Showing posts with label prohibition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prohibition. Show all posts

Christopher Ingraham: One Of The Biggest Arguments Against Marijuana Legalization Is Falling Apart

Drug use continues a decade-long drop.     America's high school students are using drugs and alcohol at or near the lowest levels on recordaccording to federal data released Wednesday. The 2015 Monitoring the Future Survey, conducted by the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)        ... MORE

Top White House Drug Official: War On Drugs Is A Failure

by Alex Mierjeski.   That makes it unanimous. The nation's top drug official went on CBS' "60 Minutes" Sunday night and proclaimed the old War on Drugs a failure. Michael Botticelli, who serves as the director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, also said he wants to reform and refocus U.S. drug policy. When asked by "60 Minutes"  ... MORE

Going To Pot? Canada Leads Way In Legalizing Marijuana

by Michel Comte. Justin Trudeau raised eyebrows when he admitted to having dabbled in marijuana while a member of parliament, but his pledge as prime minister to legalize pot has been broadly cheered. He said in a policy speech on Friday that his Liberal government would introduce legislation as early as 2016 to legalize marijuana, making Canada  ... MORE

Heroin And Prohibition Are A Lethal Combination

by Jacob Sullum.     After the esteemed actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died in February 2014, press coverage of the "heroin epidemic" exploded. Mentions of that phrase in the newspaper and wire service articles cataloged by Nexis rose from 681 in 2013 to 3,222 in 2014, an increase of almost 400 percent. Yet Hoffman—who by his own account used ... MORE

Phillip Schneider: Government May Be Too Tyrannical When It Seeks To Criminalize The Collection Of Rainwater

A war on self-sufficiency.   Collecting rainwater is classically seen as a safe and sustainable way of supplying your household with an off-the-grid water supply. Some people collect rainwater only for a backup reservoir, while others prefer to go all the way and maintain their household with pure off-the-grid rainwater collection. This method ensures  ... MORE

VIDEO: Andrew Napolitano - High Cost Of The War On Drugs

Some Members Of Congress Want To Stop Squandering Tax Money On The DEA's Failed Marijuana Eradication Program

by Christopher Ingraham.    The Drug Enforcement Administration is not having a great year. The chief of the agency stepped down in April under a cloud of scandal. The acting administrator since then has courted ridicule for saying pot is "probably not" as dangerous as heroin, and more recently he provoked 100,000 petition-signers and seven       ... MORE

In The Public Service - Heroic Cops Protect Community By Raiding A Group Of 90-Year-Old Women Playing MahJong

by Matt Agorist.   As hundreds of thousands of rape kits collect dust and remain untested, cops are quick to jump to action to raid a group of elderly women playing mahjong. A concerned citizen, with a knack for blindly following all decrees handed down from the establishment on high, conducted their patriotic duty of ‘seeing something’ and then    ... MORE

J.D. Tuccille: If Prohibitions Cannot Work Within The Prison System, How Can They Work In The Outside World?

Answer: they can't.   Last week, Karl Jensen and Lisa Mary Hutchinson were sent to the lockup for smuggling a knife, drugs, and a McMuffin into the UK's Wormwood Scrubs prison. Maybe somebody still on the outside will toss a sandwich over the wall to help them pass the time. In a related story, at about the same time Larry Michael Webb and Holly    ... MORE

Charles Seeburger: 10 Facts About The Economics Of Weed

From black market to free market. From the legal markets thriving in states like Colorado and Washington, to the underground trade that generates billions of Mexican cartels, the economics of weed are crazy. Ganja. Smoke. Dro. Chronic. Spliffage. The names are as varied as the opinions about it: from rather innocuous plant, to cure all, to   ... MORE

Flawed Ohio Marijuana Legalization Initiative Defeated

by Ilya Somin.   An anti-marijuana or anti-monopoly vote? Ohio Issue 3 – the seriously flawed marijuana legalization referendum initiative that I nonetheless defended because of its superiority to the status quo, has gone down to defeat. While not all of the votes have yet been counted, it is likely that it will lose by a large margin (currently 65-35,       ... MORE

Hell's Angels Say Canada’s Plans To Legalize Marijuana Will Deal Massive Blow To Their Organized Crime Operations

by Emily Gray Brosious.  Canada’s newly elected Liberal government has promised to legalize marijuana “right away,” and that’s not sitting well with thousands of Hells Angels members who say the move would cost the organized crime outfit hundreds of thousands of jobs, as reported by World News Daily. Thousands of members of the organized   ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: Pot Pleasure, Pot Problems

As prohibition collapses, abuse is less likely.  It stands to reason that legalizing marijuana, by making it easier, cheaper, and less risky to obtain, would encourage consumption. That is mostly a positive development, since it implies greater consumer satisfaction as more people enjoy a product that prohibition made harder to get.     ... MORE

Federal Court Orders The DEA To Stop Harassing Medical Marijuana Providers And Instead Start Obeying The Law

Enforcement zealots must learn to obey the law. In a scathing decision, a federal court in California has ruled that the Drug Enforcement Administration's interpretation of a recent medical marijuana bill "defies language and logic," "tortures the plain meaning of the statute" and is "at odds with fundamental notions of the rule of law." The ruling     ... MORE

Richard Juman: Why A Man Who Fought The Drug War For 30 Years Is Now Spearheading The Project To Stop It

Understanding Portugal's model.     When it comes to the War on Drugs, there are few people in a better position to comment on the futility, brutality and tragedy of the endeavor than retired Major Neill Franklin. He spent over 30 years participating in, and directing, state and local police anti-drug efforts before retiring to become the    ... MORE

VIDEO: Where Can You Smoke Legal Pot In Colorado?

Nullification In Effect: Oregonians Defy Feds, Spend Millions On Marijuana In First Week Of Legal Sales

$3.5 million of sales on first day.        In the first week of limited marijuana sales in Oregon, dispensaries sold a staggering $11 million of weed – more than double the numbers from Colorado’s first week – proving state laws legalizing cannabis truly do nullify federal prohibition in practice. The Free Thought Project reported on the first week  ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: Prohibition Kills

Government bans make drugs more dangerous.  Remember the guy who bought 80-proof vodka that turned out to be 190-proof Everclear and died from alcohol poisoning? Probably not, because that sort of thing almost never happens in a legal drug market, where merchants or manufacturers who made such a substitution, whether           ... MORE