Jim Webb: Pot Legalization Could Be Part Of Criminal Justice Overhaul

[slappyjack]

Sen. Jim Webb, fresh off his passage of an historic expansion of the GI Bill, has found a new issue: the criminal justice system. And when Webb, a Virginia Democrat, sets his legislative sites on a priority, his colleagues pay attention.

On Thursday, Webb, along with the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), introduced a bill to create a commission that would undertake an 18-month study of the criminal justice system and come back with legislative recommendations.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Webb said that everything should be considered. And he means everything.

"I think everything should be on the table, and we specifically say that we want recommendations on how to deal with drug policy in our country. And we'll get it to the people who have the credibility and the expertise and see what they come up with," said Webb.

What about legalizing, taxing and regulating marijuana?

Webb paused. "I think they should do a very careful examination of all aspects of drug policy. I've done a couple of very extensive hearings on this, so we'll wait to see what they say about that," he said.

So it's on the table? Webb flashed a wry grin, laughing mischievously.

The last government study group to look at drug policy, the 1972 Shafer Commission, recommended that President Richard Nixon decriminalize marijuana. He didn't.

This commission will have a broader mandate, said Webb. He expects a "pretty broad range of legislative priorities to come out of it not just incarceration but the entire panorama of criminal justice."

Webb's bill, he said, is backed by Judiciary Committee chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) as well as Majority Whip Dick Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) -- the chairman and ranking Republican of the Crime and Drugs Subcommittee. It has a powerful list of cosponsors, including the top four Democrats, Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), Durbin, Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/27/jim-webb-pot-legalization_n_180073.html

This is really, REALLY good news!

 

[slappyjack]

Kick, because this is the most important story ever written in the legalization battle. I'm honestly shocked by the lack of interest in what is reported here.

 

[Barnt]

I'm very interested. I think it needs to be done on the federal level rather than state level, however I'll take whatever we can get!

If Cali got the ball rolling and legalized it, other states would follow. I however don't see that happening with Ahnold in office...

So this is great IMO! As long as the commission isn't corrupt and reports back true evidence, they will suggest the same as '72. Hopefully Obama and his administration will listen.

 

[BobbleheadJed]

So they are going to take 18 months to "study" what the lobbyists tell them is working in the criminal justice system, and may consider ending prohibition. Forward progress, Ill give it that while pointing out that all they are doing is something that was already done 37 years ago. They should just read the 1972 report, realize it was right, and act within two days, like they just did when they raised the tax on roll your own tobacco from $2 a lb to $26 a lb, as an example of how fast they can change policy when they want to.

 

[jaysplifferton]

I think the reason people aren't responding to the amazing possibilities this story proposes is because it's "not cool" to get your hopes up. I've been reading a lot of defeatist posts regarding Obama's recent online Q and A session, and I'm amazed how negative the online stoner community is. It's a knee-jerk reaction. People are just SO ready to start hating Obama because of one little comment. It boggles my mind.

Any intelligent analysis of our criminal justice system will reveal the truth that we already know. At least we have a president who can admit when he's wrong.

Good find w/ this story. I'll have to stay abreast of this study.

 

[Leaf it to me]

wow, i never thought anyone from VA would consider it. Hopefully Webb doesn't punk out.

 

[movingtocally]

Kick, because this is the most important story ever written in the legalization battle. I'm honestly shocked by the lack of interest in what is reported here.

Man, I could link you probably 2 thousand articles of xyz congressman talking like a grown up about pot that got lost in the shuffle and never amounted to shit. Fuck, even when the Justice Department makes an official statement they don't even follow it. A dispensary got raided 5 days after the feds said they would knock that shit off.


I think the skepticism is more than understandable. For now, it's just a roll of the eyes for those of us that have been watching this shit for years.

 

[slappyjack]

Man, I could link you probably 2 thousand articles of xyz congressman talking like a grown up about pot that got lost in the shuffle and never amounted to shit. Fuck, even when the Justice Department makes an official statement they don't even follow it. A dispensary got raided 5 days after the feds said they would knock that shit off.


I think the skepticism is more than understandable. For now, it's just a roll of the eyes for those of us that have been watching this shit for years.

Please post the links. It'll be helpful to your argument.

 

[Funky Donkey]

Maybe Joe Biden would want to see some things legalized soon?

http://www.nypost.com/seven/0328200..._of_bidens_daughter_shopping_tape__161772.htm

FRIEND OF BIDEN'S DAUGHTER SHOPPING TAPE OF HER ALLEGEDLY DOING COCAINE

A friend of the daughter of Vice President Joseph Biden is attempting to hawk a videotape that he claims shows Ashley Biden snorting cocaine at a house party this month in Delaware.

An anonymous male "friend" of Biden took the video, said Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer representing the seller. Dunlap and another man claiming to be a lawyer showed The Post about 90 seconds of 43-minute tape, saying it was legally obtained and that Biden was aware she was being filmed. The Post refused to pay for the video.

The video shows a 20-something woman with light skin and long brown hair taking a red straw from her mouth and bending over a desk, inserting the straw into her nostril and snorting from lines of white powder.

She then stands up and begins talking with other people in the room. A young man looks on from behind her, facing the camera. The lawyers said he was Biden's boyfriend of some years.

The camera follows the woman from a few feet away, focusing on her as she moves around the room. It appears not to be concealed. At one point she shouts, "Shut the fñ-ñ-ñ- up!"

The woman appears to resemble the 27-year-old Biden, a social worker who was a visible presence during her father's campaign for the White House.

The dialogue is difficult to discern, but the woman makes repeated references to the drugs, said the lawyers, who said they viewed the tape about 15 times.

"At one point she pretty much complains that the line isn't big enough," said the second lawyer, who declined to identify himself. "And she talks about her dad."

Vice President Biden has been an outspoken crusader against drugs, coining the term "Drug Czar" while campaigning for a more forceful "war on drugs" in 1982.

The lawyers declined to name the person who shot the video, but said he knew Ashley Biden well and had attended other parties with her at which there were illegal drugs. The lawyers said the shooter used a camera with a hard-drive that he later destroyed, drilling into the device and tossing it into a lake.

The woman in the video acknowledges the camera in a way that makes it clear she knows she's being taped, the lawyers said, waving at it during a part of the video not shown to The Post.

No one else in the video is seen using the drugs. The portion of the tape shown to The Post ends shortly after the woman's alleged ingestion.

The shooter claims that he previously tape-recorded Biden at a party in August but was unsuccessful in his attempts to sell that video, they said.

A US media company offered $250,000 for the footage and access to the person who shot the tape, according to the lawyers. Another company, based overseas, offered $225,000, they said. The video shooter was hoping to get $2 million for the footage, then lowered his expectation to $400,000, they said.

The unnamed lawyer hinted that his client had additional information that could embarrass the vice president's daughter.

"The higher the price, the more he'll reveal," said the lawyer.

The lawyers said the video shooter was afraid of being identified and prosecuted for his role in the alleged drug use. "He's got a criminal defense attorney," said Dunlap.

The other lawyer said Biden didn't have secret service protection at the time of the party because she complained about agents blocking her driveway.

"She complained to her dad about it and he got rid of them," he said.

 

[BobbleheadJed]

I think the reason people aren't responding to the amazing possibilities this story proposes is because it's "not cool" to get your hopes up. I've been reading a lot of defeatist posts regarding Obama's recent online Q and A session, and I'm amazed how negative the online stoner community is. It's a knee-jerk reaction. People are just SO ready to start hating Obama because of one little comment. It boggles my mind.

Any intelligent analysis of our criminal justice system will reveal the truth that we already know. At least we have a president who can admit when he's wrong.

Good find w/ this story. I'll have to stay abreast of this study.

Jay, this statement of yours "At least we have a president who can admit when he's wrong." is a knee jerk, defeatist statement. You are defending Obama for being a coward and you are defending Obama's hate toward people that like cannabis evidenced by his policy of locking them in cages. I hate that Obama policy, don't you? We shouldn't be putting up leaders that are afraid to lead.

Here is some recommended reading for you, and Glenn Greenwald can hardly be called an Obama hater or Bush lover. Conclusion included, which is right on target, in case you don't want to read it all.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...ebb/index.html
-- Glenn Greenwald

Jim Webb's courage v. the "pragmatism" excuse for politicians

But the fact that cowardly actions from political leaders are inevitable is no reason to excuse or, worse, justify and even advocate that cowardice. In fact, the more citizens are willing to excuse and even urge political cowardice in the name of "realism" or "pragmatism" ("he was smart to take this bad, unjust position because Americans are too stupid or primitive for him to do otherwise and he needs to be re-elected"), the more common that behavior will be.

 

[JQP]

National Commission on our Criminal Justice System?

National Commission on our Criminal Justice System?

Check out this article by VA Senator Jim Webb in today's Parade Magazine. It has some incredible statistics about marijuana and the nation's prisons. I already sent the Senator a message supporting his plan, and asking if I could help from NYS.

http://www.parade.com/news/2009/03/why-we-must-fix-our-prisons.html

JQ

 

[vta]

Pot Legalization Could Be Part Of Overhaul

Pot Legalization Could Be Part Of Overhaul

Pot Legalization Could Be Part Of Overhaul
March 28, 2009 at 16:54:19 PT
By Ryan Grim
Source: Huffington Post

cannabis USA -- Sen. Jim Webb, fresh off his passage of an historic expansion of the GI Bill, has found a new issue: the criminal justice system. And when Webb, a Virginia Democrat, sets his legislative sites on a priority, his colleagues pay attention.

On Thursday, Webb, along with the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), introduced a bill to create a commission that would undertake an 18-month study of the criminal justice system and come back with legislative recommendations.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Webb said that everything should be considered. And he means everything.

"I think everything should be on the table, and we specifically say that we want recommendations on how to deal with drug policy in our country. And we'll get it to the people who have the credibility and the expertise and see what they come up with," said Webb.

What about legalizing, taxing and regulating marijuana?

Webb paused. "I think they should do a very careful examination of all aspects of drug policy. I've done a couple of very extensive hearings on this, so we'll wait to see what they say about that," he said.

So it's on the table? Webb flashed a wry grin, laughing mischievously.

The last government study group to look at drug policy, the 1972 Shafer Commission, recommended that President Richard Nixon decriminalize marijuana. He didn't.

This commission will have a broader mandate, said Webb. He expects a "pretty broad range of legislative priorities to come out of it [covering] not just incarceration but the entire panorama of criminal justice."

Webb's bill, he said, is backed by Judiciary Committee chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) as well as Majority Whip Dick Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) -- the chairman and ranking Republican of the Crime and Drugs Subcommittee. It has a powerful list of cosponsors, including the top four Democrats, Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), Durbin, Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).

"We've got a good chance to get this done this year," said Webb, suggesting that the "dramatic" growth of the prison population makes it an issue that needs to be addressed. See the charts Webb brought to the Senate floor.

Webb cited "the exponential growth of incarceration since 1980," saying that "a huge percentage of that growth has been nonviolent crimes associated with drugs."

Webb, a decorated Vietnam veteran who was Secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan, has as much military cred as any Democrat. "I'm very concerned about the issue of gangs and transnational gangs and I think a big piece of that -- not all of it -- a big piece of that is the movement of drugs. So that's a huge piece of this," said Webb.

The growing prison population has bipartisan roots, which I explore in a book be published soon, This Is Your Country On Drugs. Throughout the 1980s, Democrats in Congress and state governments around the country increased prison sentences for drug offenses, coming down particularly hard on crack. In 1986, Congress instituted mandatory-minimum sentences for powder and crack cocaine. To trigger the powder minimum, a dealer needed to possess 500 grams. For crack, just five grams. Two years later, the law was extended to anybody who was associated with the dealer -- girlfriends, roommates, etc.

In 1991, Michigander Allen Harmelin argued that his life sentence for possessing roughly a pound and a half of cocaine is cruel and unusual. The Supreme Court ruled that it is neither. California enacted its three-strikes law in 1994 -- three felonies equals a minimum of 25 years -- and the feds one-upped the state, declaring a third felony to result in life without parole. Twenty-three more states enacted three-strikes laws by 1995.

In 1984, just over 30,000 people were in prison for drug crimes; by 1991, the number had soared to more than 150,000. The Department of Justice found in a study of the prison population that the average length of a federal stay drastically increased between 1986 and 1997. If you walked into prison in 1986, your average stay would have been 21 months. In 1997, it was 47 months. For weapons offenders, the rise was from 23 to 75 months, and for drug offenders, it was from 30 to 66 months. Not all criminals could expect such increased time behind bars, however: A bank robber could expect 74 months in 1986 and only 83 months a decade later.

Three-strikes laws and lengthening prison sentences explain what appears to be a contradiction: U.S. crime rates are falling while U.S. incarceration rates are rising. It stands to reason that if fewer people are committing crimes, then fewer people should be locked up. But locking up fewer people every year and putting them away for much longer mushrooms the prison population.

The result is that more than one out of every 100 Americans is currently in prison. If you're a black male between 20 and 34, there's a better than one in nine chance that you're imprisoned. To keep all of these people behind bars, states spent a combined $44 billion in 2007.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said he's open to working with Webb. "It'll be interesting," Cornyn, a former prosecutor, said of the coming debate. "I would be open to ideas that would take certain first-time, nonviolent offenders and try to give them a shock probation or something like that which would encourage treatment but then would go serve their time if they didn't fully cooperate," he said.

Complete Title: Pot Legalization Could Be Part Of Criminal Justice Overhaul

 

[vta]

Jim Webb's Courage

Jim Webb's Courage

Jim Webb's Courage
March 28, 2009 at 16:04:06 PT
By Glenn Greenwald
Source: Salon

justice USA -- There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb's impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that. Webb's interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession. After decades of mindless "tough-on-crime" hysteria, an increasingly irrational "drug war," and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan -- and virtually every other country in the world -- to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a "a nation of jailers" whose "prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history."

What's most notable about Webb's decision to champion this cause is how honest his advocacy is. He isn't just attempting to chip away at the safe edges of America's oppressive prison state. His critique of what we're doing is fundamental, not incremental. And, most important of all, Webb is addressing head-on one of the principal causes of our insane imprisonment fixation: our aberrational insistence on criminalizing and imprisoning non-violent drug offenders (when we're not doing worse to them). That is an issue most politicians are petrified to get anywhere near, as evidenced just this week by Barack Obama's adolescent, condescending snickering when asked about marijuana legalization, in response to which Obama gave a dismissive answer that Andrew Sullivan accurately deemed "pathetic." Here are just a few excerpts from Webb's Senate floor speech this week (.pdf) on his new bill to create a Commission to study all aspects of prison reform:

URL: http://webb.senate.gov/email/incardocs/FS_CrimJust_3-26-09.pdf

Let's start with a premise that I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world's population; we have 25% of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .

The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .

In many cases these issues involve people’s ability to have proper counsel and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .

Another piece of this issue that I hope we will address with this National Criminal Justice Commission is what happens inside our prisons. . . . We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve.

Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy - the whole area of drug policy in this country?

And how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives that we might look at?

Webb added that "America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace" and "we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail."

It's hard to overstate how politically thankless, and risky, is Webb's pursuit of this issue -- both in general and particularly for Webb. Though there has been some evolution of public opinion on some drug policy issues, there is virtually no meaningful organized constituency for prison reform. To the contrary, leaving oneself vulnerable to accusations of being "soft on crime" has, for decades, been one of the most toxic vulnerabilities a politician can suffer (ask Michael Dukakis). Moreover, the privatized Prison State is a booming and highly profitable industry, with an army of lobbyists, donations, and other well-funded weapons for targeting candidates who threaten its interests.

Most notably, Webb is in the Senate not as an invulnerable, multi-term political institution from a safely blue state (he's not Ted Kennedy), but is the opposite: he's a first-term Senator from Virginia, one of the "toughest" "anti-crime" states in the country (it abolished parole in 1995 and is second only to Texas in the number of prisoners it executes), and Webb won election to the Senate by the narrowest of margins, thanks largely to George Allen's macaca-driven implosion. As Ezra Klein wrote, with understatement: "Lots of politicians make their name being anti-crime, which has come to mean pro-punishment. Few make their name being pro-prison reform."

For a Senator like Webb to spend his time trumpeting the evils of excessive prison rates, racial disparities in sentencing, the unjust effects of the Drug War, and disgustingly harsh conditions inside prisons is precisely the opposite of what every single political consultant would recommend that he do. There's just no plausible explanation for what Webb's actions other than the fact that he's engaged in the noblest and rarest of conduct: advocating a position and pursuing an outcome because he actually believes in it and believes that, with reasoned argument, he can convince his fellow citizens to see the validity of his cause. And he is doing this despite the fact that it potentially poses substantial risks to his political self-interest and offers almost no prospect for political reward. Webb is far from perfect -- he's cast some truly bad votes since being elected -- but, in this instance, not only his conduct but also his motives are highly commendable.

Webb's actions here underscore a broader point. Our political class has trained so many citizens not only to tolerate, but to endorse, cowardly behavior on the part of their political leaders. When politicians take bad positions, ones that are opposed by large numbers of their supporters, it is not only the politicians, but also huge numbers of their supporters, who step forward to offer excuses and justifications: well, they have to take that position because it's too politically risky not to; they have no choice and it's the smart thing to do. That's the excuse one heard for years as Democrats meekly acquiesced to or actively supported virtually every extremist Bush policy from the attack on Iraq to torture and warrantless eavesdropping; it's the excuse which even progressives offer for why their political leaders won't advocate for marriage equality or defense spending cuts; and it's the same excuse one hears now to justify virtually every Obama "disappointment."

Webb's commitment to this unpopular project demonstrates how false that excuse-making is -- just as it was proven false by Russ Feingold's singular, lonely, October, 2001 vote against the Patriot Act and Feingold's subsequent, early opposition to the then-popular Bush's assault on civil liberties, despite his representing the purple state of Wisconsin. Political leaders have the ability to change public opinion by engaging in leadership and persuasive advocacy. Any cowardly politician can take only those positions that reside safely within the majoritiarian consensus. Actual leaders, by definition, confront majoritarian views when they are misguided and seek to change them, and politicians have far more ability to affect and change public opinion than they want the public to believe they have.

The political class wants people to see them as helpless captives to immutable political realities so that they have a permanent, all-purpose excuse for whatever they do, so that they are always able to justify their position by appealing to so-called "political realities." But that excuse is grounded in a fundamentally false view of what political leaders are actually capable of doing in terms of shifting public opinion, as NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen explained when I interviewed him about his theories of how political consensus is maintained and manipulated:

GG: One of the points you make is that it's not just journalists who define what these spheres [of consensus, legitimate debate and deviance] encompass. You argue that politicians, political actors can change what's included in these spheres based on the positions that they take. And in some sense, you could even say that that's kind of what leadership is -- not just articulating what already is within the realm of consensus, which anyone can do, but taking ideas that are marginalized or within the sphere of deviance and bringing them into the sphere of legitimacy. How does that process work? How do political actors change those spheres?

JR: Well, that's exactly what leadership is. And I think it's crippling sometimes to our own sense of efficacy in politics and media, if we assume that the media has all of the power to frame the debate and decide what consensus is, and consign things to deviant status. That's not really true. That's true under conditions of political immobilization, leadership default, a rage for normalcy, but in ordinary political life, leaders, by talking about things, make them legitimate. Parties, by pushing for things, make them part of the sphere of debate. Important and visible people can question consensus, and all of a sudden expand it. These spheres are malleable; if the conversation of democracy is alive and if you make your leaders talk about things, it becomes valid to talk about them.

And I really do think there's a self-victimization that sometimes goes on, but to go back to the beginning of your question, there's something else going on, which is the ability to infect us with notions of what's realistic is one of the most potent powers press and political elites have. Whenever we make that kind of decision -- "well it's pragmatic, let's be realistic" -- what we're really doing is we're speculating about other Americans, our fellow citizens, and what they're likely to accept or what works on them or what stimuli they respond to. And that way of seeing other Americans, fellow citizens, is in fact something the media has taught us; that is one of the deepest lessons we've learned from the media even if we are skeptics of the MSM.

And one of the things I see on the left that really bothers me is the ease with which people skeptical of the media will talk about what the masses believe and how the masses will be led and moved in this way that shows me that the mass media tutors them on how to see their fellow citizens. And here the Internet again has at least some potential, because we don't have to guess what those other Americans think. We can encounter them ourselves, and thereby reshape our sense of what they think. I think every time people make that judgment about what's realistic, what they're really doing is they're imagining what the rest of the country would accept, and how other people think, and they get those ideas from the media.

We've been trained how we talk about our political leaders primarily by a media that worships political cynicism and can only understand the world through political game-playing. Thus, so many Americans have been taught to believe not only that politicians shouldn't have the obligation of leadership imposed on them -- i.e., to persuade the public of what is right -- but that it's actually smart and wise of them to avoid positions they believe in when doing so is political risky.

People love now to assume the role of super-sophisticated political consultant rather than a citizen demanding actions from their representatives. Due to the prism of gamesmanship through which political pundits understand and discuss politics, many citizens have learned to talk about their political leaders as though they're political strategists advising their clients as to the politically shrewd steps that should be taken ("this law is awful and unjust and he was being craven by voting for it, but he was absolutely right to vote for it because the public wouldn't understand if he opposed it"), rather than as citizens demanding that their public servants do the right thing ("this law is awful and unjust and, for that reason alone, he should oppose it and show leadership by making the case to the public as to why it's awful and unjust").

It may be unrealistic to expect most politicians in most circumstances to do what Jim Webb is doing here (or what Russ Feingold did during Bush's first term). My guess is that Webb, having succeeded in numerous other endeavors outside of politics, is not desperate to cling to his political office, and he has thus calculated that he'd rather have six years in the Senate doing things he thinks are meaningful than stay there forever on the condition that he cowardly renounce any actual beliefs. It's probably true that most career politicians, possessed of few other talents or interests, are highly unlikely to think that way.

But the fact that cowardly actions from political leaders are inevitable is no reason to excuse or, worse, justify and even advocate that cowardice. In fact, the more citizens are willing to excuse and even urge political cowardice in the name of "realism" or "pragmatism" ("he was smart to take this bad, unjust position because Americans are too stupid or primitive for him to do otherwise and he needs to be re-elected"), the more common that behavior will be. Politicians and their various advisers, consultants and enablers will make all the excuses they can for why politicians do what they do and insist that public opinion constrains them to do otherwise. That excuse-making is their role, not the role of citizens. What ought to be demanded of political officials by citizens is precisely the type of leadership Webb is exhibiting here.

 

[vta]

When Will We Learn To Legalize?

URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v09/n341/a05.html

Pubdate: Thu, 26 Mar 2009
Source: University Chronicle (MN Edu)

WHEN WILL WE LEARN TO LEGALIZE?

I'm no economist, but I know in order for a product to sell, there has to be a market for it.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also knows this, which is why she said Wednesday, "[The U.S.'s] insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade."

Well hot damn. This shouldn't be news to anyone. We're a nation of stark-raving mad drug fiends. Whether legal or not, Americans, like anyone else, enjoy the escape and relaxation their normal, anxiety-laden lives don't naturally have.

That's why we have a Starbucks or Caribou Coffee on every street corner in America; we need the fix.

Cigarette laws take away the personal accountability we once had, turning us now into whiny, thumb-sucking babies. But you can still smoke and get cancer and there is no violence over beating weeds.

America loves alcohol as much as any other nation; in 2007, we drank enough for every person in the country to guzzle seven bottles of liquor, 12 bottles of wine and 230 cans of beer. That's a lot, even considering that one third of the population doesn't drink.

All of these things are drugs, the most used and abused of our great nation. But can you imagine if they were illegal? Prohibition of caffeine; a coffee bean war with the Colombians. A nation of addicted smokers chucking grenades in the streets over a pack of Newports? Can you imagine what banning these substances would do to the remaining thread holding our economy up?

And could you imagine something as wild as the prohibition of alcohol? Good God, the madness.

But wait - didn't that already happen? From 1919 to 1933, the U.S. had a different war on drugs. Instead of battling Mexican drug cartels attempting to satisfy their loyal customers with the relaxing effects of marijuana, we were doing the same thing to gangsters and rumrunners trying to satisfy the country with booze.

Any idea what happened there? The late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson said in a 1997 interview about the legalization of drugs: "Look at Prohibition: all it did was make a lot of criminals rich."

That it did. And it also resulted in a whole lot of gunfire, murder and definitely didn't help the slumping economy of the times.

And look where we're at today. A third of the country doesn't drink.

How does this not make sense? Marijuana is illegal because it has been grandfathered down as a bad thing. Well guess what, it's medicine in 13 states.

Now Washington is planning on upping border security with a $184 billion program to take and destroy billions of dollars in potential product. Along with drugs, they hope to get a hold of the military-style weaponry the drug cartels are using - but they wouldn't be stealing those, they'd be taking back what was theirs, since 90 percent of the weapons and equipment come from the U.S.

New flash, kids. You won't have a problem with guns, drugs or the economy if you legalized marijuana.

Instead of spending billions on prosecuting, protecting, fighting, incarcerating and burying bodies every year, why not make billions by selling it?

 

[Hash Zeppelin]

Maybe Obama was laughing at the town hall meeting becuase, while he does not think pot will grow the econemy, he still thinks it should be decriminalized. maybe he knew this was coming, and just didnt want to let the at out of the bag.

 

[vta]

Why We Must Fix Our Prisons
March 29, 2009 at 14:54:21 PT
By Senator Jim Webb
Source: Parade

arrests Washington, D.C. -- America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace. Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation's prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.

We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration. Twenty-five years ago, I went to Japan on assignment for PARADE to write a story on that country's prison system. In 1984, Japan had a population half the size of ours and was incarcerating 40,000 sentenced offenders, compared with 580,000 in the United States. As shocking as that disparity was, the difference between the countries now is even more astounding--and profoundly disturbing. Since then, Japan's prison population has not quite doubled to 71,000, while ours has quadrupled to 2.3 million.

The United States has by far the world's highest incarceration rate. With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses nearly 25% of the world's reported prisoners. We currently incarcerate 756 inmates per 100,000 residents, a rate nearly five times the average worldwide of 158 for every 100,000. In addition, more than 5 million people who recently left jail remain under "correctional supervision," which includes parole, probation, and other community sanctions. All told, about one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, in jail, or on supervised release. This all comes at a very high price to taxpayers: Local, state, and federal spending on corrections adds up to about $68 billion a year.

Our overcrowded, ill-managed prison systems are places of violence, physical abuse, and hate, making them breeding grounds that perpetuate and magnify the same types of behavior we purport to fear. Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard or, in some places, nonexistent, making it more difficult for former offenders who wish to overcome the stigma of having done prison time and become full, contributing members of society. And, in the face of the movement toward mass incarceration, law-enforcement officials in many parts of the U.S. have been overwhelmed and unable to address a dangerous wave of organized, frequently violent gang activity, much of it run by leaders who are based in other countries.

With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different--and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter.

Over the past two decades, we have been incarcerating more and more people for nonviolent crimes and for acts that are driven by mental illness or drug dependence. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 16% of the adult inmates in American prisons and jails--which means more than 350,000 of those locked up--suffer from mental illness, and the percentage in juvenile custody is even higher. Our correctional institutions are also heavily populated by the "criminally ill," including inmates who suffer from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and hepatitis.

