How About Just Cracking Down to Win the Drug War?
The drug war, as most everyone knows has been going on a long time — decades! It’s just your standard government program. It keeps going and going no matter how much failure, death, and destruction it produces.
For example, when I returned to my hometown of Laredo, Texas, in 1975 to practice law, the drug war was going strong. In fact, my very first trial was in federal court. The federal judge appointed me to represent an indigent defendant in a drug conspiracy case. The DEA and the assistant U.S. Attorney were going after my client with a vengeance. But I was able to convince the jury that the charges were nothing more than a sophisticated set-up designed by the DEA. My very first trial in federal district court produced an acquittal.
In the 1970s, the DEA, the U.S. Attorneys, and federal judges were pulling out all the stops to win the drug war. That was some 50 years ago! Obviously, they failed to win the war on drugs because the drug war is still going strong. New generations of DEA agents, U.S. Attorneys, and federal judges are doing the same things they were doing back when I was practicing law on the border in the 1970s and 1980s.
Over those 50 years, there have been drug warriors who have exclaimed, “If we would just really crack down in the war on drugs, we could win it.” (They say the same thing in the war on immigrants, which has been going on at least as long as the war on drugs.)
But the fact is that the drug warriors have been cracking down in the drug war the entire time. For example, back in the 1970s, federal judges were meting out the longest jail sentences permitted by the law. They felt that they were doing their part to win the war on drugs. One federal judge in San Antonio, who was later assassinated, was even called “Maximum John” because his policy was to blindly impose the highest jail sentences he could.
Since not all federal judges saw themselves as drug-war enforcers, some of them declined to
Article from The Future of Freedom Foundation
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