of American justice. Under a narrow definition of the meaning of equal protection, there's no problem letting people use alcohol but not marijuana. Marijuana haters would just say equal protection means that everyone (more precisely, adults not under court supervision) has an equal right to use alcohol. But by any fair standard, ruining people's lives because they prefer a patently safer substance to a clearly more dangerous one tramples on the spirit of equal protection. Americans who like weed but not booze can't shift to the killer drug any more than people can change their race, sex, or sexual orientation, and no one has the moral right to try to force them to use alcohol instead of weed. Either the law on alcohol vs. cannabis is made fair or it remains a pathetic violence promoting farce.

ALL drugs, in America has its roots in racism. Even that noble experiment, alcohol prohibition, started as a tee-totalling Protestant backlash against hordes of whiskey- and wine-swilling Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants. And everyting about prohibition and its spin-off war is un-Constitutional.

It's way past time for the ACLU and the NAACP get off their collective duffs, stop equivocating, stop excusing, and start actually DOING the job they keep telling us they're doing.

I was a corrections officer ,and a Postal employee, I saw on both sides of the streets what drug Prohibition has done to both Black,and poor families.Marijuana is the least of this countries problems Heroin is making a comeback of epic proportions in this country.I with my own eyes as a white man have seen how the illegal Drug trade has impacted all races.I have found one thing in life crooks do not always look like thugs on the street,lately they wear a coat and tie and speak Scat to the public,and turn their back on the little man Black and White while we fall further in the hole,and more people die,because of the Law of Lies.

I was always under the impression that "A Chicken Ain't Nothing but a Bird" was about marijuana. Namely that the word "chicken" was code for it. Thus he writes a song to throw folks off the trail. I had a number of friends in college in the deep south who used "chicken" as code for such. Anyway…

You mention blogger Mo' Kelly's take, trying to split hairs*. While doing so looks good on paper, so to speak, the fact is in real life, I have to laugh. "On paper" law enforcement is supposed to uphold the Constitution, supposed to not be corrupted by money or power, supposed to keep drugs out of prisons, and a whole host of VERY OBVIOUS separations that are NO WHERE NEAR splitting hairs.

But a quick check over at your news items detailing corruption http://StopTheDrugWar.org/taxonomy/term/76 shows that this is not the case. So trying to impose such hair-splitting on this situation is totally bogus when there are moats and mine-fields which are constantly traversed.

* Ask people on the street what the difference between "civil rights and civil liberties" is and I bet there will be a bunch of blank stares. I know when I first read it I didn't see where he was going.

In NY police have profiled thousands ( mostly black and hispanic)

they fingerprint and process all these victims and create a database for criminal activity.

All a cop has to do is say " I smell marijuana" and you have no rights
It gives them probable cause.

Marijuana is not a "dangerous drug with no medical value"

you want dangerous drugs? no problem alcohol , Oxycontin , tabacco , aspirin all FDA approved and (safe?)

vote yes
tax and regulate and release all those people you have put in a cage over a benign plant

Alcohol and drugs are a convenient way to condemn those who enjoy these ever popular products.  It’s a simple matter to pick some item that symbolizes a race, culture, or religion, and then prosecute possession of that item, or its use, in an effort to subjugate the race, culture or competing religious group.

Prohibition Protestants banned alcohol as an excuse to discriminate against ethnic European immigrants and Catholics who enjoyed drinking.  American beverage producers were targeted in part because most pre-Prohibition brewers of beer were immigrant Germans and most commercial distillers of hard liquor were Jews. [Daniel Okrent]

By contrast, today’s marijuana prohibition is a kind of persecution smorgasbord. Marijuana is so popular and its use so diversified across different races and cultures that virtually anyone can be busted employing a thinly veiled ruse that uses cannabis as an excuse to intervene.

The ultimate goal is to serve the persecutors’ need to achieve a superior moral social identity over the condemned group.  This way the self-described morally superior types can hoard all the best jobs and so forth.  As a bonus, the sadomoralists get to cash in on the outgroup’s spilled blood, confiscated funds and property.

This category of human behavior is well described and professionally researched.  It can be found under the subject heading social identity theory.

Giordano

1. Muggles

Louis Armstrong claimed title as Second Father of his Country by giving his birthday as July 4, 1900, but did you know sources give the actual birthday as August 4, 1901? That makes him exactly 60 years older than Barack Obama.

2. Rights vs. liberties, civil or otherwise

It figures the difference between rights and liberties depends on whether you are right or left-handed. Did you know a huge majority of Presidential candidates starting 1988 have been left-handed? (Sources say both Hoover and Reagan were born left-handed and trans-educated by rightwing parents.) So whether our present is a rare window of opportunity to set precedents hurriedly or a freight train rolling into a leftwing future, anyway there are theories that cannabis liberates the right brain (connected to the left hand) of creativity and intuition, so there you are.

3. Arrest figures

I accept the realist/gradualist persuasion that everything can't happen overnight, Barack is going to let the states take the initiative, etc., but must admit I am in some suspense whether the 2009 arrest figures will bring us a radical cop drop from the 872,000 of 2008, and how the public will react.

