Tag: law

Legalize, But Prohibit?

Pot Pot, legalization, collage, photo-montage, Paul Jacob, Jim Gill

Last week, I warned of marijuana legalization.

Not that I’m against it. But how much will actual freedom be increased?

Note: I’m not bemoaning, as one activist friend argued, that “if you can’t toke up and celebrate in public when it passes, it’s not legalization.”

One cannot now legally smoke tobacco in most public buildings (meaning those open for business as well as government-owned structures) or drink a beer in most public parks or while navigating sidewalks. But you can smoke and drink at home or on certain types of private property.

Ending the drug war and treating newly legalized marijuana pretty much as we treat alcohol and tobacco seems like a long overdo common sense approach.

There’s also the freedom of home cultivation. I have friends who make wine at home, for private consumption. It’s legal; it’s proper. It should also be legal to grow cannabis at home. Yet, many a politician thinks otherwise.

And they are inspired, in a sense, by the popular legalization mantra, “legalize, tax and regulate.” That sends an ominous signal: in order to maximize revenues, politicians see the revenue advantage in forbidding hard-to-tax home cultivation — cultivation that is, let’s face it, a traditional freedom, a right “retained by the people.”

The excuse for this continued prohibition could be “think of the children.” But it’s probably just greed for revenue … and the even more hidden enticements of “crony capitalism,” which plagues almost all industry.

You should be able to grow a plant. And self-medicate. These are basic human rights, and the state should work around those.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Tags courts, Drug War, law, marijuana, marijuana legalization, prohibition, tax, tax policy

Common Sense crime and punishment folly general freedom national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Cannabis and Kings

Jack boot, photomontage, collage, James Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, http://cognitivebiasparade.prosite.com/

The over-riding reason to end the War on Drugs is to re-establish the rule of law in this country.

From Nixon and Reagan to the present time, America has vastly increased the population of prison inmates, many of them for drug offenses. The “land of the free” shouldn’t boast a larger population (per capita and total) of unfree persons than any other nation on the planet.

Further, in the mania to apprehend contraband drug users, producers, and traffickers, we’ve pretty much lost Bill of Rights protections on our lives and our property.

We’ve armed nearly every conceivable division of government against us, turning local, state and federal police “services” into police state apparatuses that hound and steal from portions of our population — which turns them from citizens into fearful, resentful, servile subjects. Meanwhile, the use of civil asset forfeiture and other policing for profit schemes corrupt our police forces in a serious and fundamental and “King Georgish” way.

Sam and John Adams, Toms Jefferson and Paine — they’d all be aghast at what we have become.

But what of the growing tide to legalize/decriminalize marijuana? Reading a report by Steven Greenhut in Reason, it becomes apparent that not every step moves us towards a rule of law. Some steps in “regulating and taxing” cannabis may be more about using crony capitalism to choose winners and losers.

Let’s use some common sense from lessons learned with alcohol — er, with regulating alcohol, that is. Keep marijuana away from the kids and keep the over-regulation of marijuana away from adults.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Tags drug prohibition, Drug War, drugs, law, marijuana, Reason, war on drugs

Common Sense crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom nannyism responsibility too much government

Must the War Go On and On?

Post author By CS Admin
Post date August 18, 2015
13 Comments on Must the War Go On and On?

I was still a kid, but I remember: as the Vietnam War dragged on, and on, we Americans continued to receive hopeful missives about how the next assault, or regroup, or dedication of manpower and weaponry, would lead to better results.

That’s what came to mind as I read the latest dispatch from the War on Drugs, in the Los Angeles Times. “White House announces push to combat growing heroin epidemic,” ran the headline.

So, it’s growing again? Haven’t I read this about a thousand times?

Talk about a familiar story:

The path to heroin addiction and overdoses can begin when patients are legally prescribed drugs containing opium, said Dr. Walter Ling, professor of psychiatry and founding director of the Integrated Substance Abuse Program at UCLA.…

“Once they get hooked they find out it’s very expensive to get these medicines and it’s much cheaper on the street.… That leads to street heroin abuse, which leads to the increase in opium overdoses,” Ling said.

But the rest of the story? Not reported.

Oh, sure: we were regaled with how dangerous the cheap street drugs are, because of how they are diluted. What we are not told, though, is that this is not a characteristic of heroin, as such, but of illegal heroin.

Decriminalize it. Let the legitimate market do what black markets cannot: provide responsible information that would discourage accidental overdoses.

Instead, we have a new and futile $1.3 million plan.

