Singer Tony Bennett calls for legalizing drugs

[kpete]

In a speech reacting to the death of Whitney Houston, legendary singer Tony Bennett urged the U.S. government to legalize drugs once and for all.

Bennett’s comments came at the Clive Davis pre-Grammy party where Houston was found dead a few hours before.

“First it was Michael Jackson, then it was Amy Winehouse, and now the magnificent Whiteny Houston,” Bennett said, according to USA Today.

“I would like every gentleman and lady in this room to commit themselves to get our government to legalize drugs. So they can be getting to a doctor, not to some gangsters who sell them up under the table. There’s enough going on, and it’s time to straighten out our own lives. We’re the greatest country in the world, and we should never forget that.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/12/singer-tony-bennett-calls-for-legalizing-drugs/

[femmocrat]

1. Uh.... Michael Jackson was "getting to a doctor".

The doctor administered the drug (allegedly).

And didn't Amy Winehouse die from alcohol.... which is a legal drug.

And... so far we have no evidence that Whitney died from drugs. Heard today that none were found in the hotel room

[eShirl]

4. Forget it, he's rolling.

"Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"

[cbrer]

11. Yer' harshing my buzz femmocrat

[spanone]

38. legalize them.

[richmwill]

2. Cool, Tony! So you want us to be able to be prescribed crack and heroin by our doctors? (eyeroll)

Since you just said "drugs" should be legalized, I would guess you really meant every single drug. Yeah, "smart" move.

[eShirl]

3. Harm Reduction is smart compared to the destructive consequences of prohibition.

[Lochloosa]

5. It takes 6 hours to get booked for crack....it's takes six months to get into rehab...maybe...

trust me I know.

That is such a bullshit argument.

[MadHound]

6. Actually it is a very smart move.

First, by legalizing drugs you will get rid of the secondary crime wave that is sweeping our country due to the black market drug trade. People wouldn't be murdered, robbed, shot, all by addicts looking to get money, protect their trade, etc. Our neighborhoods wouldn't be shooting galleries where gangsters rule by terror. Children could play outside again without fear of the drive by.

Second, by legalizing drugs you would allow addicts to get clean drugs instead of the witch's brew of battery acid, sulfur, and who knows what else that are in street drugs. Thus, the health of the addicts would improve somewhat.

Third, by removing this as a law enforcement issue, you will make it a health issue. Thus, more people will be able to get treatment and recovery without fear of being busted.

Fourth, you can manage and stabilize addicts so that while they may not give up their drugs, they can manage their addiction and become productive tax paying citizens instead of desperate criminals. This is what they've done with heroin addicts in Britain, and it has worked well. A heroin addict comes in on the train in the morning, stops by a medical clinic, gets their shot of heroin, and then goes to work. After work, he stops by the clinic, gets his shot and goes home. He holds down a job, contributes to society and manages his disease.

Fifth, you would actually lower the amount of drugs used. As it is now with drugs being illegal, there is an immense amount of glamor and appeal to do drugs, especially for young people who are all about the whole rebel image associated with drugs. Take away that rebel image, make them normalized like alcohol, and drug use goes down. We've seen that this is what happens in countries that do legalize drugs.

Sixth, you would open up an entirely new revenue stream by legalizing and taxing drugs like we do with alcohol. A revenue stream that is desperately needed right now in these tough economic times. Furthermore, you would provide good jobs for a lot of people, again, something that we need desperately.

We need to face the fact that mankind has an innate need to alter their state of consciousness, and will go to great lengths to do so. Prohibition didn't work with alcohol, and it isn't working with drugs.

[Lochloosa]

7. Thank you..I did not have the patience

[steve2470]

8. great post, thank you nt

[Spock_is_Skeptical]

10. Thanks, you nailed it. <3

[flamingdem]

12. +1 legalize it

and it loses the stigma AND the cool

[Little Star]

29. yep.

[Fix The Stupid]

30. Yes! Yes! Yes!

Nail meet head.

Perfectly worded...

"legalize it and it loses the cool".

Exactly...

[cbrer]

13. ++ Good post

The only thing I would add is that it also may remove our governments apparent willingness to commit further illegal gun running to Mexico.

[FrodosPet]

16. If only it were that easy

Legalizing drugs will not solve all the problems. For example, if an addict is broke and desperate, when the "flu bug" hits them hard, they are going to steal - if not from strangers, then at least from friends and family. After all, I've been ripped off by drunks seeking a perfectly legal fifth of Jim Beam. Plus gambling, loansharking, truck hijacking, protection rackets...I suspect the best we can hope to do is reduce the influence of organized crime by 20%, if that.

