And I'll close with this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm2sLSWXOOM&feature=related
Good things are coming friends, good things.
...i take it you haven't been following the republican presidential race? ron paul has an internet following and says a few rabble-rousing things about the insanity of US drug policy and foreign policy, but he's not setting the agenda. nor is he taken seriously by the media, his party or middle america.
i'd love to think that there was a huge groundswell of opposition to the war on drugs, but it just isn't the reality in the US unfortunately. there
is dissent, there
are people criticising prohibition and there are states that are legislating to allow medical marijuana and so on, but they are a minority and there is still a multi-billion dollar industry set up around prohibition.
when you hear the opponents of obama talking about what they want, it always comes back to "i want my country back". from what exactly, i'm not sure - but this is what the republican party is looking to capitalise on; a desire to return to "traditional american values" (again, whatever the hell those are) not a foray into drug legalisation and allowing the states to do whatever they please.
yes - we are getting somewhere in the sense that a presidential candidate is actually mentioning the war on drugs and voicing his opposition to it, but unfortunately that is a long way from anything being done to change it. i would love to share your optimism - and i'm certainly not saying we should give up - but there are a lot more people and a many more powerful forces standing behind the war on drugs than there are folks campaigning against it. and i really don't think ron paul is the answer by any means.
as well meaning as paul may be (this remains to be seen), the president doesn't actually have as much control as people may think.
even in the fairytale scenario that ron paul won the republican presidential nomination and beat obama in the presidential elections, he would have to convince his party (remember, this is the party that started "the war on drugs", "the war on terror" and counts fundamentalist christian america as its main support base) and even if he were able to get the republican party onside, they would need the numbers to get it through both houses of congress in order to pass it into law.
now...obama had enough trouble implementing a bill that proposed
health care for all americans. they called him a socialist, this that and the other. how dare he try and fix the diabolical health system? the one that makes medical treatment prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthy? he must be a communist!
community and political resistance has held obama back in several ways, and compared to the idea of legalising drugs, his political aims have never really been that radical. if ron paul came to power and tried to do what was being proposed, america would become more corrosively divided that it is today.
a large shift towards liberalising drug policy would mean that drug law enforcement bodies would lose all their funding - and these are groups with a lot of power, a lot of links to government and a lot of sway in the media. there are also the enormous privatised prisons and the infrastructure that has set up around them. we're not talking about a small town police force or a little county jail - these are enormous bureaucracies.
the one thing politicians never want to be associated with is losing jobs. making a decision that costs people their jobs is always very unpopular, especially in the current global economic climate. i think that on top of all the drug propaganda of the last 50+ years, the other huge obstacle in ending these policies is the amount of jobs that would become obsolete.
sorry about the ranty ramble and i hate being a nay-sayer, but just because there is an undercurrent of ron paul supporters online, doesn't mean shit in a country that is so held back by conservative traditions, fundamentalist religion and overwhelming corporate power - especially in the media which is the filter through which the majority of debate is heard.
ron paul for all his apparent goodwill and sound arguments has been ignored by the media from the very beginning. we are not witnessing his rise to power...maybe just his last attempt to be politically relevant. his libertarian message strikes a chord with a lot of people that are otherwise not entirely tuned-in to politics, but not necessarily to the many forces that seek to maintain the status quo.
now, i'm not saying that we shouldn't continue to be vocal about this or treat it like the inevitability it should be. drugs policy is corrupt and needs to be changed.
but we need to be pragmatic about it too - this guy isn't going to solve the problem, but he might be one of the first to bring it up in a mainstream forum. i think the only way we are going to make any headway is by taking baby steps. radical changes tend to cause a backlash - if they are even allowed to succeed in the first place.
again, sorry for the rant, but ron paul isn't our saviour.
