Al Sharpton and Ron Paul are the two people I can’t imagine ever voting for, and yet… God bless ’em for their contributions to presidential debates! They both liven things up, buck the Party Line, and sometimes just make plain sense (though, alas, not all the time).
Here’s Paul talking about drug legalization. He makes it sound like a common-sense mainstream conservative issue. Which of course it should be. Maybe soon it will be.
Making drug legalization a debateable issue (which, honestly, ten years ago it wasn’t) is half the battle. I like to think that organizations like LEAP (which I’m a member of) have helped this happen. Merely considering that the War on Drugs might be, I don’t know, misguided, used to be taboo in polite company. Now a call for heroin legalization gets raucous cheers in Republican debates. It’s great to see this shift because when it comes down to honest debate, the prohibitionists simply can’t win.
[–Peter Moskos]
They might actually get somewhere if they make the debate about the cost of prohibition.
The war on drug. The war that we can never win. As long as their is money in drugs, there is no way to make even a dent. The other part of the problem is that we are locking up people for small repeat offenses and bogging the system down even more. I am not sure how we are going to fix this, but I know Amsterdam had a good idea.
thanks