Another Stasher C.C. from Lowndes County emailed Georgia Rep. Tommy Benton to protest his stance that marijuana users should be tortured by the brutal act of caning, as is the standard in Singapore.

GA Rep. Benton: "I am opposed to the legalization of marijuana. I think we should go to caning for people caught using and maybe execute dealers."

Before we get to Rep. Benton’s response (sadly, this one is not a Hall & Oates cover), I’d like to explain a bit what “caning” is, courtesy of research by Georgia NORML’s David Clark and the website of World Corporal Punishment (placed below the “Read more” link in case you’re sensitive to pictures and descriptions of brutality).  This isn’t some schoolhouse rap on the knuckles from the teacher; this is a form of torture.

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

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This just in from a Georgia Stasher as part of our ongoing series called Politicians on Pot, where listeners send in replies from their elected officials regarding marijuana law reform.

Thanks for the email. We will have to agree to disagree on this and whether or not money is wasted. I am opposed to the legalization of marijuana. I think we should go to caning for people caught using and maybe execute dealers. That would solve the problem as well. That is what they do in Singapore and they don’t have a drug problem, but then they have less liberty than we do here.

Rep. Tommy Benton
tommy.benton@house.ga.gov

Isn’t it amazing how much of the Constitution an elected official is willing to throw away for the Drug War Exception?  Here’s the Wikipedia entry on Singapore’s drug laws:

The law creates a presumption of trafficking for certain threshold amounts, e.g. 30 grams of cannabis. It also creates a presumption that a person possesses drugs if he possesses the keys to a premises containing the drugs, and that “Any person found in or escaping from any place or premises which is proved or presumed to be used for the purpose of smoking or administering a controlled drug shall, until the contrary is proved, be presumed to have been smoking or administering a controlled drug in that place or premises.” Thus, one runs the risk of arrest for drug use by simply being in the company of drug users. The law also allows officers to search premises and individuals, without a search warrant, if he “reasonably suspects that there is to be found a controlled drug or article liable to seizure”.

So if you don’t mind sacrificing essential liberty, if you’re cool with cops searching you and your property on mere suspicion or being considered guilty because you happened to be in a night club where someone unknown to you got caught sniffing coke in the restroom, or if you think it’s reasonable to execute someone for possessing 1.06 ounces of pot, you can have a relatively drug-free society.

The United States per-capita rate of drug crimes is 41st out of 60 countries surveyed by NationMaster.com at 560.1 per 100,000.  Singapore ranks near the bottom at #53 with a rate almost 1/12th that of America, or 46.8 per 100,000.  Yet Spain, with its fairly liberal drug laws, ranks #56 in the survey with only 27.9 drug offenses per 100,000.  That 30 grams of cannabis that gets you the hangman’s noose in Singapore isn’t even a crime in Spain and neither is buying and selling of seeds and cultivating up to five plants.

Now, certainly you’re going to have a lower rate when many of the “crimes” aren’t being counted (Spain has similar personal possession decriminalization for other drugs as well), but does anyone think Spain has descended into chaos?  By all accounts it seems to be at least as nice a place as Singapore, even though they lock up in prisons 2.6 times fewer citizens for all crimes (per capita prisoners: Spain 146/100k (#61); Singapore 388/100k (#12)).  It is tough to compare, as Singapore is a city-state on an island and Spain and America are larger continental countries with both urban and rural areas.  However, regardless of crime rate, it is simply un-American to suggest that we should be whipping people to punish them for smoking a joint.

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Download link: NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2009-04-02

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Gingrich: We should have Singapore-style drug tests for Americans

Want a clear sign that we are winning the war on drugs? When the prohibitionists have to offer a radical and extreme solution to drug use, you know you’re on the right track. Bill O’Reilly took a trip to Singapore and so in five days, he figures out the “remedy” to drugs.

Bill O’Reilly: Now, they have no drug problem in Singapore at all, number one, because they hang drug dealers — they execute them. And number two, the market is very thin, because when they catch you using, you go away with a mandatory rehab. You go to some rehab center, which they have, which the government has built. The United States does not have the stomach for that. We don’t have the stomach for that, Mr. Speaker.

Yep, that’s right mandatory random drug testing for EVERY CITIZEN. Execute citizens that have more drugs on them than you want (any amount will do). This isn’t just big government, it’s totalitarian government. It a government that give you the freedom to do what you should, as dictated by the elite ruling class. Your life is no longer yours, your life belongs to the state from beginning to end.

Surely the head of the “small government, get government out of our lives” party would strenuously disagree with this most fascist policy? Not on YOUR life..

Gingrich: Well, I think it’s time we get the stomach for that, Bill. And I think we need a program — I would dramatically expand testing. I think we have — and I agree with you. I would try to use rehabilitation, I’d make it mandatory. And I think we have every right as a country to demand of our citizens that they quit doing illegal things which are funding, both in Afghanistan and in Mexico and in Colombia, people who are destroying civilization.

That’s right, the country has every right to demand from you to stop doing things that the government determines illegal. You have no rights, the government has total and absolute rule in Newt Gingrich’s America. Newt in a single sentence sells out every philosophy he has ever expressed a belief in to “win” the war on Americans using marijuana. It takes a lot of desperation and futility to bring a mind like Newt to this point, and the drug war’s twisted logic is twisting Newt into a pretzel. The moralists in this country have tried everything in their power including shredding the Constitution and still it’s not enough.

Our time has come.

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