So what is there to understand?

Image by mmcrae01 via Flickr

• “The last few years have seen an extraordinary shift in thinking about this issue with increasingly mainstream figures arguing we should consider legalisation as an alternative to what they regard as the failure of the law-enforcement strategy.” – BBC’s Mark Easton
  
• “I think what was truly depressing about my time in the civil service was that the professionals I met from every sector held the same view: the illegality of drugs causes far more problems for society and the individual than it solves. Yet publicly, all those people were forced to repeat the mantra that the Government would be “tough on drugs”, even though they all knew that the policy was causing harm.” – Julian Critchley (Ex- director of the UK Anti-Drug Co-Ordination Unit)
• “The only completely effective way to ameliorate the drug problem, and especially the crime which results from it, is to bring the industry into the open by legalising the distribution and consumption of all dangerous drugs, or at the very least by decriminalising their consumption.” – Alan Duncan MP, Conservative Former Cabinet Member
  
• “If the UN is right and drugs account for 70 per cent of organised criminal activity,’ argues Glenny, ‘then the legalisation of drugs would administer by far the deadliest blow possible against transnational organised criminal networks.” – Misha Glenny
• And here we come to the vital distinction between the advocacy of temperance and the advocacy of prohibition. Temperance and self-control are convertible terms. Prohibition, or that which it implies, is the direct negation of the term self-control. In order to save the small percentage of men who are too weak to resist their animal desires, it aims to put chains on every man, the weak and the strong alike. And if this is proper in one respect, why not in all respects? Yet, what would one think of a proposition to keep all men locked up because a certain number have a propensity to steal? – Felix Mendelsohn, 1915
  
• Image via Wikipedia“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.” – Albert Einstein
• “As long as the government can arbitrarily decide which substances are legal and which are illegal, then those who remain behind bars for illegal substances are political prisoners.” – Paul Krassner, 1999
  Image via Wikipedia
• “There is, in my opinion, no government policy that is as immoral as drug prohibition…” – Nobel Laureate, Milton Friedman
  
• The government is good at job creation. Every arrest of a drug dealer creates a new high-paying job opening. – Peter Guither
  
• “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.” – Jorge Costaneda – Mexican Foreign Minister
  
• “No one is asking for some free-for-all for drugs. I want drugs to be controlled and regulated, but we do not want to allow what has happened over the past thirty years to continue, whereby, in an illegal market, criminals – irresponsible people – sell poisoned drugs that kill young people. We want to say to those irresponsible people that we will control them, take their market away and not allow young people to be their victims any more. I believe that the experience of Switzerland and the Netherlands, and now of other countries, is that the only way to do that effectively is to collapse the market by replacing it with one that can be regulated, licensed and controlled.” – Paul Flynn MP Labour
  
• “The fundamental problem is the collision between the dramatic rise in the use of drugs and a policy that prohibits them. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that drug users impinge on the rights of other people only when they steal, and they have to do that only because of prohibition.” Liberal Democrat Baroness Walmsley
  
• “I joined the unit more or less agnostic on drugs policy, being personally opposed to drug use, but open-minded about the best way to deal with the problem…However, during my time in the unit, as I saw more and more evidence of ‘what works’, to quote New Labour’s mantra of the time, it became apparent to me that … enforcement and supply-side interventions were largely pointless. They have no significant, lasting impact on the availability, affordability or use of drugs.” – Julian Critchley -Former director of the UK Anti-Drug Coordination Unit in the Cabinet Office

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  Blair Anderson ‹(•¿•)›

  Spokesperson on Climate Change, Environment and Associate ‘Shadow’ Law And Order.
  #6 ‘on the list’ http://www.republicans.org.nz/

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