Re:Norway votes to decriminalise drugs and offer treatment i...
by ZeroGravitas on Saturday December 16, 2017 @05:52PM
(#15942711)
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." -- John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief for President Richard Nixon when the administration declared its war on drugs in 1971
There are a lot of young dems and republicans that are at also against the current war on drugs - mainly as it pertains to marijuana, but still [2].
Glad to see Norway making headway in the right direction here. Hopefully my countries (Germany and USA) can follow suite at some point, rather sooner than later.
Finally, when will the USA and other countries start using metrics, data, experiment, and testing to drive policy instead of following public opinion or philosophical / moral stances that are based on nothing and which are continuously being invalidated or minimally given ample evidence for optimization by any data allowed to accumulate?
1. http://news.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx 2. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/27/63-of-republ...