FK>  No, Clinton hasn't been much of a leader towards a saner drug policy.
 FK>  He could, of course, be worse. Drug arrests - especially of women
 FK>  and minorities - are up under the Clinton administration. Wiretap
 FK>  authorizations are up. His stand on privacy issues ("indecency" on
 FK>  the internet, attempted encryption bans, demands for more wiretap
 FK>  capability in new phone equipment, as well as drug testing) is not
 FK>  encouraging. His administration's reaction to the California and
 FK>  Arizona initiatives is not encouraging. I don't expect much top-down
 FK>  reform under Clinton, but I don't see "concentration camps", either.
  
     Your list of Bill's "law and order" stands is depressing.  And while 
everyone is in favor of law and order, it seems the phrase is actually a code 
for government repression.  Of course, when "law and order" includes drug 
prohibition, the result is lawless disorder.  Similarly, "family values" is 
something everyone can support.  Somehow, though, hidden beneath this 
innocuous code-phrase, is a raging intolerance desiring to use the coercive 
power of government to punish sinners.  Anti-sodomy laws, continued 
criminalization of prostitution, and the war on drugs not only do not benefit 
families, but positively harm them.  How many prostitutes are driven to the 
trade by poverty, or by the need to support a drug habit made exorbitantly 
expensive by the drug war?  Due to prohibition of prostitution, STDs are 
spread more rapidly, poor sex workers are entangled in the damaging and 
costly criminal justice system, and women prostitutes are made convenient 
targets of violent whackos.  Prostitutes are the number one victim of serial 
killers.  How many moms and dads are doing time for drug-related convictions? 
 How many are unemployable because of the X (as in eX-con) they wear on their 
backs?  How many sons and daughters are drawn into criminal enterprises by 
the government-created nuisance of the illegal drug market?  How many 
families are broken up due to financial difficulties caused by the 10,000% 
increase in the price of drugs due to its criminalization?  How many persons 
are killed or made seriously ill due to the unpredictable quality and potency 
 of i.v. drugs?  While most citizens and most law-enforcers actually believe 
that enlisting governmental power to enforce a so-called "moral lifestyle" is 
a dire necessity, I suspect that many politicians selling this line know 
better.  At any rate, they should know better.  When a country calling itself 
"the land of the free" has the highest per-capita rate of incarceration in 
the world, with the drug war accounting for a considerable fraction of those 
prisoners, light bulbs should be going on in the heads of those who claim to 
love freedom so much they're willing to lock you up for burning a flag.  
(Pardon the rant.)
  
 FK>  We learn from history that we don't learn from 
 FK> history, and politicians
 FK>  seem to learn last. The people seem to be out in front of the leaders
 FK>  on this one. Voters in CA and AZ have figured out 
 FK> that letting lawyers
 FK>  decide which drugs might be medically useful is a dumb idea. Imagine!
 FK>  Next thing, folks will be figuring out who benefits from prohibition,
 FK>  and dragging our leaders out of the darkness. It took a while, and
 FK>  much damage was done, but we did eventually repeal Prohibition.
  
     God bless the voters and activists in CA and AZ for their saneness.  
Let's hope its catching.  As to who benefits from the drug war, I'd like to 
recommend a book that addresses this question head-on:  Claire Sterling, 
Octopus: The Long Reach of the International Sicilian Mafia (New York & 
London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990).  The book is an alarming and eye-opening 
report on just how serious a situation we've created with our drug war.  
Perhaps its a good thing the author wrote this book while remaining terribly 
misinformed about the actual and relative dangers of heroin.  If she had not 
been laboring under these mistaken assumptions, the terrible picture she 
created might have been dismissed by drug warriors as an exaggeration 
calculated to scare the public into snatching those billions in profits away 
from the mafia by legalizing drugs.  Happily, however, she never considers 
this option, and the outlook at the end of her volume is quite bleak.
     Sure, but the repeal of Prohibition occurred in the depths of the Great 
Depression.  I hope it doesn't take a crisis of that order to lead us to 
reconsider this plague of a policy.
 
--- Maximus 2.01wb
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