Former Baltimore City police officer Peter Moskos in U.S. News and World Report today: Drugs Are Too Dangerous Not to RegulateÖWe Should Legalize Them
It’s a great piece with the right focus for a major national magazine.
On the other hand, the magazine is doing a point/counter-point on this and the other side is taken by former drug czar Lee P. Brown, who starts with the most inane, brain-dead statement imaginable.
Advocates of legalization argue that drug prohibition only makes things worse. They argue that crime, the spread of HIV, and violence are major consequences of drug prohibition. But these represent only part of the damage caused by drug use. Consider drug-exposed infants, drug-induced accidents, and loss of productivity and employment, not to mention the breakdown of families and the degeneration of drug-inflicted neighborhoods. These too are consequences of drugs.
Does he realize how stupid that is? Does he expect that the population is stupid enough to believe that paragraph makes any rational sense? Is he insulting our intelligence, or is his own simply that far gone?