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Today,
the Justice Policy Institute and the Correctional Association of New
York is releasing a study titled "New York State of Mind? Higher
Education vs. Prison Funding in the Empire State, 1988-1998." According
to the study, New York State's spending on prisons has grown by $761.3
million over the past 10 years. State funds for state and city colleges
have been cut back $615 million - almost a dollar-for-dollar trade-off. ===================
Unions
representing prison guards are the fastest-growing public employee
associations in many states. In California last year, the union was
given a raise of 12 percent, which brought the salary for a seasoned prison guard up to $51,000. =================== "When they have to pay $14 billion for
the drug war, somebody gets that."
said one Clinton who definitely did inhale. ''Drugs are incidental in this." ====================== "I want to be able to farm my own small
crop for my personal use without having to be criminalized for it"' said
Watt. "I want the same trust the government has in my using alcohol
responsibly to be extended to mota.'' (marijuana) ==================== The
effects of treatment "It's amazing to think that even while somebody's just in treatment, it pays for itself, dollar for dollar, in reduced crime, reduced medical problems, reduced havoc in the country," Massing says. "It pays for itself. Everything else is a bonus." With Jaffe as drug czar, thousands of addicts sought treatment in 1972. The amount of time they were forced to wait for a bed decreased dramatically. And so did crime. FBI figures in 1972 showed that crime rates dropped in 94 of 154 U.S. cities with a population of more than 100,000. Nationally, the crime rate decreased for the first time in 17 years. Although
Jaffe says other factors likely contributed to the lower crime rate, he
notes that 90,000 people entered treatment programs when he was in
charge. "An awful lot of people stopped behaving the way they
did." Despite the successes, the Jaffe method was an easy target. Methadone treatment always has been controversial, and no politician has ever won an election by advocating more treatment for addicts. Mandatory prison sentences for drug offenders have proven more popular among voters than reducing the wait for a hospital bed. The Reagan administration eventually cut the treatment budget by 25 percent. =================== "Americans at the end of World War II
told German citizens that they should have followed their conscience
instead of their government," said Glass, a Houston systems
analyst. "Today's courtroom system tells jurors the exact opposite.
You have to do whatever the law tells you to do." ============== There's
no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the
power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one
makes them. One
declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men
to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding
citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But
just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor
objectively interpreted-and you create a nation of law-breakers-and then
you cash in on the guilt."
Ayn Rand "Atlas Shrugged" =================== Experts say psychedelic drugs, such as LSD,
work by blocking selective external messages to the human brain, forcing
the mind to find ways to fill the vacuum. This results in parts of the brain that might not normally
talk to each other making contacts, often creating new perspectives. ========================= Federal,
state and local police routinely seize money from people they stop and
search - merely because the cash causes a police dog to
"alert" to some trace of cocaine on the money. But a federal
appeals court noted in 1995 that more than 75 percent of all circulated
currency is "contaminated with drug residue." Thus,
the court noted, "it
is extremely likely a narcotics detection dog will positively alert when presented
with a large sum of currency." Though
prosecutors know most American currency is tainted with cocaine residue,
they still invoke the "tainted currency" ruse to steal as much
as they can. ================= Overdoses are accidents in most cases, tragic
accidents for which only our prohibition policy is ultimately to blame. ============= "I am in favor of the federal
government ceasing and desisting the war on drugs,"
said Dr. Morgan Reynolds, director of the Criminal Justice Center at the
Dallas branch of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a free-market
think tank. ================== "One
of the problems is that we are dealing with a very close-minded society."
he added. "The
sad part about it is that if politicians, as well as parents, would
realize that it is their kids who are out there shooting up then they
would have a different view point. Unfortunately they tend to think that
it is not their kids. They're
wrong. But I can't get
those fools to see that." =================== The
Netherlands took the bold step of trying to separate hard and soft drugs
over 20 years ago. This included the setting up of the so-called
coffee-shops where small quantities of cannabis can be purchased, and
the treating of addiction to harder drugs, like opiates, as the medical
problem that it really is, rather than a legal one. As
a result, they now have the lowest rate of cannabis use by teenagers in the developed world, and
the highest survival rate of opiate addicts. The average age of opiate addicts is now approaching 40, because largely
due to the fact that existing addicts are not dying and there are very
few new addicts coming on stream. ================= Freedom
has costs. Among those costs might be limiting the actions of government
even when acting for a perceived common good. In
short, if letting a few drug runners launder money is the price of
keeping the financial records of all Americans private, the cost is tiny
compared to letting the government become privy to the day-to-day
financial details of our lives. ==================== I
think it was the great American philosopher and psychologist William
James who said (and I'm paraphrasing): "Some people think they are thinking when really they are only re-arranging
their prejudices". ================= According to the National Center on
Addiction and Substance Abuse, there is no proof
that a causal relationship exists between cigarettes, alcohol,
cannabis and other drugs.
Basic scientific and clinical research establishing causality does not
exist. As for DNA damage, brain damage and cancer supposedly caused by cannabis, no epidemiological evidence exists that links cannabis to any disease. |
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Dr Jerome Jaffe drug treatment reduces crime |
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