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2015 October 23
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"All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them,
shaping them against their will to your own pattern,
all thought control and conditioning is, therefore,
a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate." |
"Laws provide against injury from others, but not from ourselves." |
"Thanks to the war on drugs, nearly 700,000 people were arrested in the United States for possession of marijuana in 1997, while 400,000 currently sit in prison for drug crimes -- more than the entire prison population of Britain, Germany and Belgium -- for what is a consensual act. Nearly $35 billion a year is spent on arresting, prosecuting and jailing drug criminals in the US -- $400 million in Canada -- to hammer at a crime which essentially harms no one but the drug user." |
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2015 October 22
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"The federal government has turned policing into policing for profit." |
"In the end, legalization of certain substances may be the only way to bring prices down, and doing so may be the only remedy to some of the worst aspects of the drug plague: violence, corruption, and the collapse of the rule of law." |
"Democrats and Republicans alike support the "War on Drugs." Federal, state, and local police make more than a million drug arrests yearly. Drug cases clog the courts. More than 60% of federal prison cells and about 30% of state prison cells hold drug offenders. No-knock drug raiders nullify the Fourth Amendment every day. Yet illicit drugs continue to pour onto the market, and they are readily available throughout the land. Looks like another failed policy. But politicians say more money will win the war. For fiscal 1996, President Clinton has requested a record $14.6 billion for this exercise in futility. State and local government will also spend huge sums. Who benefits? Posturing politicians and puritanical zealots, of course, but also the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs Service, Coast Guard, FBI, and the rest of the drug warriors. Police love the drug war, because the forfeiture laws it inspired allow them to seize and keep private property with impunity. Corrupt cops get fabulous bribes, and corruption therefore runs rampant." |
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2015 October 21
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"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." |
"What finally emerges from the 'clear and present danger' cases
is a working principle that the substantive evil must be extremely
serious and the degree of imminence extremely high before utterances
can be punished... It must be taken as a command of the broadest scope
that explicit language, read in the context of a liberty-loving society,
will allow." |
"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet." |
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2015 October 20
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"Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security." |
"It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve." |
"No-knock police raids destroy Americans’ right to privacy and safety. People’s lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants. ... Unfortunately, no-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justified nullifying the Fourth Amendment. ... No-knock raids in response to alleged narcotics violations presume that the government should have practically unlimited power to endanger some people’s lives in order to control what others ingest." |
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2015 October 19
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"One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could." |
"I never hurt nobody but myself
and that's nobody's business but my own." |
"Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line.
What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed
group of vigilantes imposing their views on others." |
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