Hey y’all - raining hard enough here to start seriously thinking about building an ark!
I have to tip my hat to Obama on this one (a small hat tip, perhaps, but a hat tip nonetheless).
For 40+ years we’ve been fighting an war on drugs, without ever going for the jugular - taking the outrageous amounts of profit out of dealing drugs. There are lots of reasons why we haven’t - those enormous profits also can be used to buy crooked cops, lawyers, judges and politicians of all stripes and parties.
My only quibble here is with this: “We’re not at war with people in this country.” Well we sure as hell ought to be at war with the folks who deal for a living in cocaine, crack, meth, and heroin. We ought to round them up (if you’ve ever lived for any length of time in a large urban area you know exactly who they are and where they can be found).
And while I agree that cig’s and booze are at least as addicting as any of the illegal “drugs” the fact remains that we have three or more generations of Americans who smoked cigarettes and got “hooked” without even knowing that the cigarette makers were spiking the nicotine in the cigs they made.
We tried to outlaw booze and wound up making outlaws of alarming numbers of otherwise law-abiding citizens simply because governments (Federal, State and local) can’t seem to keep their noses out of other folks business.
Yes, I know, cig’s and booze add a burden to our health system and second hand smoke may in fact be as bad as the direct kind, but a line needs to be drawn where WE the people have a chance at winning - and while we have cut down on Cig smokers (and to some extent boozers) the fact is what people choose to do in their own homes ought to be their own business, SO LONG AS THEY DON’T HARM OTHER PEOPLE. Coke, Meth and the like do hurt users but also hurt those who are robbed and beaten to get the money to pay for those drugs. I don’t recall ever reading where anyone mugged anyone for the price of a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of booze.
So as I said, a hat tip to President Obama on this one.