"The drug trade has become such a widespread national if not international operation with the Philippines as a major hub."
"The drug trade has become such a widespread national if not international operation with the Philippines as a major hub."
This is the question being asked now that the matter of legitimizing the use of marijuana initially for medical purposes and, possibly, leisure and related uses is being debated all over again. I remember this issue was first brought up for serious debate during the 16th Congress when a number of states in America decided to legitimize the use of marijuana and its commercial distribution as a legitimate drug.
Although at first it became an issue, some dismissed the same as non-essential.
Now it has resurfaced since more and more scientific studies have shown that indeed marijuana has proven medical use. But will legitimizing its use work at all, given the administration’s all out “war on drugs?”
In this regard, I discovered in the course of my readings over the last few days a statement by the eminent author and conservative icon, William F. Buckley, Jr., to the New York City Bar Association on October 11, 1995 about that city’s own “war on drugs” entitled “The Drug War is not Working.” I am excerpting it for the benefit of those who are intimately involved in the ongoing Herculean effort to turn around the country’s near-spiral into being a “narco state” engendered by the past administration’s abysmal tokenism in resolving this national scourge.
Here goes:
“We are speaking here of a plagues that consumes an estimated US $75 billion a year of public money, exacts an estimated US $70 Billion a year from consumers, is responsible for the incarceration of nearly 50 percent of those 1.3-million Americans who are today in jail, consumes an estimated 30 percent of the trial time of our judiciary and occupies the time of four hundred thousand policemen—yet a plague for which no cure is in hand, or in prospect.”
“When I ran for mayor of New York City, in my paper on drugs and in my post- election book I advocated their continued embargo, but on unusual grounds. I had read—and I think the evidence continues to affirm it—that drug-taking is a gregarious activity. What this means, as I see it, is that an addict will attempt to convince others to share the habit. Under the circumstances, I reasoned, it can reasonably be held that drug taking is a contagious disease and for that reason should invoke to the conventional protections extended to shield the innocents from Typhoid Mary.”
“About 10 years later I deferred to a different order of priorities. A conservative should evaluate the practicality of a legal construction as, for instance, those states ought to do whose statute books continue to outlaw sodomy, which interdiction is unenforceable, making the law nothing more than print on paper, I came to the conclusion that the so-called war on drugs was not working, and that it would not work absent a change in the structure of the civil rights to which we cling as a valuable part of our patrimony. Therefore, if the war on drugs is not working, we should look into what effects that war has, a canvass of the casualties consequent on its failure to work. That consideration encouraged me to weight utilitarian principles: A Benthamite calculus of the pain and pleasure introduced by the illegalization of drugs.”
“When alcohol was illegal the consumer could never know whether he had been given relatively harmless alcohol to drink—such alcoholic beverages as we find today in the liquor store—or whether the bootlegger’s distillery had come up with paralyzing rotgut, By the same token. purchasers of illegal cocaine and heroin cannot know whether they are consuming a drug that would qualify for regulated consumption after clinical analysis.”
“But we do know this: That more people die every year as a result of the war on drugs than die from what we call generically overdose.
Those fatalities include, perhaps more prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money with which to buy the drug to which they have become addicted.”
“I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protect such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.”
Under the circumstances we are in right now, will Mr. Buckley’s prescription work? I seriously doubt it. The drug trade has become such a widespread national if not international operation with the Philippines as a major hub. It will be foolhardy to expect that a simple sleight of hand legalization will suddenly transform us into a haven of peace and quiet.