Here is the jist of my argoment with Obama. He brags, on his official senate web site, of being a cosponsor of the 2005 Meth Act.  Well, according the the 2007 National Drug Threat Assessment of the USDOJ that bill had the real market balloon effect of shifting the production and distribution to better organized and more aggressive Mexican gangs who have been quickly taking over American markets large and small since.

Barack Obama: A Stereotype of Conventional Wisdom

Obama was the last of the Democratic candidates to say that he would not enforce against medical pot in states where it is regulated. Chicago blogger Pete Guither at Drug WarRant told me last winter that Obama's state legislative record was always for more Draconian sentencing laws.

I would love nothing more than to vote for the first Black or woman or Black woman for president of the United States of America. hillary promises, on the campaign trail, dto return America to Bill Clinton's world record prison populations. Barack Obama knows so little about the economic forces of black markets that he is proud of laws that have brought more even more violent people onto America's streets. Two total idiots.

The DrugWar has hurt many minority groups. It can be proven beyond doubt that it was meant to perform exactly that purpose. And the largest group so targeted has been African-Americans. The prison population figures regarding racial minority composition shows well over half of prison inmates are Black. Most of those so incarcerated are there for drug law offenses. One doesn't need to be a Rhodes Scholar to see there is method to the seeming madness of the DrugWar. (If your intent is to socially and politically neutralize a 'troublesome' minority without overt, blatant violence, and use the false cloak of moralism to do it, then the end result is not madness, but twisted genius.)

Such facts have been bandied about for years. But our politicians have consistently failed to take action on what has become yet another third rail of American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by elected officials who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.

Perhaps you hoped this would change during a spirited Democratic presidential primary? Unfortunately, a quick search of the top Democratic hopefuls' websites reveals that not one of them -- not Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, not John Edwards, not Joe Biden, not Chris Dodd, not Bill Richardson -- even mentions the drug war, let alone offers any solutions.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday brought national attention to New Orleans' tops-in-the-nation murder rate with the panel's chairman calling violent crime the "most serious threat" to the city's post-hurricane recovery.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who presided over the committee's hearing on rising violent crime rates since Hurricane Katrina, said he "can't get over the staggering numbers." Crime has reached "near epidemic proportions," Leahy said, but most incredibly "just one" of last year's 162 killings has resulted in a conviction.

AP, 8/10/07:

The city has recorded at least 117 murders this year. This week, two brothers suspected in 14 murders were found shot to death.[...]

"Some of these guys are so violent that it is hard for witnesses to come forward, and they get involved in repeat criminal activities," the mayor added. "So it is unfortunate that they had to die, but it did kind of end the cycle that we were struggling with."[...]

Tourism officials tell prospective visitors that New Orleans is mostly safe and that much of the crime involves "criminal on criminal."

The New Yorker, 5/29/07:

Murders associated with the drug trade are horrible enough. Ever since the AK-47 replaced the 9-mm. handgun as the standard drug-gang infantry weapon on the streets of New Orleans (a transition, my friends at the morgue say, that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union), victims have included uninvolved neighbors sitting on their porches or inside their houses down the street. But at least drug-related violence has a twisted logic to it. The attacks described on this flyer are creepy because the culprits seem to be beating women for the fun of it.

Such attacks can happen in any city, I know, but it's hard not to see them as a symptom of the slow-burn wig-out under way in New Orleans. I don't notice it as much anymore, because I'm used to it, but re-reading my first post, from January, I know that people here looked heavier, paler, and more exhausted than I remember them looking last May. A mental-health crisis is smoldering here, with few resources to relieve it. People are good at covering it up, but get them talking--which isn't hard to do--and sooner or later the name of their sleeping pill or their antidepressant will surface. The illegal-drug trade probably explains a lot of the violence, but certainly not all of it.

A big part of the problem in New Orleans is the fact that the police abandoned the city in its time of need. Abandoned it to anarchy. Then the politicians compounded that by disbursing the poor population rather than sending in resources to help them rebuild quickly. Jim Crow at its finest.

