All Posts Tagged With: "War on Drugs"
A Libertarian Program for Urban Renewal
In the spirit of providing politically feasible “libertarian policies,” I want to offer a set of proposals to improve one area of American society that desperately needs it: the inner city.
29Sep2011 | Steven Horwitz | 14 comments | ContinuedDrug Decriminalization Has Failed?
Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a columnist for the Washington Post, has denounced libertarianism as “morally empty,” “anti-government,” “a scandal,” “an idealism that strangles mercy,” guilty of “selfishness,” “rigid ideology,” and “rigorous ideological coldness.” (He’s starting to repeat himself.) In his May 9 column, “Ron Paul’s Land of Second-Rate [...]
24Aug2011 | David Boaz | 7 comments | ContinuedFEE.TV Launches Today
FEE.tv, the newest project of the Foundation for Economic Education, launches today. The new site will be the place for exciting videos, mini-lectures, and other features that teach and illustrate the principles of the free society. The inaugural video below marks the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs, which has brought virtually unparalleled government [...]
17Jun2011 | Tsvetelin M. Tsonevski | 2 comments | ContinuedA Victim of the State, pt. 2
Now even speaking out against injustice can subject a person to criminal investigation. What’s next?
1Apr2011 | Sheldon Richman | 12 comments | ContinuedThis Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America
Americans really like to get high, and they’ll go out of their way to do so even when the government threatens to punish them. That’s the theme that comes through strongest in Ryan Grim’s This Is Your Country On Drugs, a look at the relationship among Americans, the drugs they use, and their government. The [...]
24Nov2010 | Jacob H. Huebert | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Fourth Amendment and Faulty Originalism
“All arrests are at the peril of the party making them.” —Alexander H. Stephens, August 27, 1863 These days the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution means next to nothing. Consider, for example, the choice offered a few years ago: surveillance under routine, easy “warrants” from the drive-through FISA Court or warrantless surveillance at the whim [...]
25Aug2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 3 comments | ContinuedDrugs, Economics, and Liberty
Only a few people would dispute that narcotics can harm people, whether that harm is in the form of damage to the body, mental and physical dependency, or threats to social relationships. However, there is not nearly as much consensus as to what the correct public response to narcotics use and sales is. Ideas range [...]
20May2010 | Walter E. Williams | 39 comments | ContinuedOn Not Admitting Error
According to a September 2006 report in the New York Times, Afghanistan’s opium harvest has increased almost 50 percent from the year before and reached the highest levels ever recorded. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (sic) explained: “It is indeed very bad, you can say it is [...]
1Mar2007 | Thomas Szasz | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Myth of Available Pain Care
America is in the midst of an ongoing epidemic of undertreated chronic pain. This fact is confirmed by surveys such as “Chronic Pain in America: Roadblocks to Relief,” which is posted on the American Pain Society website (www.ampainsoc.org/ whatsnew/toc_road.htm). The economic cost of this epidemic can be estimated, in terms of lost productivity, at about [...]
1Apr2005 | Frank B. Fisher | 30 comments | ContinuedAnother Victim of the Drug War
It’s not pleasant to hear Dr. Frank Fisher speak. I first heard him several months ago at a briefing on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s war on prescription painkillers in Washington, D.C. His eyes tend to glass over through much of his speech, seemingly on the verge of tears. Above them rests a sweeping coif of [...]
1Apr2005 | Radley Balko | 0 comments | ContinuedLosing the Law: From Shield to Weapon
William Anderson is an assistant professor of economics at Frostburg State University, Frostburg, Maryland. Candice Jackson is litigation counsel for Judicial Watch. In recent years lawmakers and enforcers have increasingly criminalized business behavior. From the prosecution of Michael Milken and other Wall Street figures in the 1980s to the indictment of Martha Stewart in 2003, [...]
1May2004 | and William L. Anderson | 0 comments | ContinuedThe New Drug War
Seeking to combine the failures of the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty, the U.S. government has now embarked on the War on (Expensive) Prescription Drugs. You see, grannies crossing the northern border in search of cheaper prescription drugs are causing fits at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). U.S. District Judge Claire [...]
1Apr2004 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | ContinuedTaking Drug Laws Seriously, II
Libertarians univocally assert that the prohibition against initiating violence is a cardinal principle of libertarianism. The peasant in Colombia who grows coca is not initiating violence. The politician in the District of Columbia who enacts laws authorizing the use of military aircraft to bomb and destroy the peasant’s crop does.
1Oct2003 | Thomas Szasz | 2 comments | ContinuedUnequal Justice for All
Drug prohibition is stupid social policy for many reasons, most obviously because forbidden fruit tastes sweeter; that is, because one of the easiest ways for a young person to assert his autonomy is by defying authority, especially arbitrary and hypocritical authority.
1Jul2003 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It
Among regular readers of this publication, the notion that America’s drug war brings more harm than good is hardly a news flash. But while the message of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It may not be unique, its messenger, Orange County (Calif.) Superior Court Judge James P. Gray, [...]
1Sep2002 | Paul Armentano | 1 comment | ContinuedGoing Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation
Reviewed by John Seiler Across America’s vast territory stretches another country, an archipelago, few citizens know about: the Gulag Americana. Many of the inmates belong there: murderers, rapists, thieves. But many don’t, having been sent to prison for crimes that didn’t hurt anybody, especially nonviolent drug offenses. Going Up the River details the Hell of [...]
1Jul2002 | Joseph T. Hallinan | 1 comment | ContinuedAfter Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century by Timothy Lynch
Cato Institute • 2000 • 193 pages • $18.95 Reviewed by Kevin B. Zeese As the title indicates, this book takes an adult approach to drug issues. While most politicians argue over the mix of drug war funding—interdiction, eradication, law enforcement, treatment, or prevention—After Prohibition avoids merely moving around the furniture on the Titanic and [...]
1Jun2002 | Timothy Lynch - Editor | 0 comments | Continued-
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