via AP:
Clinton urged a quick resolution to a dispute over Mexican trucks entering the United States, saying both sides need to ensure that traffic across the border is safe and legal.
"We (in the U.S.) can worry about what's coming north, but Mexican people are worried about what's coming south: assault weapons, bazookas, grenades," she said. "
Illicit drug overdose remains a leading cause of premature mortality in urban settings worldwide. We sought to estimate the number of deaths potentially averted by the implementation of a medically supervised safer injection facility (SIF) in Vancouver, Canada.
The number of potentially averted deaths was calculated using an estimate of the local ratio of non-fatal to fatal overdoses. Inputs were derived from counts of overdose deaths by the British Columbia Vital Statistics Agency and non-fatal overdose rates from published estimates. Potentially-fatal overdoses were defined as events within the SIF that required the provision of naloxone, a 911 call or an ambulance. Point estimates and 95% Confidence Intervals (95% CI) were calculated using a Monte Carlo simulation. Between March 1, 2004 and July 1, 2008 there were 1004 overdose events in the SIF of which 453 events matched our definition of potentially fatal. In 2004, 2005 and 2006 there were 32, 37 and 38 drug-induced deaths in the SIF's neighbourhood. Owing to the wide range of non-fatal overdose rates reported in the literature (between 5% and 30% per year) we performed sensitivity analyses using non-fatal overdose rates of 50, 200 and 300 per 1,000 person years. Using these model inputs, the number of averted deaths were, respectively: 50.9 (95% CI: 23.6–78.1); 12.6 (95% CI: 9.6–15.7); 8.4 (95% CI: 6.5–10.4) during the study period, equal to 1.9 to 11.7 averted deaths per annum.
Based on a conservative estimate of the local ratio of non-fatal to fatal overdoses, the potentially fatal overdoses in the SIF during the study period could have resulted in between 8 and 51 deaths had they occurred outside the facility, or from 6% to 37% of the total overdose mortality burden in the neighborhood during the study period. These data should inform the ongoing debates over the future of the pilot project.
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"It’s not what you think. The United States is embroiled in an immoral, racist, and ineffective war, costing taxpayers $69 billion a year with no end in sight. But unlike Iraq, this war is fought in America’s streets and the casualties are American civilians. Without exaggeration, the War on Drugs is this country’s single most destructive public policy failure since slavery.
The War on Drugs is America’s second attempt at the failed policy of prohibition. In 1919, Congress ratified the 18th Amendment, banning the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol. Instead of reducing alcohol consumption and its associated crimes, Prohibition multiplied them exponentially. The abolition of legal booze created an incredible demand that fueled a thriving black market. Increased demand generates increased cost, so gangsters like Al Capone made millions trafficking illegal hooch with huge profit margins. These thugs gunned down rival bootleggers, as well as bystanders caught in the crossfire. Violent alcohol trafficking disappeared only after Prohibition was lifted and bootlegging alcohol became unprofitable."
~ Full article here ~"The US government succeeds in over 90 per cent of its prosecutions, which indicates that the system is a stacked deck. US criminal justice is based on the plea bargain, which is essentially the exchange of immunity or a reduced sentence for inculpatory perjury against targeted people. It is an evil and repulsive system based on intimidation, suborned falsehoods, and impoverishment. Irish, British and Canadian prosecutors using these tactics would be disbarred.
The prosecutors routinely try to freeze assets of targeted people, ex parte, on the basis of affidavits they know to be fraudulent. They did so with me. Few people can afford to go the distance with the Justice Department, and are conducted to their confinement by the Judas Goats of the public defender service, pawns of the prosecutors, understaffed, and paid on the basis of supposed merit by the judges, most of whom are also ex-prosecutors."The United States imprisons almost one in one hundred American adults—a higher number and percentage of its population than any other country, according to a February 29, 2008 Washington Post article. This has been especially devastating for minorities—as the Post points out, “(o)ne in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars.” Many of these people remain in a continual pattern of crime. Are we a safer society as a result, or should we re-evaluate our crime policies?
