Editorial

Someone give Cleon a toke, quick!

The economy is wrecked, Bay State Unemployment hits 7%,
Former Policeman Turner is worried about you smoking pot

By Walter Brooks

Your Mid-Cape State Representative Cleon Turner came out of the closet this week - he's a policeman not a politician, masquerading as a Liberal Democrat when he's at best a DINO, Democrat In Name Only. He's also a dinosaur who does not have a website or use email, sort of a Mid-Cape John McCain.

And no politician with an ounce of common sense would try to undo a statewide referendum which passed two months ago by an overwhelming majority of 65%.

Unless he is a fanatic, that is.

Someone should give old Cleon a toke the next time he asks for another Martini.

With unemployment in his state at the highest in twenty-two years and getting worse daily, old Cleon wants to put a few more of his constituents in prison - for pot smoking!

We thought his recent efforts to drive away vacationers this summer with his proposed room tax on houses and condo rentals was wacko, all it would do is drive vacationers to another town without such a tax, but his criminalizing of marijuana is evidence of a bigoted but empty head unable to examine evidence which we hope to supply him here.

Turner said he's proposing the second marijuanna bill, which includes the potential penalty of jail time, because of concerns that have been expressed about the lack of enforcement for collecting the $100 fines under the law, leading to possible scofflaw behavior.

Legislating morality does not work, never has, never will

Doesn't Cleon know that America created the Mafia by attempting to stop its citizens from drinking a drug named alcohol almost a century ago?

It took billions of tax dollars and three generations of effort to get rid of the criminal syndicate which that Prohibition created, and today's drug cartel as a thousand times richer and more powerful than The Mob ever was.

Today alcohol kills 100,000 people a year. Have another martini, Cleon.

But alcohol is sold in licensed stores where two things are guaranteed;

1. The Bay State gets taxes on every bottle sold, and
2. Alcohol drinkers know what strength they are getting. During Prohibition 97% of the booze tested contained poisons. So booze isn't illegal, but driving drunk is.
   

By not decriminalizing drugs, these two things happen;

1. Central and South American Drug Cartels get the tax money, and earn $60 billion dollars a year, according to U.S. government estimates, which they spend to corrupt our law enforcement and judicial systems.Decriminalizing would allow legitimate businesses to make the recreational drugs and the tax would be nearly $10 billion every year.
   
2. Thousands of our citizens die every year from overdoses by not doing the strength.

And Cleon, no one will ever smoke a couple joints and break into your home for the cash to buy more, although that often happens with alcoholics. If you don't know where to get any weed, ask any teenager in your district - they'll score a bag for you. (If you agree with me, make a comment below and send Cleon an email here.)

Listen to Bill Buckley on drugs in America

Conservative thinker, Bill Buckley, wrote the reasons to decriminalize drugs decades ago. He was correct then, and he's far more correct today when the Drug War is Lost.

Mr. Buckley said it much better than I, "The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.

"Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.

"It is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.

"More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted.

"This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of those drugs. Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000. The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars, whatever. We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000."