...or, Great Scott! I actually agree with Clarence Page for once!
Legalize drugs to force traffickers out of business
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When you step back and take a broad look at Mexico’s growing carnage, it’s easy to see why El Paso’s city leaders think legalization doesn’t look so bad. Mexico’s drug problem is not the drugs. It is the illegality of the drugs.
Legalization is not the perfect solution. But treating currently illegal drugs in the way we treat liquor and other legal addictive substances would provide regulation, tax revenue and funds for rehabilitation programs. Most satisfying, it would wipe a lot of smiles off the current drug lords’ faces.
Yep, that's pretty much the long and short of it. I am pleased to see more people looking at it from this perspective, although it does suck that it took violence in another country for them to do it as opposed to the violence in our own inner cities. For those of you reading the snippet about El Paso and wondering what he's talking about, that city's council passed a resolution encouraging the federal government to study the legalization of currently illegal drugs. The resolution was promptly vetoed by El Paso mayor John Cook, who said, "It is not realistic to believe that the U.S. Congress will seriously consider any broad-based debate on the legalization of narcotics...that position is not consistent with the community standards both locally and nationally."
In other words, "drugs'r'bad, hmkay?"
Unfortunately his position seems to be shared by the area's representative in the U.S. House, Silvestre Reyes, who said, "Legalizing the types of drugs that are being smuggled across the border is not an effective way to combat the violence in Mexico." The question of what Reyes thinks would be effective would have been a good one to ask, indeed. Street price of a gram of cocaine in El Paso says he favors yet more enforcement of drug and gun laws, in other words, "do it again, only HARDER!"...
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