Somebody tried to do to me what I tried to do to the Heritage Foundation. I was accused of playing fast and loose the numbers in my Washington Post op-ed. In the old days I could have just challenged him to a duel. I’d feel pretty confident going into that battle! Instead I have to…
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The generally conservative and pro-legalization Economist reports: The evidence from Portugal since 2001 is that decriminalisation of drug use and possession has benefits and no harmful side-effects. … IN 2001 newspapers around the world carried graphic reports of addicts injecting heroin in the grimy streets of a Lisbon slum. The place was dubbed Europe’s “most…
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“One of the reasons we fought a bloody war against Britain was we didn’t like these soldiers stopping people on the street willy-nilly….We went to armed revolution against the strongest nation in the world in order to have these protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. They’re not technicalities. They’re real. … Indeed, the ability to…
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Out of the blue (at least to me), the BBC reports: The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption. … The Argentine court ruled that: “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state.” Supreme Court President Ricardo…
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An op-ed by Tony Newman in the New York Daily News. While New York has a reputation as a tolerant and open-minded city and New York State effectively decriminalized simple possession of up to 25 grams of marijuana more than 30 years ago, Gotham has made so many pot arrests that it now has the…
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“New formula lets meth users make drug in soda bottles, avoid anti-drug laws.” The AP story by Justin Juozapavicius.
Perhaps nothing speaks better to our broken justice system than the fact that people–guilty and innocent alike–are held in jail for more than year beforetrial. Lise Olsen reports in the Houston Chronicle: Though the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to a speedy trial, at least 500 county inmates [out of 11,500] have been locked up…
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The story in the New York Times. The law sets out maximum “personal use” amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities will no longer face criminal prosecution; the law goes into effect on Friday. Too bad this won’t stop the narco violence.
Nicholas Kristof sounds offabout our absurd priorities that funds incarceration instead of school and health care. Did you know a black boy born today has a one-in-three chance of serving time in prison? That’s right, not arrested, but prison. It wasn’t that way a generation ago. It’s not crime. Crime hasn’t gone up (it’s gone…
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John Tierney writes: Treating hard-core heroin addicts with their drug of choice seems to work better than treating them with methadone, according to first rigorous test of the approach performed in North America. In the study, the addicts who went to a clinic to receive injections of a heroin compound were more likely to remain…
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