Don't look now, but conservative Latin American leaders want us to legalize drugs . . . .

An increasingly large chorus of nations - ravaged by trafficking and violence - say it's now time to re-think international drug policy. As the corrupting power of cartels grows across Mexico and Central America, and as the body count rises, legalisation needs to be seriously discussed as an alternative to militarisation, regional leaders say.

It isn't a message US President Barack Obama wants to hear when he arrives in Cartagena, Colombia, to meet 33 heads of state on April 14.

--snip--

Guatemala's President Otto Perez Molina, a former general during the country’s "dirty war", came to power promising an "iron fist" against delinquency. He recently called the war on drugs a failure and argued that "consumption and production should be legalised" within certain limits.

Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia, and arguably Washington's closest regional ally, has called for "a new approach" that would "take away the violent profit that comes with drug trafficking".

"If that means legalising and the world thinks that's the solution, I will welcome it," said Santos, a former defence minister responsible for battling leftist rebels and drug traffickers in a war with massive human rights abuses.

What's interesting here is that the traditional libertarian view ("I've got a right to do whatever I want to with my own body") is not driving this, but a more utilitarian comparative-harm view ("The evils of the violence caused by drug trafficking are worse than the evils caused by drug use/addiction").

It is a pretty simple calculus: We now have X million number of Americans using illegal drugs. The cost of that usage includes (a) personal/social/economic losses attributable to addiction; (b) cost of law enforcement and incarceration; (c) cost in human lives of narco trafficking both here and abroad; (d) cost of additional military force both here and abroad; (e) destablization of friendly regimes and the funneling of illicit drug profits into terrorist causes; and (f) loss of potential tax revenues that could be used to fund addiction treatment programs here at home.

Eliminating the war on drugs transfers a minimal to moderate level of risk here (a few more car accidents and overdoses, a few more people getting hooked)--read that as an increase in (a) above, countered by massive decreases in (b), (c), (d), (e), and (f).

Aside from that, I really don't think it is any of your damn business what I decide to put in my own body as long as I take precautions not to allow my usage not to endanger you directly.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

Search This Blog