From an interview in Mexico
QUESTION: Okay. In several occasion, you have recognized that the partial explanation to the violence in Mexico can be found in the elevated drug consumption and the tolerance towards arms selling in your country. The consumption has not diminished. On the contrary, I hear it’s, like, reached a historical maximum and arms selling continue. And it’s very unlikely that it would – this will change. So why would – should we continue giving this battle? And when I say we, it’s like our country, Mexico.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, we are making some progress. There has been some decrease in drug use. But more than that, there’s been greater cooperation across the border. We are stopping more people and finding not only drugs, but guns, money for money laundering. We have much better law enforcement cooperation across the border. I don’t think either of us could do this without working with the other. And I don’t think either of us wants to let a drug kingpin and his gang behead people or addict people on either side of the border.
QUESTION: In Mexico, there are those who propose not keeping going with this battle and legalize drug trafficking and consumption. What is your opinion?
SECRETARY CLINTON: I don’t think that will work. I mean, I hear the same debate. I hear it in my country. It is not likely to work. There is just too much money in it, and I don’t think that – you can legalize small amounts for possession, but those who are making so much money selling, they have to be stopped. They can’t be given an even easier road to take, because they will then find it in their interest to addict even more young people. Mexico didn’t have much of a drug problem before the last 10 years, and you want to keep it that way. So you don’t want to give any excuse to the drug traffickers to be able legally to addict young people.
QUESTION: But in the United States there [is] more and more tolerance for marijuana, right?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Mm-hmm.
QUESTION: So this doesn’t seem right. Like the tolerance in the United States, and here we are killing each other for this product.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, the tolerance is in a very limited arena. It is for medical –
QUESTION: Medical use.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Medical use. And there are lots of regulations on it. So it’s not accurate to say, as I’ve heard some say, well, we’re legalizing marijuana. We are not. We are – the biggest – we have more people incarcerated, unfortunately, than any country in the world, and most of them are there because of some drug-related offense. So we know that this is not an easy struggle. We’ve been at it ourselves. But we also believe that you have to keep the pressure on the criminals; otherwise, they will just expand their operations, and then you do have to worry about more corruption, more problems with institutions.
What mindset does it take to keep claiming that legalization means the illegal traffickers get to have the profits?
It’s boggles the mind that someone who supposes to be intelligent can give such responses, well, actually non answers.
Not an optimist on any of this stuff, yet, however, it was great the topic was brought up in Mexico.
“We have people incarcerated … So we know this is not an easy struggle.”
You and your cohorts hillary are the ones who make it a struggle, cast blame where it belongs and please stop with the denial.
One that is talking about decriminalizing, not fully legalizing production, sale, and distribution.
True, although she had to change the thrust of the question in order to do that.
“…but those who are making so much money selling, they have to be stopped.”
I think my mind just overloaded. In what world is it where we need to stop peopele from making so much money? And why doesn’t that apply to Goldman-Sachs, or Phizer or Exxon? The cognative dissonance is deafening, I can’t find my feet, where did my yogurt go? Ctrl/Alt/Del. Tilt.TiltTiLt…..
Clinton Quiet About Own Radical Ties
When Hillary Rodham Clinton questioned rival Barack Obama’s ties to 1960s radicals, her comments baffled two retired Bay Area lawyers who knew Clinton in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an intern at a left-wing law firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended communists and Black Panthers.
Bill and Hillary’s Hippie Daze December 13, 2007
The other thing you can bet the stash on about the Clintons in that summer of 1971 in Berkeley is that they were stoned, loaded, blasted, wasted, high as a kite, and just plain baked. At the very least.
The Clinton’s Berkeley Summer of Love by Josh Gerstein
The New York Sun
Hillary was clerking for the radical Treuhaft law firm in nearby Oakland.
ahem, except Tobacco and Alcohol…
A shocking admission from our sitting Secretary of State
(from the body of the interview):
“We are – the biggest – we have more people incarcerated, unfortunately, than any country in the world, and most of them are there because of some drug-related offense. So we know that this is not an easy struggle”
So they finally admit it.
