On Thursday, I wrote about the United States military’s continuing campaign of blowing up small boats, and killing their occupants in the process, in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The so-called justification for this killing spree is to win, or at least make headway in, the war on drugs. But, it turns out the evidence indicates that the violence and destruction has contributed nothing to impeding the flow of verboten drugs in America.
You may have heard President Donald Trump declare once or more his often repeated claim that the United States government has saved the lives of 25,000 Americans each time its military has blown up a purported drug trafficking boat over the last few months in the Caribbean and Pacific. That sounds impressive. But, as Jacob Sullum explained in a Tuesday Reason article, Trump’s numbers don’t make sense.
Eleven years back, John W. Whitehead warned in his weekly column about the danger from government’s proliferating use of automated license plate readers across America. Whitehead included these devices among the tools being employed in the construction of what he termed an “electronic concentration camp.”
In an editorial last week, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio was touting his effort to ensure the US government respects free speech. But, Rubio is also a leader in the ongoing US government program that deports people from America because they have exercised free speech in criticizing actions of the Israel government or support by the US government for those actions.
Government excels at messing things up and then, in the name of fixing the problem that it created, creating more problems. This at least is how things look from the perspective of someone who desires advancement of liberty, safety, and welfare. For many politicians and special interests, priorities often are otherwise.
In October of 2022, I wrote about the underwhelming nature of President Joe Biden’s pardons for some people convicted of marijuana offenses. What Biden proclaimed was a big rollback in the war on marijuana was really much less. The same goes for the new effort by the Biden administration to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.
Ron Paul was a strong proponent in the United States House of Representatives of ending the US government’s war on doctors who prescribe pain medication and on their patients who rely on the medication to relieve pain. This war has been a subset of the larger war on drugs and one that is in many ways easier to fight than taking on actual drug-running organizations that use stealth and violence as tools of the trade.
Over the last two years, I have been writing about how the congressional Democratic leadership has stood in the way of the bipartisan effort that would be needed to adopt marijuana legalization at the national level. It has done so by choosing as its legalization vehicle the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act that features race-based provisions and marijuana business subsidies that ensure that nearly no Republican congressional members will support the bill. The strategy has allowed Democrats in Congress to continue to bluster in favor of marijuana legalization while making no progress toward legalization becoming reality.
As of Monday, possessing small quantities of cocaine, heroin, LSD, methamphetamine, MDMA, psilocybin, methadone, or oxycodone is no longer punishable by prison time and thousands of dollars in fines in Oregon.
“Once police stop you, a ticket is the least of your worries,” writes Jacob Sullum early on in his new Reason article “10 Ways a Roadside Police Stop Can Go Wrong.”
After starting off with a short examination of the discretion police have to pull over vehicles on the road for a plethora of reasons, Sullum addresses, in turn, ten of the ways beyond a ticket that a traffic stop can be harmful. He starts with number one, having one’s driver license taken away, and proceeds on to number ten, being killed.