4. It's the Tobackgo, Stupid!"

Both Scott's posting and the comments continue to harp on comparisons with alcohol and ignore Big 2Wackgo. Remember, (a) Tobackgo kills 6 million a year, alcohol fewer than 2 million. (b) Big 2WackGo gives twice as much campaign money to Republicans as Democrats and polls show Republican voters 20 points more anti-cannabis-legalization than Democrat voters. (c) Anti-cannabis laws help the tobackgo industry by suppressing what they really fear, vaporizers, one-hitters and other equipment which, if cannabis is legalized, will speedily obsolesce the cash cow hot burning overdose $igarette format which is the basis of the tobackgo industry profit margin. When nicotine addicts learn to imitate cannabis users by "vaporizing" 25-mg. single tokes instead of puffing on 1000-degree F. 700-mg. $igarettes, the industry as we know it today is Toast. (That's code language for totally toked.)

bull:
Busted in 1969 for one stick of Marijuana, spent 90 days in a mental institution because they said I was crazy.
This happened to be a felony at the time, I was twenty years old and dumber then a sack of stones.
It did stop me from getting the best jobs but I did work for most of my adult life and stayed away from the police, keeping a very low profile, and never advocating the use of drugs.
In todays market I have a hard time affording any drugs, and I still work and keep a low profile, and never advocate the use of drugs because the system from the lawyers to the jailers to the judges to the police are all making a living off the backs of the people.
The prison populations are run by private corporations, so right there we have lost our civil rights.

Maybe Big Tobacco does have more to fear from the end of cannabis prohibition than the alcohol industry does.
But I can think of 3 reasons for 'harping' on alcohol. One is that it kills maybe more innocent people than tobacco, which is what we are most concerned with, another is that tobacco takes so long to do it's dirty work, it is more comparable to junk food then to the quick catastrophes that happen when some people are UI alcohol. The third reason is that while I'm not clear on tobacco's psychoactive status, I don't think it's as significant as it is for alcohol and weed, so they are more directly comparable.
But I'm taking your argument that reformers are not paying enough attention to tobacco seriously.

There are plenty of other reasons why marijuana should be legal. Just to name a few:

Medicinal use: Marijuana can be used as medicine because it helps to stimulate apetite and relieve nausea in cancer and AIDS patients.
Hemp: The hemp plant is a valuable natural resource. Legalizing marijuana would eliminate the confusion surrounding hemp and allow us to take advantage of hemp's agricultural and industrial uses.
Religious Use:Some religions instruct their followers to use marijuana. Just like Christianity and Judaism instruct their followers to drink wine on certain occaisions, some Hindus, Buddhists, Rastafarians, and members of other religions use marijuana as part of their spiritual and religious ceremonies. These people deserve the freedom to practice their religion as they see fit. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says that the government cannot 'prohibit the free exercise' of religion, and so marijuana should be legal.

Cannabis prohibition was brought about because of massive financial political donations from the multinational 'Legal' drug companies such as 'The Alcohol', 'The Tobacco' and 'The Pharmaceutical' companies, who through these massive donations took control of our governments and eventually started telling the politicians how to vote. Two other large players are the 'Timber industries', and the 'Pest Insecticide industries' . As long as our politicians are getting paid (accepting political donations) from these major multinational corporations we will never see a change in the current dug laws. 

No man or government has the right to tell me what to do. People will do what they want to do, regardless of unjust laws.

To me, these drug laws are an excuse to shuttle the people they want into prison. To make prisoners work for free. Of course it's a civil rights issue. It's also an all around human rights issue, but of course it's very convenient to have everyone in the country getting high but only the people they want to wage war on getting arrested. Think about it as a way to get to the loophole in the emancipation of slavery. Become Peter Pan, and take them to Neverland-- as in, slavery was never emancipated. Because of course you can make people work for no pay in prisons. 

Of course everyone should realize that drug laws are a violation of your free will. And more than that, your free speech, if they don't like what you say. But to regular people, drugs are like donuts. When you can never have donuts again, how upset will you be? It added something to your life, but so does cake. Of course, it's not the same as donuts. Nothing is the same as a little donut with coconut frosting. And if because of these donuts, people you don't know are basically growing up in an environment like a prison slave camp, do you care? After all, it's boring that donuts aren't actually dangerous. You know that. What you don't know is that they've been playing both sides of the game, that the cruelty and maliciousness of their hypocrisy can't possibly have a limit if they would use the law to take away donuts from you on a high moral basis. 

Let me just say that the drug issue actually makes me feel homicidal. Thinking about it, about what people say about it, the lies they keep spewing, about botany, for the sake of money and power, they are disgusting humans who have created a disgusting culture. I don't like breathing the same air as americans. I'm serious. 

Wake up and realize that you live in hell. 

Really, the drug laws take all meaning out of the word "law". If you would like to think of the law as a way to enforce common human morals and decency upon the public, when learning about the drug laws this optimistic utopian ideal is thrashed, and you realize that people merely use the power of law to enforce selfish goals of their own, not about enforcing any ethos. Morality therefore loses any meaning but who is the most powerful enough to enforce their twisted mind upon the public. 

I thought universally morality was to treat others as you would wish to be treated. Growing up I learned I was wrong. Sometimes also people associate morality with imaginary worlds like Gods which are invented to scare the person into doing the right thing with the threat of imaginary harm to them. Obviously americans have no fear of such imaginary troubles as this, if they would punish someone doing harm to no one. 

There is no argument that makes it righteous. To think there is means humanity is not only stupid and violent but apparently capable of being used as mere puppets.  To say that a drug user is braking some ethos, some morality, is absurd. If you hate them, that's your free will. But it shouldn't be your free will to break into their home and kill them. Because that is evil. Or lock them up, whatever.

I don't use the word evil lightly. I know the difference between good and evil and the gray areas in-between. I use it meaning that their worth as people is zero and their lives worth nothing, if they would be for using law as a selfish way to impose martial law on innocent citizens. 

I've said my say.