Here's an infuriating article that just blew all the circuitry in my irony detector.

A Justice Department lawyer compared the enforcement of idiotic federal marijuana laws to ending Jim Crow in the South.

California and other states that want to make marijuana available to sick or dying patients are flouting federal drug laws in much the same way that Southern states defied national civil rights laws, a senior Bush administration lawyer said.

And here's a wonder of understatement by his debating opponent:

When government agents shut down marijuana growers who serve sick people, it is "not acting with the same degree of moral propriety as it did to end civil rights abuses," said Taylor Carey, a California special assistant attorney general who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief backing medical marijuana.

That's putting it mildly. In fact, in this case, even ignoring the rights of patients to get the potentially most efficacious medicine, the federal government is enforcing civil rights abuses with this insanity. Recall that the point at issue was one of free speech and doctor-patient privilege--the right of a doctor to recommend a course of treatment for a sick client, which the federal law forbids.

It would almost be enough to make me vote Democrat, except for the war, and, of course, the fact that this was a policy initiated by the Clinton Administration...

While I'm in favor of legalization of marijuana and other relatively mild recreational drugs, I should point out that I heard from a source that apparently was buying marijuana at the time, that the price of high quality marijuana dropped from $60 an ounce to $30 an ounce (in the Berkeley, CA area) after legalization for medical purposes. Others may know better what happened during that time. But it looked to me like partial legalization resulted in a halving of the street price for regular customers!

And it increased selection, and it lowered the amount of markup for smaller purchases. Oh and that would be from $60 -> $30ish for an EIGHTH of an ounce.
And no one who smoked was paranoid.

That's how it was 2 years ago when I visited the Bay for a few weeks.

And the Dems are indeed not your friend either if you want to bring sanity to the Drug War. Too much dirty money in prohibition: the prison guard unions alone have ensured that the Dems oppose ending it.

Well, there may be that, David, but I think generally it's because throughout most of recent history there has been big public support for "fighting drugs" as a generic idea. I have little doubt that more widespread knowledge of how the current "drug war" is waged would erode that, if it isn't doing so already, but political parties as institutions really aren't good at keeping up with changing circumstances.

Politicians of both major parties remain committed to the "drug war" because to them and the public it's how we're "fighting drugs," which as far as the politicians can tell the public still wants.

That's my Occam's Razor explanation for it.

It occurs to me that this odious analogy is of a piece with the ``support our troops'' meme: each implies that the same means cannot be applied to both good and bad ends.

It occurs to me that this odious analogy is of a piece with the ``support our troops'' meme: each implies that the same means cannot be applied to both good and bad ends.