Right Thinking From The Left Coast
"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Thursday, July 03, 2008

High Times
by West Virginia Rebel

The Best Magazine In The World points out something that many Republicans probably wouldn’t want to admit.

Overall, drug use in the U.S. peaked around 1979 and began to fall well before Ronald Reagan ramped up the war on drugs. As Republicans are fond of noting, drug use did rise during the Clinton administration, but it started to fall again before anything George W. Bush did differently could have had an impact. Although marijuana arrests have increased by more than 150 percent since 1990, marijuana use seems to be just as common today as it was then, if not more so.

So does that mean that if Barack Obama wins, drug use will actually go down? I would suggest that part of the current increase is a result of the government’s tendency to put medical marijuana and hemp in the same league as crack and heroin. And certainly one could argue that the Bush years gave more people a reason to want to escape. At any rate, this does seem to contradict the notion that drug use only goes up when those durn libruls are in office.

Posted by West Virginia Rebel on 07/03/08 at 04:55 PM in Politics, Law, & Economics  • (2) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink • Discuss this in the forums
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