The futility and destructiveness of the Drug War

  The U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Louisiana just sent out a press release reporting that a New Orleans federal judge has sentenced a 28-year-old man, Derek Nolan, to 15 years in a federal penitentiary for drug-related crimes. 

U.S. dictatorial fangs at the World Cup

  In his Fourth of July address to Congress in 1821, entitled “In Search of Monsters to Destroy,” John Quincy Adams warned the American people that if the U.S. government ever became an imperial, interventionist government, it would inevitably become like a dictatorial regime.

  A good example of how right Adams has been shown to be has occurred during the World Cup matches. The dictatorial nature of the U.S. government came through loud and clear in the case of Rafael Martinez, a star soccer player on the Mexican team.

Policing for profit, not justice

  If law enforcement agencies in Alabama want to seize and keep someone’s property — cash, cars, real estate, guns, TVs or other assets — they don’t have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was used in drug trafficking or obtained through criminal activity.

  As in many other states, they don’t have to show that the property owner was convicted of a crime — or even charged with one.

  They can just take the property. And in the vast majority of cases, they get to keep it.

Civil asset forfeiture: Tracking the cash seized by police in a Deep South state where transparency is not required

  Each year, law enforcement agencies seize billions of dollars in cash and other property from potential suspects – some of whom are never convicted or even charged with a crime – through a process called civil asset forfeiture.

  In nearly every state, the agencies get to keep some or all of the property.

  In 13 states and the District of Columbia, agencies don’t have to report or even keep records to show the value of the property they confiscate or why it was seized, according to the Institute for Justice.

  Alabama is one such state. A research analyst at the Institute recently wrote that Alabama’s civil forfeiture laws are among “the most unjust in the nation.”

Jacob G. Hornberger: Trump and Duterte: Birds of a feather

  When it comes to the drug war, the verdict is in: The big, drain-the-swamp, anti-establishment president, Donald Trump, is turning out to be just like all the other mainstream establishment politicians. He made that clear last week in a speech before a group of law-enforcement officials, where he vowed to be “ruthless” in the war on drugs. Trump told the group:

     We’re going to stop the drugs from pouring in. We’re going to stop those drugs from poisoning our youth, poisoning our people. We’re going to be ruthless in that fight. We have no choice. And we’re going to take that fight to the drug cartels and work to liberate our communities from their terrible grip of violence.

Sam Fulwood III: Poisonous rhetoric, then and now

  After a career spent cataloguing and commenting on the American political scene—nearly 30 years as a newspaper journalist and, more recently, as a public policy observer—I am rarely personally offended by anything that politicians say or do. But last week, two news stories exposed a level of political mendacity that set my heart racing and blood boiling.

  Even now, my anger has yet to abate after reading journalist Dan Baum’s April cover story in Harper’s Magazine. In that article, Baum quoted John Ehrlichman—a former aide to President Richard Nixon who served a year and half prison sentence for his role in the Watergate scandal—as saying the Nixon administration’s war on drugs campaign was deliberately designed to target black Americans.

Jacob G. Hornberger: The Drug War is finished

  The drug war is finished. Kaput.  It’s now just a matter of time when the federal government calls an end to this evil, immoral, destructive, and racist government program.

  This week the New York Times became the latest addition to those calling for an end to the drug war, with an editorial entitled “Repeal Prohibition, Again.” That was followed by two more editorials written by members of the NYT editorial board, one entitled “Let States Decide on Marijuana” by David Firestone and the other “The Public Lightens Up About Weed” by Juliet Lapidos.

Jacob G. Hornberger: Is the drug-war worth this?

  For the past week, the mainstream media has been agog over the arrest of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, much as they’ve gone agog over every other big drug bust for the past 50 years or so. The hoopla surrounding these much-ballyhooed drug busts is to ensure that the citizenry, who have become increasingly disenchanted with the drug war, don’t lose faith and that they continue to support the drug war for another 50 years.

Sheldon Richman: When will Obama evolve on the Drug War?

  Much is made of how President Obama’s position on same-sex marriage has “evolved” to an endorsement of legalization. One hopes his position on the atrocity called the “war on drugs” is evolving.

  It’s not really a war on drugs. It’s a war on people, most of whom have committed no violence or other aggression against person or property. Those who do commit violence are encouraged to do so by the very “war on drugs” that Obama and other enlightened leaders so enthusiastically support. Black markets often feature violence — precisely because they are illegal. Decriminalize the activity, and the violence goes away.