When I was in college, Johnnie Cochran gave a talk in which he asked whether we are doing a service to the country by building a land of barbed wire and concrete “from sea to shining sea.” There is a psychological and social effect that has been pointed out by Ayn Rand, who argued (astutely) that social control is easier if we create a nation of criminals. Many statutes do not prevent crimes; they create them. Drug laws are a perfect example: drug use infringes on no one’s rights; it is the essence of a “victimless crime.”
Some might respond that there is no such thing as a “victimless crime” because of the effects of drug use on the user’s friends and families. These costs are all too real as the legacy of families torn apart by drug abuse suggests. If we are going to adopt this utilitarian line of reasoning, though, then we have to weigh the costs to families against the social costs created by the unintended consequences of the war on drugs.
The drug war is an integral part of the rapidly growing American prison population. Outlawing marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and other drugs created a whole new class of crimes and moved traffic in psychoactive drugs out of the legitimate marketplace and into the black market.
Another one of the unintended consequences of the drug war is the escalating potency of the drugs people use today. The marijuana on the streets today is much more potent than the marijuana that was on the streets thirty and forty years ago. As penalties have changed, so too have the drugs people use. Cocaine became more prevalent after the government cracked down on heroin in the 1970s. The crack epidemic was in part a response to attempts to eradicate cocaine, and the crystal meth epidemic of the last decade has happened in part in response to the war on crack. Criminal penalties give people incentives to pack as much potency into as small a space as possible; therefore, drug dealers have incentives to increase the potency of the drugs they deal.
Yet other examples of the unintended consequence of the drug war are the extremely low quality of the drugs that appear on the street and the violent means that drug dealers use to settle disputes. Someone who buys bad aspirin has legal recourse against the company that sold it to him. Someone who buys bad heroin or bad crack has no such legal recourse, and disputes over quality will be settled violently, if at all. Epidemics of urban crime are among the unintended consequences of the drug war.
It appears that we learned nothing from our experiment with alcohol prohibition in the first part of the twentieth century. When alcohol was outlawed, alcohol production and distribution were taken over by organized criminal syndicates—think Al Capone—and crime skyrocketed.
Prison is not the answer. In a recent set of lectures given on behalf of the Institute for Humane Studies, Georgetown University legal scholar John Hasnas argued in favor of restitution as opposed to incarceration and statutory law. Hasnas argued that people are not necessarily reformed while in prisons and jails. They learn to be better criminals. They attach themselves to larger criminal networks. After some of the horrible experiences of prison—like prison rape, for example—still others are likely to become even more withdrawn and antisocial. The current system isn’t working.
Proponents of law and order might see this as bleeding-heart, soft-on-crime liberalism. I agree that crime should be punished; indeed, a strong legal system is essential for a well-functioning society. To take one example, it has been argued by legal scholar Richard Posner (and I agree) that the penalties for drunken driving are not nearly severe enough. It is quite another matter, however, to argue that our current system is doing what it was meant to do. It is time to re-examine our drug policy.
As both a U.S. Attorney and Member of Congress, I defended drug prohibition. But it has become increasingly clear to me, after much study, that our current strategy has not worked and will not work. The other candidates for president prefer not to address this issue, but ignoring the failure of existing policy exhibits both a poverty of thought and an absence of political courage. The federal government must turn the decision on drug policy back to the states and the citizens themselves.
My change in perspective might shock some people, but leadership requires a willingness to assess evidence and recognize when a strategy is not working. We are paying far too high a price for today's failed policy to continue it simply because it has always been done that way.
It is obvious that, like Prohibition's effort to eradicate alcohol usage, drug prohibition has not succeeded. Despite enormous law enforcement efforts -- including the dedicated service of many thousands of professional men and women -- the government has not halted drug use. Indeed, the problem is worse today than in 1972, when Richard Nixon first coined the phrase "War on Drugs."
Whether we like it or not, tens of millions of Americans have used and will continue to use drugs. Yet in 2005 we spent more than $12 billion on federal drug enforcement efforts. Another $30 billion went to incarcerate non-violent drug offenders.