We’re overdosing on government. The cure is to cut down government to the proper dose.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Tags addiction, big government, crime, Drug War, drugs, law

Common Sense crime and punishment general freedom jury rights and duties U.S. Constitution

Guess Who Else Nullifies?

Citizens have more power than they exercise. But folks in government aren’t exactly falling all over each other in the rush to help citizens participate and realize their potential.

Take juries. There are few more awesome responsibilities than sitting on a jury. And one of the things you can do, as a juror, is to refuse to follow the law or the judge, instead making your decision contrary to the immediate, official directive. Disapprove of a bureaucracy’s “legal” prosecution of an individual or group? Judge the law as well as the facts. Acquit.

Glenn Reynolds, writing in USA Today, shows that this practice has a long, honorable history in our country — he not unreasonably mentions how northern abolitionists fought the Fugitive Slave Act — and, if you, the juror, push it, “there’s nothing anyone can do about it…

Of course, prosecutors have essentially the same power, since they’re under no obligation to bring charges against even an obviously guilty defendant. But while the power of juries to let guilty people go free in the name of justice is treated as suspect and called “jury nullification,” the power of prosecutors to do the exact same thing is called “prosecutorial discretion,” and is treated not as a bug, but as a feature in our justice system.

Reynolds concisely makes the case that jury nullification is, itself, a designed feature of our American constitutional tradition, and not nearly so buggy as “prosecutorial discretion.”

Why? Its tendency is to liberate us from usurping government action.

Prosecutors’ “discretion” (on the other hand) gives folks in government more power over our lives. And ruins many.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Tags Glen Reynolds, jury duty, jury nullification, justice, law, prosecution

crime and punishment general freedom too much government

Marauding Cops

Policemen who perpetrate acts like those I am about to describe should be imprisoned.

That’s not an anti-police statement, it’s a pro-law-and-order one. Anybody who vandalizes the property of innocent people and pointlessly terrorizes them, whether flashing a badge as prelude or not, should be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and punished.

Santa Ana police raided a medical-marijuana dispensary, a legal business in California. Why? Solely because it lacked a license.

Techdirt.com, which has videos of the raid, suggests that although “having the proper paperwork in place is important” — and it sure seems to be if not-being-raided is also important to you — the shop was in line to get the license. The process had been bogged down by local politics.

Nevertheless, officers on site “treated this lack of proper paperwork like it was the Zeta Cartel operating under its nose. The video captured by the dispensary’s cameras shows heavily-armed cops — some wearing ski masks — smashing through two doors and yelling at the peaceably-assembled customers to lie on the floor.”

We then see the jolly officers sampling the shop’s foodstuffs, playing darts, and ripping cameras off the wall.

They missed a couple. (Hence Techdirt’s extensive video coverage.)

Motive? It seems apparent that they engaged in all this abusive authority-flaunting just because they could.

And there is no real doubt that they knew what they were doing was wrong, and they knew that we would know. That’s why they went for the cameras.

Just like any gang trying to get away with something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Tags Drug War, law, marijuana, police, police abuse

folly general freedom government transparency national politics & policies too much government

Safety, Savings and Symbolism

Post author By CS Admin
Post date June 25, 2015
2 Comments on Safety, Savings and Symbolism

How can the U. S. save $2.5 billion a year, reduce the federal workforce by 4,000 hires, and engage in a symbolic act of undoubted patriotism, all at the same time?

Get rid of the Department of Homeland Security.

Matt A. Mayer, a former DHS employee who claims to have “written more on DHS than just about anyone,” writes in Reason that dismantling DHS would increase co-ordination and decrease inefficiencies.

Since DHS was put in place, in 2003, to increase governmental co-ordination in the face of terrorist threats, Mayer’s charge that it serves the opposite cause should … give us pause.

Establishing the DHS didn’t get rid of turf wars. Why would it? It increased the turf rather than merely reroute chains of communication and command. All other agencies still exist. Extra turf exacerbates co-ordination difficulty.

And then there’s what state and local law enforcement faces: “the multi-headed hydra.” The federal operation remains fragmented, which “only ensures that key items will fall through the cracks between these departments, whose personnel spend far too much time fighting each other for primacy than they should. Our enemies couldn’t ask for a more fertile environment within which to attack us.”

I added the italics, for emphasis.

Ever since Jimmy Carter ran for the presidency on consolidating bureaucratic departments in the nation’s capital, but delivered, instead, new departments, the “logic” of adding new bureaucracies onto old has proven to be the “easy answer” for insiders. But a transparent failure, for everyone else.

So, start over. Get rid of the inefficient monster.

And take heart: republics don’t have “homelands”; empires do. Let’s stop playing the wrong game.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF