"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, June 09, 2011

End 'War on Drugs' Now

EXTRACT: Communists, on the other hand, unambiguously call for the full legalisation of all drugs - not just the supposedly ‘soft’ ones like cannabis. Not because we naively believe that ending the ‘war on drugs’ is some sort of universal panacea that will instantly usher in a society of perfectly adjusted, well-rounded, non-alienated individuals. No, our call for legalisation is principally motivated by the desire not to make a bad situation worse. Huge swathes of the population are criminalised by the current prohibitive drugs laws.
In the US, of course, this has reached barbaric proportions: arrests for drug law violations this year are expected to exceed the 1,663,582 that occurred in 2009. The various law enforcement agencies made more arrests for drugs violations than for any other offences in 2009 - an estimated 1.6 million, or 13% of the total number. The prison population has grown by an average of 43,266 inmates per year since 1995 - and around 25% are there for drug law violations. Furthermore, those receiving custodial sentence for drugs crimes are disproportionately black - so whilst blacks constitute 14% of regular drug users in the US, they constitute 37% of those arrested for drug offences and 56% those detained in hellish state prison as a result. Clearly the ‘war on drugs’ is more like a war on society - fundamentally no different from the ‘war on booze’ during the dark days of prohibition (1920-33).
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Posted by at 12:18 pm

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