Obama Wants Broader Use of Clemency to Free Nonviolent Drug Offenders

I'm personally happy that Obama is starting to challenge the prison industrial complex. Now, get him to help pass and sign the Justice System reform bill that Booker/Paul wrote.

originally posted by: ladyinwaiting

It's a good start however, and makes way for youths who have long sentences (and in many cases have already served more than 10 years for a small possession charge) to regain their lives.

Well, of course it sounds great. But that's par for the course for Obama, right? Obama's ideas often sound pretty innocent and well-intentioned (because calculated lies by malicious politicians just seem to work out that way). Of course you usually have to wait at least a couple of years to find out what he's really up to. Unless you can guess. Which you can. But you could be wrong. Unless you just get lucky.

So. Why would the man who wants to punish millions of people for simply not buying health insurance suddenly decide to let a bunch of drug addicts (or whatever a "nonviolent offender" is) out of jail? Call me stupid (everyone does) but something tells me he's not all that concerned about unnecessary punishment.

originally posted by: CharlieSpeirs
The opposite side of course is that all drug dealers are inextricably linked to the violence of the cartels who produce the product...

If we're talking marijuana only, I guess there would be a select few who grew themselves and had no violence in the plants distribution down the ladder...

Legalise all drugs, teach your children well, their fathers hell is just a go by...
I find this discussion tiresome to say the least, if you want to punish the cartels stop them from making money by legalising the product, never mind if its good, bad or just plain ugly, in modern times Portugal has taken this approach and guess what, drug use among all age groups has gone down significantly. So do you just want to punish evil doers or root out the problem ? Societies interest is supposedly to protect the health of the population we all know the govt does a great job of that, fact is if you legalise drugs they become less attractive to young consumers and if they end up with an addiction anyway at least they can get clean quality products of the pharmacy
giving them more of a chance to recouperate their health and self respect if they kick the habit. That's the way to protect peoples health if that is your genuine concern.




But I'm sure people are only looking at this with a myopic view of the drug trade.
Not intentionally perhaps...
But the pro-pot propaganda is just as strong as the anti-pot propaganda.