Conrad Black on drugs

No! Not that way!  He's writing about the Conservative government's proposed mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, and Black makes a lot of sense.

Stephen Harper's position on marijuana laws are archaic, illogical and anti-libertarian. Alcohol does extensive damage to many people, but in a free society, we allow people to make choices rather than have the state do it for them. Marijuana is no more harmful than alcohol and the hypocrisy of criminalizing one and not the other undermines any morality to those laws.

Most police chiefs in North America recognize that enforcing laws against it is not only ineffective but a waste of both scarce police and court resources.

The libertarian movement seeks to legalize and tax marijuana, and Canadians can lobby their government to turn the liability of antiquated nanny-state regulations into a revenue producing asset.

Here's an excerpt of what Black (along with Evan Wood) wrote (full column can be seen at The National Post):

..the argument that locking up more drug dealers improves community safety is flatly untrue. Research clearly demonstrates that gun violence is a common and natural result of many a successful drug bust, and often occurs when remaining gangs fight over the new economic opportunity that police have unwittingly created. California is an excellent example of this sad reality. The state now has a prison budget that exceeds expenditures on post-secondary education, and yet the intractable gang violence that is directly linked to the drug trade has only been inflamed by these efforts.

Clearly, we need new approaches to address the drug problem. Writing recently in the Globe and Mail, former federal Conservative party campaign manager Tom Flanagan noted that “Some prominent Canadian conservatives, such as former Fraser Institute president Michael Walker, Conservative MP Scott Reid, legal writer Karen Selick and financial journalist Terence Corcoran, have led the way in decrying drug prohibition, but their position has to become more appreciated within the conservative movement.”

One can only hope that this happens soon. Failed mandatory minimum sentencing legislation is currently being repealed in various U.S. states, including New York, Michigan, Massachusetts and Connecticut, and it will be a sad legacy for Canadian conservatives if we sit quietly and ignore how U.S. society has been remarkably weakened by the same laws our government is now hell-bent on enacting.