Jack Cole checks in: War on drugs, take 2,374
Malakkar Vohryzek's recent Blowback on the L.A. Trade Tech raid inspired Jack Cole of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition to sit right down and write the L.A. Times a letter. We spoke with Cole a few months ago, and he's still fighting to bring the war on drugs to a peaceful conclusion:
As a retired police officer, I want to congratulate Malakkar Vohryzek on his superb analysis of the failed war on drugs (see "drug prohibition doesn't work," Los Angeles times, January 11, 2008).
For years our children have reported it is easier to buy illegal drugs than to buy beer and cigarettes because people selling illegal drugs don't them ask for age identification.
DEA says there are 900,000 teenagers in the United States who have sold illegal drugs.
DEA also asserts that nearly 900,000 teenagers in the United States have illegally carried a gun. People selling illegal commodities must protect themselves and their merchandise from robbery. They must discipline workers and customers to continue doing business. In an illegal market they can't get that protection from the police or the courts so they get it at the point of a gun. Many of those teenagers have been shot and killed in the course of their drug distribution activities.Many others died from drug overdose because in an unregulated illegal market there is no way to tell how much of the purchased powder is really the drug at how much is cutting-agent; too much drug and you're dead. Over the course of the war on drugs, the overdose rate has increased from 28 per hundred-thousand heroin users in 1979 to 141 per hundred-thousand users by 2003.
This is the situation as it stands under prohibition.
Legalized regulation of drugs would end the violence; reduce the incidence of death, disease, crime and addiction.
Jack A. Cole
Retired detective lieutenant with 26-year career in New Jersey State Police-14 years undercover narcotics.
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Obama walking fine line on race
AVOIDING LABELS | As he woos black voters to come out for him in South Carolina, he stresses reaching across color lines
January 27, 2008
BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Barack Obama is walking a tricky racial line, trying to excite black support in the South without getting tagged as ''the black candidate'' and scaring off anybody else.
At a spaghetti dinner in the basement of a black church last week, he told a cheering crowd that the civil rights movement started from the bottom up, with marches and boycotts. ''That's how change comes,'' he said, linking black civil rights to his own campaign slogan.
But here in South Carolina, which has its Democratic primary Saturday, he also says over and over that color doesn't matter.
The same day as the church dinner, he told an audience at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, ''If I came to you and I had polka dots, but you were convinced that I was going to put more money in your pockets and help you pay for college and keep America safe, you'd say, 'OK, I wish he didn't have polka dots, but I'm still voting for him.' ''
A new McClatchy/MSNBC poll holds warning signs for Obama. He leads Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, but his support among white Democrats fell in one week from 20 percent to 10 percent after race became more of an issue.
Blacks comprise large portions of the Democratic electorate in Deep South states, and they could help Obama win a handful of primaries, including South Carolina's.
'The black candidate' tag
But the more Obama is seen through a racial lens, the more it might hamper him in other, bigger states, especially those where voters might be unaccustomed or unwilling to support black candidates.
Clinton's campaign isn't interested in helping him resolve that situation. Her strategists deny any effort to stir the racial debate, but they say they think the fallout has had the effect of marking Obama as ''the black candidate,'' something he has worked to avoid.
Former President Bill Clinton reminded a South Carolina audience last week, even as he linked Obama and Hillary Clinton as historic candidates. ''They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender,'' he said. ''That's why people tell me Hillary doesn't have a chance of winning here.''
Obama was asked Thursday if he thought the Clintons were trying, to his detriment, to depict him as the black candidate. ''I'll let the Clintons speak to what their strategy is going to be,'' he said coolly.
'That ain't right!'
He said his public career has been ''based on the idea that we're all in it together, and that black, white, Hispanic, Asian, all of us share common dreams, common fears and common concerns.''
That approach, he said, won him votes ''across the board'' in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and will elsewhere.
The racial minefields haven't kept him from having fun with heavily black audiences in South Carolina.
The Harvard Law School graduate sometimes playfully breaks into vernacular, which seems to amuse him and his audiences greatly.
''I need you to grab Cousin Pookie to vote,'' he told a crowd in Kingstree on Thursday. ''I need you to get Ray-Ray to vote.''
At a rally in Dillon, Obama said Hillary Clinton was ducking the need to shore up Social Security. ''There are some things that aren't right,'' he said, ''and some things that just ain't right. And that ain't right!''
James Thrower, a federal employee from Sumter, was among the black voters charmed by Obama last week. ''In the beginning of this campaign, I didn't think America was ready'' to elect a black president, Thrower, 50, said after one rally. ''Now I do.''
''This country needs some fresh blood,'' he said.
Both Clintons, campaigning separately, have wooed black and white supporters in South Carolina last week. An event Wednesday in Kingstree underscored the tension and suspicions animating the rivalry. Fielding questions from the audience, Bill Clinton called on a black man standing near the stage. The man said he was a pastor and told Clinton that ''black America is voting for Obama because he's black.'' He said Democrats are in a dangerous position because if Obama wins the nomination, voters will elect a Republican in November. ''They're not ready for a black president,'' he said.
Several black audience members nodded and said, ''That's right.''
''I have to tell you I hope you're not right,'' Clinton responded.
He said that despite the ''mean things'' said about him ''in the Obama camp this week,'' he would support the Illinois senator if he is nominated
Posted by: jim | January 27, 2008 at 11:34 PM