the Trustees’ plan to use the special permit process, as suggested on Monday evening by the former chair of the Economic Development Committee, to deny approval to any project that doesn’t have a net positive tax impact (meaning, a proposal that would generate more in village taxes than the current use of the property), could subject the Village to even more litigation, as denial of an application on that basis is simply not permitted under New York State law.

Unless the Village Board believes the village needs more housing stock, it should not rezone Harmon to permit and incentivize more and higher density housing in it. If, on the other hand, the Village Board believes we need more housing, then it must accept that, except under very limited circumstances not applicable here, it cannot attempt to dictate who occupies that housing. Families with children are a protected class under the Fair Housing Act, and any effort to treat them differently or deny them access to housing through exclusionary zoning or individual special permit decisions are likely to be met with resistance by the County and outright rejection and penalties imposed by the courts.

Much of the Article 78 proceeding challenging Harmon Rezoning is about making full disclosure to Village residents of exactly what impacts Harmon Rezoning may have. Despite accusations to the contrary offered by proponents of the law, the lawsuit is not about keeping out “affordable housing” – a term that appears nowhere in petitioners’ court papers. What it IS about is holding the Village Board to its responsibility to present the community with the facts about likely impacts on school population and school taxes, among many other issues. Opponents of the law believe this Village Board has not done so. Instead, the Village Board has chosen to 1) present questionable facts and figures and claim there would be no significant impacts; 2) reel over opposition challenging that claim; and, now, 3) propose illegal legislation to address the impacts it denies even exist. This is no way to govern, and it is unlikely to help the Village’s position in the ongoing Article 78 proceeding.

Roseann Schuyler
Croton on Hudson

Smack Down

Rep. Jackie Speier calls it like she sees it on the House floor. I love how her critics have accused her of exploiting her miscarriage to "blur the line" about abortion. News flash to the right: I think the point was that the line is, in fact, a blurry one. Punishing Planned Parenthood for performing the procedure she underwent is tantamount to punishing Planned Parenthood for responsibly seeing to the health needs of women.

Justice Thomas has been silent on the bench for five years - Nation - NewsObserver.com

Questions clarify the law; questions sharpen arguments; questions hold legal theories up to critical analysis and either improve them or show them to be faulty. Can't he even bother to make his clerks write something down for him to say? I don't know whether to be grateful or outraged at this anniversary.

Justice Thomas has been silent on the bench for five years - Nation - NewsObserver.com

U.S. District Judge John Roll faced death threats in 2009

An unspeakable tragedy, which should force an examination of the sad fact that extremism has become mainstream in political discourse today. Rest in peace, Judge Roll.

U.S. District Judge John Roll faced death threats in 2009