Drug offenders, most of them passive users or minor dealers, are swamping our prisons. According to data supplied to Congress' Joint Economic Committee, those imprisoned for drug offenses rose from 10% of the inmate population to approximately 33% between 1984 and 2002. Experts estimate that this increase accounts for about half of the dramatic escalation in the total number imprisoned over that period. Yet locking up more of these offenders has done nothing to break up the power of the multibillion-dollar illegal drug trade. Nor has it brought about a reduction in the amounts of the more dangerous drugs--such as cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines--that are reaching our citizens.

Justice statistics also show that 47.5% of all the drug arrests in our country in 2007 were for marijuana offenses. Additionally, nearly 60% of the people in state prisons serving time for a drug offense had no history of violence or of any significant selling activity. Indeed, four out of five drug arrests were for possession of illegal substances, while only one out of five was for sales. Three-quarters of the drug offenders in our state prisons were there for nonviolent or purely drug offenses. And although experts have found little statistical difference among racial groups regarding actual drug use, African-Americans--who make up about 12% of the total U.S. population--accounted for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison.

Against this backdrop of chaos and mismanagement, a dangerous form of organized and sometimes deadly gang activity has infiltrated America's towns and cities. It comes largely from our country's southern border, and much of the criminal activity centers around the movement of illegal drugs. The weapons and tactics involved are of the highest order.

The Mexican drug cartels, whose combined profits are estimated at $25 billion a year, are known to employ many elite former soldiers who were trained in some of America's most sophisticated military programs. Their brutal tactics took the lives of more than 6000 Mexicans last year alone, and the bloodshed has been spilling over the border into our own neighborhoods at a rapid pace. One terrible result is that Phoenix, Ariz., has become the kidnapping capital of the United States, with more than 370 cases in 2008. That is more incidents than in any other city in the world outside of Mexico City.

The challenge to our communities is not limited to the states that border Mexico. Mexican cartels are now reported to be running operations in some 230 American cities. Other gang activity--much of it directed from Latin America, Asia, and Europe--has permeated our country to the point that no area is immune. As one example, several thousand members of the Central American gang MS-13 now operate in northern Virginia, only a stone's throw from our nation's capital.

In short, we are not protecting our citizens from the increasing danger of criminals who perpetrate violence and intimidation as a way of life, and we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail. It is incumbent on our national leadership to find a way to fix our prison system. I believe that American ingenuity can discover better ways to deal with the problems of drugs and nonviolent criminal behavior while still minimizing violent crime and large-scale gang activity. And we all deserve to live in a country made better by such changes.

Senator Jim Webb (D. Va.) is a PARADE Contributing Editor and the author of nine books, including "A Time to Fight."

 

[ChronJohn]

I'm proud to say that that's my senator. Our prison system and prohibition as a whole are both completely fucked up... the situation is so bad you can get drugs in JAIL for fucks sake! Hopefully this bill will pass through Congress quickly (funny how quickly Congress will write up a blank check for the banks but bojangle like shit on bills that actually matter to the American people) and hopefully the commission will actually do a good, honest, thorough job. I know if it's run as intended we WILL see some positive change. This isn't some BS bill people, we should get behind this! I already called Jim and gave him my condolences, you should to the same. VA peeps especially.
Peace

P.S. Those are all good articles thanks for those ya'll

 

[anarchist]

I wish we have more legislators like Senator Jim Webb.

 

[Mackawber]

Say What You Want--Webb Gets Shit Done

Say What You Want--Webb Gets Shit Done

Jim Webb is the rising star of the US Senate. He gets shit done. He got the new GI bill through.

Webb was Reagan's Sec. of the Navy and will defend the United States. No question about it. If anybody can get things done and bring people together, it's Jim Webb.

Watch this guy---he's a rising star with a future.

Don't blow it Jim----People believe in you now. Can you come through 2 or 3 times more? Are you the new Teddy Roosevelt? Maybe!

 

[Hash Zeppelin]

maybe this guy will have a good shot a president in 8 years. If he is openly pro pot, i will vote for him.