Drug War

The Case against Medical Marijuana

by Laurence M. Vance November 11, 2010

Pot smokers aren’t the only ones disappointed by the rejection of Proposition 19 by California voters. Freedom lovers were just as dissatisfied with the outcome. Proposition 19, the Regulate, Control & Tax Cannabis Act, would have made it legal for individuals to possess, and authorized retailers to sell to those twenty-one and older, up to one ounce of marijuana. The ballot ...

The Moral Case for Drug Freedom, Part 2

by Laurence M. Vance September 1, 2010

Part 1 | Part 2 Believers in a free society should challenge all laws on drug trafficking, drug manufacturing, drug sales, and drug use. They should object to the 750,000 arrests of Americans every year for marijuana possession. They should protest the incarceration of tens of thousands of Americans for drug-related offenses. They should contest the Harrison Narcotics Tax ...

Leading Humanity Out of the Darkness, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 2010

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 The 40-year-old war on drugs has long been a favorite government program of both liberals and conservatives. It is a program by which statists have brought nothing but death and destruction to our nation and to people all over the world. It is impossible to count ...

The Moral Case for Drug Freedom, Part 1

by Laurence M. Vance August 1, 2010

Part 1 | Part 2 My title is a radical one, and deliberately so. There is a reason I did not say, “The Moral Case for Drug Legalization,” or, “The Moral Case for Drug Decriminalization,” or, “The Moral Case for Drug Regulation,” or, “The Moral Case for Medical Marijuana,” or, “The Moral Case for Relaxing Drug Laws,” or, “The Moral ...

Immigration, Civil Liberties, and the Drug War

by Sheldon Richman May 4, 2010

Arizona’s horrid law empowering cops to demand that people show their “papers” when suspected of being in the country without government permission holds an important lesson for both so-called progressives and conservatives. It’s a lesson about a seemingly separate issue: drugs. Concern about illegal immigrants along the Mexican border would undoubtedly diminish if the “war on drugs” ended. (It’s not ...

America’s Injustice System

by George Leef March 1, 2010

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey A. Silverglate (Encounter Books, 2009); 325 pages. It was probably inevitable that as the United States became an increasingly politicized nation, its justice system would be transformed from one that actually sought justice into one where prosecutors abuse their power to win cases and advance their careers. ...

Sex, Drugs, and Consenting Adults

by Scott McPherson January 20, 2010

The Georgia Supreme Court has struck down a 170-year-old law forbidding sexual acts between unmarried people. The ruling, which came on Monday, January 13, was the result of a case of a 16-year-old boy caught having sex with his girlfriend in her home. “Our opinion,” wrote Chief Justice Norman Fletcher, “simply affirms that ... the government may not reach into ...

Medical Marijuana Does Not Equal Freedom

by Sheldon Richman December 3, 2009

The Obama Justice Department says it will no longer go after “individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” In other words, if a state legalizes the production, distribution, and possession of marijuana for medical purposes, Attorney General Eric Holder’s troops will keep hands off. Considering that marijuana ...

The Failed War on Drugs (Video from Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Freedom Watch FoxNews.com)

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 2009

Freedom Watch 44 w/ Jacob Hornberger and Wayne Allen Root

Economics and the Drug War

by Bart Frazier July 1, 2009

It is becoming ever more apparent that the war on drugs has been lost. Doomed to fail from the moment of its inception, the war the U.S. government has been waging has not been against drugs, but against people and the laws of economics. The results have been violence, corruption, and a militarized society.

Ending the Drug War Would End the Violence

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2009

The news media are rife with stories about Mexican drug cartels operating throughout the United States and drug-related violence threatening U.S. cities near the border. Americans are becoming reluctant to cross into Mexican towns for fear of getting caught in the crossfire. Do we need another reason to end the abominable war on “drugs” (a ...

Drug-War Idiocy in Federal Court

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 20, 2009

A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, Leonie M. Brinkema, recently sentenced four young people to terms in the penitentiary ranging from 46 months to 20 years. The four, whose ages ranged from 19 to 21, were convicted of drug-war crimes relating to the possession and distribution of heroin. Faced with what the Washington Post described ...