Now the Democrats and Barack Obama promise to send in police to lock up people who already have no opportunity under the Jim Crow guise of the drug war.

Barack Obama and the other right-wing Democrats are offensive in their ignorance.

New Orleans has a black market for drugs that is worth between $ 108,566,568 and $163,966,792 depending on the estimates used. US Illicit drug market value calculator That economic resource could be redirected back into the community and the gangs disbursed by the real economic opportunity that exist in rebuilding the city.

What the poverty oppressed people of New Orleans greatest need is economic opportunity.

The gangs exist, especially the influx of aggressively violent Mexican gangs, because the only economic opportunity is in drugs. Gangs are feeding their members which is more than the Democrats and Republicans are doing for the population there.

The gun violence exist because guns are a tool to secure some of that illegal economic opportunity.

All that Barack Obama promises the poverty oppressed people of New Orleans is more Jim Crow oppression. More disenfranchisement. More reason for disaffection from American society.

Threatening to take away the only economic opportunity and often the  parents away from children does nothing to reduce the free fire zone or its impact on children. Give their parents economic opportunity and you take the parents out of the gang culture that is feeding them and their children today.

It disgust me that right-wing Democrats love to rant 'for the children' the minute anyone criticizes their ignorant drug war and its Jim Crow politician supporters. The 80% interdiction failure rate of the drug war abandons American children to the morals and ethics of addict drug dealers, gangsters, social predators and even terrorists. Giving them nothing more than "just say no".

"NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that...the United States Conference of Mayors believes the war on drugs has failed and calls for a New Bottom Line in U.S. drug policy.."

Where is the difference in the two parties on the issue?  Ron Paul and Gravel are the only two I know of who think the drug war is a horrible waste of resources.

Anyway, Dodd wasn't about to let his hometown helicopter go down without a fight. He took to the Senate floor and offered an amendment that would leave the choice of choppers to the "experts" in the Pentagon and the Colombian military -- a smooth move that would have guaranteed the Blackhawks would prevail.

After all, Gen. Fabio Velazco, the Colombian Air Force commander, is on record expressing his contempt for the Huey: "It's like comparing a '60 Ford to a new Mercedes." And Colombian Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez chimed in, clearly forgetting the adage about not looking a gift Huey in the mouth.

"When the Huey is coming," he whined, "the first thing you hear is the noise, even 10 minutes before you see it. It's a very noisy helicopter. With the Blackhawk, by the time you hear it, it is practically overhead."

But Stevens and his coupon-cutting cronies were undeterred. "The Blackhawks are the tip of a sword going into another Vietnam," he claimed, playing the Southeast Asian-quagmire card. Which raises the question: If 30 Blackhawks put us on the road to another Vietnam, where do 60 Hueys lead? Another Grenada?

In the end, the Hueys won the Senate dogfight, but the Blackhawks will clearly live to fight another day. As the House-Senate Conference Committee tries to reconcile the two bills, Colombia's ambassador to Washington has warned that his country will insist on the state-of-the-art Blackhawk.

This regulatory vacuum is filled with anarchy.

Regulation and licensing are how democratic societies minimize the predatory anarchy that is often natural to unlimited economic opportunity. Regulation and licensing are the democratic middle ground between those who strongly believe in freedom and those who have no faith in freedom.

Conservative economists tell us what the outcome is for unregulated markets when they decry over-regulation as stifling to the growth and profitability of of products and markets. If ever a market needed stifling it is the intoxicant drug market. Democratic regulatory institutions are the fastest and surest way to stifle the predatory anarchy that prohibition is licensing but not regulating on our streets and in the world today.

As long as young people are forced to run the gauntlet of their formative years between peers who are already addict dealers, predators and gangsters, none of whom have the morals and ethics of our community at heart, we will have more kids becoming addicts.

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n1551/a10.html?1318
 21 Aug 2002
Boston Globe

"Glen Hanson, acting director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a federal agency, said ".... Since access to beer and cigarettes is restricted at the retail stage, Hanson said, youths have significant hurdles to obtaining them."

As far as marijuana is concerned, there is not any control there," he said. "If you want it, you can get it. That is not good news."