war on drugs

In which we discuss issues of civic responsibility and other close calls.

My friend Art Benevie had a column published in the News and Observer yesterday. I've spoken often with Art about the subject - the War on Drugs - and I always find his arguments compelling and powerful.

CHAPEL HILL - Last month San Francisco health officials met with groups that supported the idea of opening a "safe injection" center -- the first in the United States. It would be funded by the city and be limited to intravenous users of heroin, cocaine and other drugs. Addicts would bring their own drugs, receive clean needles and inject themselves under medical supervision instead of shooting up in the streets.

Note: This is a cross-post from my personal blog, The Bull in Full.

I linked without comment to a YouTube video, which was a fake drug ad for a compound called Incarcerex.  The ad promotes haphazard incarceration of drug users as a means to fix political ills, and is a brilliant piece of satire—I can't recommend it highly enough.

After posting that video, I was leafing through my print edition of the Herald-Sun, and came across the latest from Malcolm Berko in the business section.  I like reading Berko—he's certainly not handing out tips for socially responsible investing, but his irreverence for the icons of the financial world, like brokerage firms and Alan Greenspan, make him fun to read.  This week's column (linked from a paper with a more reasonable archiving system), though, was a tad disturbing.  A read wrote in asking about his shares in GEO, which used to be called Wackenhut, which Berko had recommended a few years ago.  As Berko notes, the company's revenues have gone up 450% in the past decade.  Why?  Because they run prisons. 

A good friend of mine at NC State is President of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. Under his guidance, the club has become increasingly active. This activity has mostly centered around education.

For instance, last week they had a Q & A session with a local lawyer, and watched a video from the ACLU. Even for me, as someone who has only been stopped for speeding once, and who has never (and will never) be in a situation where I will be worried about what the cops might find in a search, the session was incredibly interesting. From my point of view, the minute we excuse certain government actions by saying, "oh well that person is a criminal so who cares?" is the moment we lose our rights as citizens to be free from unreasonable searches.
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Heating your home with Corn sound corny? Well a couple in New Jersey are using a Corn burning stove to heat part of their 8000 sq.ft. home. It takes approximately 50 pounds of corn a day and heats so well they sometimes have to open their windows to cool the place down, and the lady of the house has been known to wear a bikini around the house in winter.

The corn burning stove costs around $4000. But the inventor claims the costs is recovered in 3 to 4 years depending on where you live, how many months out of the year you need to heat your home and of course the cost of corn. At any rate, corn is far less costly than oil or natural gas, and very much cleaner. So as “corny” as it sounds perhaps there will be a corn burning stove in your future.
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An article in Tuesday’s N&R opinion page reminded me of a topic I have been mauling over for some time now: drugs in America and what we have been doing wrong since President Nixon declared his War On Drugs in 1971. Yes, you youngsters out there, it certainly has been that long since our tax dollars been going to fighting the drug war all over the world and the battles just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, with no let up in sight. The article compared the deaths in the Iraqi War that the public seems so up in arms about with the huge numbers of deaths from drugs in our nation during the same time period and wonders just where our priorities are. Well, it is not priorities, it’s memory. The War on Drugs is old news to the point that when drugs are mentioned most people just shake their head, frown and go on to the next topic unless their family or someone they know is affected. Well people, don’t look now, but EVERYONE is affected.

Crossposted from Town Called Dobson


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