Steal This Quote

I'm ripping this one off from Matt's facebook page. Fresh Ideas for a Tired Crusade

If it takes a churchgoing guidebook writer who spent his college years as a member of the marching band to call for an end to a tired war, so be it. The cheerleaders and architects of harsh drug laws — from Rush Limbaugh, who promised to take random drugs tests after admitting his addiction to pain pills, to the former drug czar Bill Bennett, who had a multimillion-dollar gambling habit — have been exposed as moral frauds.

See, it's articles like this that get me all ra-ra drug legalization. Then I have to go back and bury my head in the voluminous literature on the social ills associated with drug abuse to reconsider. Still, I think the right answer is not drug legalization. The right answer is drug control. But I'm just not sure it should emphasize law enforcement and incarceration to the degree that it does. Prevention and treatment were, amazingly enough, the main thrust of Nixon's administration (which started the so-called "war on drugs"), but apparently the creation of some new ways of scheduling the drugs, combined with the creation of a single drug enforcement agency, eventually led to politicians capturing the war for political gains. This is at least the hypothesis I'm working with: did politicians capture these early, relatively beneficial attempts at drug control? The building of prisons is an easy way, I'm hearing, to win votes. Whether they are as cost-effective at reducing drug consumption related harms as prevention and treatment methods - which are more delayed and less visible - is another matter completely. This quote by Nixon is awesome to by the way:

"You know, when people think about drugs, they're just disgusted by it. They want to lock them up and throw away the key. But it's more compelx than that." - Richard Nixon, told to his aide Bud Krogh during a helicopter flight over New York City.

And even more exciting quote, though, was this one by Obama Barack:

“I’m not interested in legalizing drugs. What I am interested in is putting more of an emphasis on the public health approach to drugs and less on incarceration.”