{"id":1643,"date":"2011-08-14T08:34:04","date_gmt":"2011-08-14T12:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/08\/hitting-the-cartels-where-it-hurts.html"},"modified":"2011-08-14T08:34:04","modified_gmt":"2011-08-14T12:34:04","slug":"hitting-the-cartels-where-it-hurts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/08\/hitting-the-cartels-where-it-hurts.html","title":{"rendered":"Hitting the cartels where it hurts"},"content":{"rendered":"Former border state governor advocates ending drug prohibition.\n

\nGary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, wrote in the Washington Times 5 August 2011,\n\nJOHNSON: Hitting the cartels where it hurts:\nLegalization of marijuana would end drug profiteering and violence<\/a>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nImagine you are a drug lord in Mexico, making unfathomable profits\nsending your illegal product to the United States. What is the headline\nyou fear the most? \u201cU.S. to build bigger fence\u201d? \u201cU.S. to send\ntroops to the border\u201d? \u201cU.S. to deploy tanks in El Paso\u201d? No. None\nof those would give you much pause. They would simply raise the level of\ndifficulty and perhaps cause you to escalate the violence that already\nhas turned the border region into a war zone. But would they stop you\nor ultimately hurt your bottom line? Probably not.\n

\nBut what if that drug lord opened his newspaper and read this: \u201cU.S. to\nlegalize and regulate marijuana\u201d? That would ruin his day, and ruin\nit in a way that could not be fixed with more and bigger guns, higher\nprices or more murder.\n<\/blockquote>\nAs a Republican, he manages to say legalize and regulate but forget\nto mention tax, and he didn’t mention \nJimmy Carter<\/a>\nor Javier Sicilia<\/a>\ncalling for an end to the drug war,\nbut he did mention (I added the links):\n\n\n

\nThere are ample reasons why millions of Americans, the\n\nGlobal Commission on Drug Policy<\/a>\nand, just recently,\n\nformer Mexican President Vincente Fox<\/a>\nare calling for legalization of marijuana as an alternative to the\nfailed and ridiculously costly \u201cwar on drugs.\u201d Twenty-eight thousand\ndeaths along the border are certainly among those reasons.\n

\nWill legalizing marijuana put the criminal cartels out of\nbusiness? No. But it will immediately deny them their largest profit\ncenter and dramatically reduce not only the role of the United States\nin their business plans, but also the motivation for waging war along\nour southern border.\n

\nOur federal government has spent 40 years and a trillion dollars on\na failed war on drugs. The real and societal costs of treating drug\nabuse as a crime problem rather than what it is – a health problem –\nare inestimable. Add to that reality the tragedy our laws are fueling\nalong the border, and it clearly is time to end this prohibition, just\nas we ended the last one.\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n-jsq\n

\nPS: Owed to Dante Avecedo.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former border state governor advocates ending drug prohibition. Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, wrote in the Washington Times 5 August 2011, JOHNSON: Hitting the cartels where it hurts: Legalization of marijuana would end drug profiteering and violence Imagine you are a drug lord in Mexico, making unfathomable profits sending your illegal product to […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,202,48,40,2,19,1381,72,20],"tags":[3779,3948,8830,8730,2650,1296,79,2651,60,82],"class_list":["post-1643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-agriculture","category-code-enforcement","category-community","category-government","category-history","category-immigration","category-incarceration","category-law","tag-drug-cartels","tag-gary-johnson","tag-immigration","tag-incarceration","tag-legalize","tag-mexico","tag-prohibition","tag-regulate","tag-tax","tag-war-on-drugs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-qv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}