Hit & Run > Obama on Pot: Har Har Har, The Joke's On You! - Reason Magazine:
"At yesterday's super-excellent online intertubes Town Hall meeting, admitted pot user President Barack Obama drew his biggest laugh with his comments about legalizing marijuana:More than 100,000 questions were submitted, with the idea Obama would answer those that were most popular. But after 3.6 million votes were cast, one of the top questions turned out to be a query on whether legalizing marijuana might stimulate the economy by allowing the government to regulate and tax the drug.Ha ha ha. Very funny. Not. Especially given two recent developments. First, Obama's Justice Department has backtracked on its pledge not to conduct raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in California and other states that allow such things. Second, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is jawboning Mexico about how the U.S. will stop drug demand, etc. in an effort to decrease violence along the border."
'I don't know what this says about the online audience,' Obama said in the session in the East Room, drawing a laugh from his live audience, which included teachers, nurses and small-business people. 'The answer is no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow the economy.'
"Alcohol did not create Al Capone's gang violence in the hometown of our current president. Prohibition did.
Marijuana does not create murderous drug cartels in Mexico. America's War on Drugs does.
Surely President Barack Obama, one of the smartest men to inhabit the White House, must understand that truth—even if he chooses to laugh-off those of us who want to get serious about the need to end the social insanity of neo-Prohibition by legalizing marijuana and other psychoactive chemicals.
French essayist Georges Bernanos wrote, "The worst, the most corrupting of lies, are problems poorly stated." It is an outrageous lie, one that corrupts intelligent public policy discourse, when we talk of "drug violence." The official corruption and murderous mayhem in both Mexico and on our side of the border are not a result of dried leafy vegetation and white powder. They are the consequence of a lucrative black market, spawning profits for which bad people are willing to kill and die, directly resulting from federal and state laws that prohibit the sale, use, and possession of drugs...
President Obama promised an end to politics as usual, but he now stands in the way of a long-neglected debate about ending the harm creation of draconian policies which: infringe on individual liberty; rip apart neighbor nations; create government violence against our own people by militarized police forces; cause health harm to the young by forcing psycho-active drugs underground, with no regulation of their content, purity, and strength, or education about how to use them intelligently; promote disrespect for the rule of law, with unequal penalties applied to the rich and to the poor—all factors which have disgracefully transformed the United States of America into the world's number one jailer..."
"...from John Lingan at Splice Today:The justifications for legalizing pot are many and varied, from the unbelievable stress that the drug war places on our criminal justice and law enforcement systems to the fact that such policy has done nothing to curb marijuana use over the last decade; more people are going to jail for nonviolent crimes, while production of opium and cannabis have both doubled and the society-wide rate of use has remained at 1998 levels. But more importantly, the economic crisis and the recent escalation of gang violence in Mexico have punctured whatever puritanical groupthink bubble remains in place to prevent this legislation from changing. We literally can't afford to waste money and resources fighting this worthless battle anymore.
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