Marijuana legalization's income may help fund education, prevention and treatment programs for harder drugs. What's clear is that the four-decade-old U.S.-backed war on drugs is not working, and that it's producing tens of thousands of dead across the hemisphere, without significant gains in reducing consumption. Experimenting with new weapons to weaken the cartels may be better than doing nothing.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the failures of the war on drugs and suggests that marijuana legalization could provide funding for better solutions.
Andres Oppenheimer's quote critiques the long-standing U.S. war on drugs, asserting that it has failed to decrease drug consumption and has resulted in numerous casualties. He proposes that legalizing marijuana might generate revenue to support education, prevention, and treatment programs for more dangerous substances, suggesting that finding innovative approaches to address drug-related issues is essential.
In practice
In a discussion about drug policy reform, one might cite this quote to emphasize the need for new strategies.
We expected, I expected to find actual usable, chemical or biological weapons after we entered Iraq. But I have to accept, as the months have passed, it seems increasingly clear that at the time of invasion, Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy.
If you do politics the right way, I believe, you can actually make people's lives better. And integrity is the minimum ante to get into the game.
This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It's authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.
While democracy must have its organization and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty.
They say, oh, let’s have multiparty politics. Let’s have different parties change and be in charge of the Government. Is it that simple? You vote in a Division Three government, not a Division One government, and the whole economy will just subside within three, four years. Finished.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. ~ Every class is unfit to govern ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
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