“So we know that this is not an easy struggleâ€
“WE” know this is not an easy struggle? And just how many years have you spent in prison Ms. Hillary for *YOUR* illegal drug use?
Reminds me of the austerity plans the elite wish to impose on us meaning you and I and anyone else who has a gross income of less than $100,000 per year, will have to sacrifice a bit for the fututre of our country.
BTW, on the issue of money laundering…hasn’t Wells-Fargo (too big to fail) been caught laundering illegal drug money? Yet we as taxpayers had to bail them out? WTF?
And I love the way she turned and bolted when she was asked by a savvy reporter if she was using the word insurgency seriously; she wasn’t it, was hyperbole. A press thats not cowed into submission and tacitly supporting the position will ask about, rather than just let her get away with it. Plus, it sounds to me ALOMST as if they are worried about American Tanks rolling into Cuidad Juarez.
Hillary is one of the drug warriors who confuses me. Obama, I know that he knows better than his public stance, but political realities force him to ignore this issue.
Hillary, I don’t know if she is actually ignorant of the reality(legalization means NO MORE illegal profits, not increased illegal profits), or if she continues to back the drug war out of cynical calculation.
Dough! what I was trying to say above
“Obama, I know that he knows better than his public stance,”
Ben you seem to be giving Obama a pass because he “knows better”.
My response is the opposite. Obama knows better than to cross his oligarch masters who are sucking the teat of prohibition. Same as the old boss.
Hillary I could never vote for as my opinion of her has long been she will say whatever she believes to be politically expedient, she has no “moral compass”.
Oh, for crying out loud! The intellectually dishonest spin! The outright lies! The ignorance of the lessons of alcohol prohibition!
Must….keep….head….from….exploding…..aaarrrrgh!
Unreal…she keeps saying taking the profit away from cartels wont stop them selling drugs.
Its like saying a glass of water wont quench a thurst.
A breath of air wont stop suffocation.
Take profit out of loaning money…would we have bankers?
Take profit out of selling cars, would we have car salesmen?
Take profit out of selling weapons and making war. Would we still have the military industrial complex?
Talk about thick headed.
Until the banksters, lawyers, politicians, cia spooks and crooked leo’s who benefit from prohibition are frog marched in orange jumpsuits to jail to join those who just got caught, the war on drugs will continue.
“What mindset does it take to keep claiming that legalization means the illegal traffickers get to have the profits?”
One that is insufficiently challenged in the public spotlight.
There we are again. The denial of the obvious: If an activity is not criminalized, the people who engage in that activity are not criminals. Period. It’s so goddamn obvious that any sixth-grade C student should get it right away. Yet our Sec.State can’t seem to make (or, more accurately, won’t make) the logical connection.
It’s not that they’re retarded, it’s that they think WE’RE retarded. (as an aside, I really love that that word has returned. Retarded. It sounds so….retarded)
The mind set that realizes the amount of black ops money that is made on illegal substances?
“Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.
We like it.
It’s left a trail of graft and slime
It don’t prohibit worth a dime
It’s filled our land with vice and crime,
Nevertheless, we’re for it.”
— newspaperman Franklin P. Adams, 1931, in the New York World,
on the release of the Wickersham Commission report
“Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.”
— Will Rogers
“I am against Prohibition because it has set the cause of temperence back twenty years; because it has substituted an ineffective campaign of force for an effective campaign of education; because it has replaced comparatively uninjurious light wines and beers with the worst kind of hard liquor and bad liquor; because it has increased
drinking not only among men but has extended drinking to women and even children.”
— William Randolph Hearst,
initially a supporter of Prohibition,
explaining his change of mind in 1929.
From “Drink: A Social History of America” by Andrew Barr (1999), p.239.
One more time… Al Capone and Watergate were red herrings to divert the countries attention from the Fascist acts of eliminating competition. Booze/Ethanol or Ganja//Hemp.
