Hornberger: "repeal of all drug laws is a necessary pre-requisite for a free society"

[Zenaan Harkness]

Posted with vehement in principle support for the position, and the
need, to repeal all drug "prohibition" laws, to return some sanity to
the Western world, eliminate the bulk of all alleged "criminals" in
the West, and massively reduce crime and Western incarceration rates.

The numbers are in, the empirical evidence from Amsterdam to South
America are overwhelmingly compelling, and the logic never left those
with second neurone in the first place - even for those who are not
'statutorily illegal' drug users.



  Hornberger: The Evil Of The Drug War
  https://www.zerohedge.com/health/hornberger-evil-drug-war

  https://www.fff.org/2019/10/28/the-evil-of-the-drug-war/

    With the exception of the U.S. national-security state and its
    foreign policy of empire and intervention and its torture,
    state-sponsored assassinations, coups, alliances with dictatorial
    regimes, invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, illegal and
    unconstitutional wars, mass secret surveillance, indefinite
    detention, secret prison camps, drug experimentation on
    unsuspecting people, denial of due process, denial of trial by
    jury, kangaroo military tribunals, and other dark-side practices,
    it would be difficult to find a better example of an evil and
    immoral program than the war on drugs.

    Consider:

    1. Everyone, including the most ardent drug-war proponent, agrees
       that this decades-long program has failed to achieve its goal,
       which is a drug-free society.

    2. If failure was the only consequence of this program, that
       would be one thing. But it’s not. Drug laws have brought Into
       existence drug gangs, drug cartels, gang wars, drug
       assassinations, drug kidnappings, burglaries, robberies,
       murders, muggings, and official corruption.

    3. The drug war is also the most racially bigoted government
       program since segregation, perhaps even more so. Under
       segregation, government officials used the force of law to
       keep the races separated, but at least they permitted blacks
       to keep living in the community. With drug laws, they have
       been able to remove blacks entirely from communities and
       relocate them into places called penitentiaries, where they
       are forced to spend a large portion of their lives. They have
       also been able to use drug laws to harass, abuse, insult, and
       humiliate African-Americans, Latinos, and other racial
       minorities.

       That’s not to say, of course, that all law-enforcement agents
       and all judges are racially bigoted. It is simply to say that
       for those who are racially bigoted, the drug war is like
       heaven on earth, in that it enables them to exercise their
       bigotry in a legal manner and even get praised for it.

    4. The drug war has played a major role in the destruction of
       liberty in America. Just think: They actually put people into
       jail for doing nothing more than ingesting a substance that
       politicians and bureaucrats, both at the state and federal
       level, don’t approve of.

  Who cares whether politicians and bureaucrats approve of a
  particular substance? What business is that of theirs?

  Actually, it’s none of their business what a person puts into his
  mouth. Freedom necessarily entails the right to ingest whatever a
  person wants to Ingest, no matter how harmful or destructive it
  might be. When people live in a society where government officials
  can punish them for ingesting unapproved substances, there is no
  way that people in that society can legitimately be considered
  free.

  The repeal of drug laws — all drug laws, not just marijuana laws —
  is a necessary pre-requisite for a free society. It’s also a
  prerequisite for a just and humane society, one that treats drug
  addiction and drug use as a private problem, not a criminal-justice
  one.