Obama in Mexico: Marijuana on the Agenda?
Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 10:20 am | By: MrSpof
“In his only public statement on the issue since taking office, President Obama treated the question of ending marijuana prohibition as a joke, but the families of the 7,000 murdered by Mexican drug gangs know it’s not funny,” said Marijuana Policy Project executive director Rob Kampia. “By refusing to bring the massive marijuana industry out of the shadows and regulate it as we do beer, wine and liquor, we’ve handed a massive subsidy to some of the most brutal thugs on the planet.”
In an April 12 discussion of Mexico’s brutal drug cartels on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan was asked by host Bob Schieffer, “What if marijuana were legalized? Would that change this situation?”
Rather than dismissing the idea as President Obama did in his recent online town hall meeting, Sarukhan said, “This is a debate that needs to be taken seriously, that we have to engage in on both sides of the border.”
via – Long Island Exchange “Obama in Mexico: Marijuana on the Agenda?”
The War on Drugs has gone on longer than all modern American wars combined!
[In June 1971, President Nixon identified "public enemy #1" and declared a "War on Drugs". Now in April 2009, President Obama is pledging to escalate the drug war violence in Mexico with gifts of more firepower and more money to fight the narcotrafficantes. Eight administrations now have continued this war, the only war since the Civil War whose casualties are American. And since 47% of all drug arrests are for marijuana and the huge majority of people who use drugs use only marijuana, the War on Drugs is really a War on Marijuana.
Each administration, save President Carter's, has pursued tougher penalties, stronger enforcement, and more interdiction of marijuana. The result? Today, a person born in June 1971 is a 37-year-old with a 50/50 chance of having used cannabis. The War on Marijuana is a ground action in our own country against 22 million unidentifiable enemies (for comparison's sake, that was the population of Iraq before we invaded) employed in our factories, schools, hospitals, banks, farms, and government.
What is the goal? To eliminate marijuana usage and/or exterminate the cannabis plant? What is the exit strategy? Once no pot plants exist, we can stop spending all this money and arresting all these people (and sometimes shooting them and their dogs)? What is the terrible cost of not fighting this war, that people will smoke pot, or at least, more of them will smoke pot? 22 million adults smoke pot! Already! What demonstrable harm is that causing now and how much worse will it get when we stop fighting the War on Marijuana?
The first question of war is not "can we win?" it is "should we fight?" This is a war that never needed to be fought and should be ended now. -- "R"R]
