I already mentioned this in the comments section of Holly’s post, but I think it bears repeating.
During last night’s Democratic Presidential Debate at Howard University in Washington D.C., Mike Gravel gave a rather impassioned speech in which he denounced the War on Drugs and called for its immediate end:
And one of the areas that touches me the most and enrages me the most is our War on Drugs that this country has been putting forth for the last generation.
In 1972, we had 179,000 human beings in jail in this country. Today it’s 2.3 million, and 70% of them are black African-Americans. And I hope my colleagues will join me in standing up and saying like FDR did with Prohibition, “We’ll do away with that.” And FDR did it.
And if I’m president, I will do away with the War on Drugs, which does nothing but savage our inner cities and put our children at risk!
For those of you keeping count, that’s now three presidential candidates (Democrats Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich and Republican Ron Paul) who have come out against the War on Drugs and vowed to end it. They join the Libertarians and Greens, whose parties have also vowed to end the War on Drugs.
What will be the response of the remaining Democratic and Republican candidates, who have been completely silent on this issue during the course of the campaign thus far? Will they denounce Mike Gravel and defend America’s 35-year long War on Drugs? Does anyone expect Rudy Giuliani to remind us of his “zero tolerance” position on drugs or Joe Biden to brag about his RAVE Act?
Birthplace: San Diego, CA
Birthdate: That’s for me to know
Political Party: Independent
Political Philosophy: Libertarian-liberal