On Saturday, United States President Donald Trump held a press conference to boast about his sending the US military hours earlier to bring destruction in Venezuela and drag off the leader of the nation’s government to America for incarceration and prosecution. It was all done in the name of fighting the war on drugs, though few people give much credit to the Trump administration’s repeated assertion that Venezuela President Nicolás Madura was a drug kingpin responsible for a major share of fentanyl or cocaine shipments into America.
Tag: war on drugs
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Venezuela’s Drug-running Hobbyists
The absurdities keep piling up to justify increasing United States aggression against Venezuela in the name of fighting the war on drugs.
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President Trump’s Drug War Bad Math
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.
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) was patting itself on the back with gusto last week in publicizing it is prosecuting alleged drug kingpin Zhi Dong Zhang upon his extradition from Mexico. The prosecution is a really big deal in the US government’s effort to win the war on drugs according to the assertions of several government employees in the DOJ press release.
A CBS poll conducted November 19-21 has found that 70 percent of polled Americans oppose the United States government taking military action in Venezuela. This result is in line with polling earlier in November by Reuters/Ipsos that found that only 21 percent of polled Americans support the US government using military force for the specific objective of removing from office Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro.
Back in the 1980s, I was not a fan of the television show Miami Vice. The focus of the show — cops Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs enforcing laws against vice — was not appealing. Stop the crackdown on vice — including by bowing out of the war on drugs — and follow a policy of live and let live instead, I thought. Miami and the rest of America would be a freer and safer place as a result.
It is bad enough that the United States government year after year spends enormous sums and violates rights in abandon to continue fighting in America its war on drugs — a war it has been losing and will continue to lose. Unfortunately, the US government keeps pursuing its war on drugs abroad as well.
A newly reported on March of 1973 recording of a private conversation of then President Richard Nixon with some of his executive branch aides includes Nixon commenting that marijuana is “not particularly dangerous.” He also stated that penalties related to marijuana should be evaluated to make sure they are not too harsh. Nixon, as an example, described as “wrong” a Texas 10 year prison term for a marijuana offence.
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.
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Libertarians for the Drug War?
Kyle Jaeger, in a Marijuana Moment article last week discussing answers to a drug war question from a March Cato Institute poll, suggests that a substantial percentage of libertarians, even higher than among liberals, support continuing the drug war. Yet, when you look at the poll question at issue, a much different alternative interpretation becomes evident.