“Insanity is …
Continuing to do the same things and expecting different results.”
— Albert Einstein
“Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.”
— Seneca, A.D. 65
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“Well, we are making some progress.”
~ Hillary Clinton on the Drug War
Teen pot smokers? Don’t blame medical marijuana laws
Feb 1 2011
You can argue all you like that medical marijuana laws are somehow behind the recent rise in teen marijuana use, but you won’t find any support in the statistics.
Worth Repeating: Marijuana Halves Lung Cancer Tumor Growth
Feb 1 2011
A 2007 study, performed at Harvard University by Anju Preet, PhD and the Division of Experimental Medicine, is further evidence that supports the study performed by Donald Tashkin, M.D. originally published in 2005, indicating that THC appears not to start or promote lung cancer, and if anything, appears to slow or stop lung cancer.
Chemo or Cannabis: How Would You Like to Treat Your Cancer?
CANNABIS CULTURE – What if Cannabis Cured Cancer? CC presents an interview with Len Richmond, director of a new documentary film about how science is showing that compounds in cannabis attack cancer while protecting healthier cells.
Cannabis and cancer rhetoric 02/06/01
Moving Forward,
in spite of the governments “Help”.
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Mexicans are angry at the U.S.. They’re tired of the war and the murders, and they rightly blame America. It’s got to be an uncomfortable interview for Clinton.
I just hope that more and more of Central and South America break with America on this issue and go their own way. Between their resistance and American financial insolvency, we may yet see a retreat in this endless war.
Governments never give up power willingly. Prohibition may do nothing to stop the consumption of illegal drugs, but prohibiting commodities is critically useful to those in power.
Whenever the authoritarian right gains ascendance, whether it’s in the United States, The Netherlands, or as we learned earlier, even Denmark, invoking harsh drug laws is a favored fast way to amp up the apparatus of oppression. Then the apparatus gets redirected. Oppression gives the government in power an alleged justification for its existence, among other things. Wars are sought – not avoided.
It’s an old game despots play. Reading drug war material is a lot like reading the complaints made against the French monarchy and priesthood just prior to the French Revolution. Same theme. Same fraud. Different time. But the confluence of an economic meltdown, then and now, and the hardships imposed by a predatory policing agenda, resonate loudly. This is not a good time for a government to be messing with its citizens, whether in Mexico or the United States.
Servitus
we need to understand the difference between Authoritarian and Right Wing.
Milton Friedman and Will Buckley would agree with us that porhibition is just plain stupidity.
There are plenty of authoritarian leftwingers out there.
Opposition to the Drug war is neither a right wing, or a left wing stance.
Rory, the right wing in this country is authoritarian. We call the non-authoritarian right Libertarian here.
Rory. We tend to find the authoritarian left in places like Russia, where the old guard communists still long for the iron hand of Stalin.
Where ever authoritarians are found, they tend to attach themselves to the local reactionary status quo, which in the U.S., Canada, and Europe has traditionally been the extreme right. In Russia and Sweden, it’s the extreme left.
And yes, everyone, left or right, has a stake in ending this horrendous drug war.
The Russian KGB envied the CIA, It took them lots of hours of torture, intimidation and threats. Not to mention a giant expensive Security force to attain order and loyal followers. Same result as what Americans seem to do voluntarily, just watching TV. Simply censor any damaging content and they graze like sheep.
Thomas Jefferson said “Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” There is nothing but fear that backs comments that legalization is “not likely to work.”
Do they assume drug use is going to be out of control? Isn’t it already? So the governments think MORE of the same is going to help when in fact it never does. You don’t put out a fire by throwing more gas on it.
It’s time to throw off these left/right chains and realize that people willing to buy Marijuana or any other drug for that matter, is going to happen regardless of the amount of force used by the State.
We need to focus on education about the dangers of drugs and how responsible people act. Not fill their heads with lies that once discovered completely discredit the State propaganda they have been fed.
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