Last week, Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak blamed white, middle-class, pot-smoking Minnesotans for murders in his city. He told MPR’s Cathy Wurzer:
This assertion is, of course, ridiculous on its face and smacks of a politician grasping at straws, looking for a someone to blame. He’s not the first politician to take the easy excuse rather than having the guts to admit the obvious: The War on Drugs is a miserable failure that creates more problems than it solves.
The first thing you have to come to terms with is that you will never eliminate human beings’ desire to alter their consciousness. We’ve been doing that throughout our history and we will continue to do so (see Prohibition). Then you need to look at who has won during our decades-long effort to fight drug use.
Jim Gray, a conservative judge in conservative Orange County, California, has changed his mind with regard to the War on Drugs. In 1992, he held a press conference during which he recommended that we rethink our drug laws. He is the author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed & What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs
. In this interview, he discusses the six groups who benefit from drug prohibition. Found at YouTube from ReasonTV.