If a huge tax is placed on it, organized crime will be undercutting the legal price. Alcohol and cigarettes are legal, yet criminals are still making money off of them.

As for reducing the amount of drugs taken, I've been blessed to never have been a cokehead, but I've been a toker for over 35 years. If I could go down to the corner and buy at will, I probably would go wake and bake pretty much every day. Other people's mileage may vary.

As for purity and safety: people around here seem to get upset when you talk about these factors in relation to MJ at least.

I'm not a prohibitionist (at least not for MJ - with drugs that can kill you through overdose I am). I am just saying we need to understand the whole picture and prepare accordingly. In other words, don't go off into "la la la la la everything is perfect now" land, only to be smashed when reality strikes back.

[MadHound]

25. I am basing my observations in reality,

The reality of our own experience in prohibition, and other countries' experience in legalizing drugs. This isn't "la la land" as you so dismissively put it. It is reality.

Furthermore, you are, in part, basing your arguments on anecdotal evidence. Again, a rule of logic, what you personally observe cannot always be applied to the public at large.

For instance, while you may have been ripped off by drunks, in general those types of crimes are relatively rare.

And while you may toke your head off if dope was legal, the fact remains that in countries where drugs were legalized, drug use went down. Again, what you experience cannot necessarily be generalized to the entire population.

As far as purity and safety, I have no clue as to what you are trying to say. Perhaps if you could restate that in a more coherent form.

Finally, if you are against drugs that can kill you by overdose, then you should be against a myriad of currently legal drugs, including alcohol, oxy, ibuprofen, nicotine, and many, many others.

Your arguments are incoherent, illogical and anecdotal. You are essentially arguing that drugs shouldn't be legalized "just because". Surely you can do better than that.

[FrodosPet]

31. So WHAT do we legalize?

OK, I'm biased, so I am OK with marijuana being legalized. But I'm not naive enough to say that it is harmless - indeed I am way too experienced for that. I know that despite some stoners living in denial, it DOES negatively impact your driving ability. It makes you cough up scary looking chunks of WTF. And it zaps the hell out of your motivation, to the point it can cost you jobs and relationships. But the negative impacts of prohibition outweigh the positives.

But cocaine? Has ANYONE ever met an experienced powder or crack cocaine user whose life was NOT a train wreck? And unfortunately, a lot of innocents get hurt in those wrecks.

We need treatment programs for cocaine, opioid, alcohol, and prescription pill abuse. And we need a system that can ASSURE the people who need it, not only can, but MUST, get it. Do you have a better solution for forcing people into treatment? Maybe make it easier for loved ones and social service workers to have people committed for inpatient treatment?

As for the greedy cocaine and heroin importers and sellers who could care less how many lives and communities they destroy? Throw them in a cage for a VERY long time next to the mortgage fraudsters and others who have damaged our national economy and psyche.

[MadHound]

35. We legalize everything, for reasons that I named above

Prohibition, of alcohol or any other drug, simply does not work. So why put ourselves, the public, along with addicts, casual users, what have you, through that kind of agony.

I am not saying that drugs are harmless, nowhere close to that. What I am saying is that prohibition of them is also harmful, to people and our society as a whole. So why should we inflict harm upon harm? Yes, coke addicts' lives are a train wreck, but has making coke illegal ever stopped somebody from doing coke if they want to? Stats and reality say no.

You want to help people get the treatment they need? Legalization of all drugs will help with that. First, because we're approaching the problem as a health care problem, which it truly is, instead of a law enforcement problem. People would thus be more inclined to get the help they need, themselves, easier for social services to help these people.

As far as coke and heroin dealers go, gee, if we legalized coke and heroin, meth and dope, those dealers would be gone, poof, in a day. They would be out of business, and the crimes they commit, shooting innocents, robbery, etc. etc. would also disappear. No longer would people have to worry about drive bys, or whether their home is secure, because the dealers who cause these problems would no longer be in business.

We have tried prohibition, and it has failed. It has cost us untold number of innocent lives. It has destroyed communities. It has thrown people into jail when all they needed was to get help with their addiction. It has cost each and every one of us money and our civil rights. Prohibition has failed, the War on Drugs has been lost. By some definitions, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result each time. That is what we're currently engaged in, insanity. Don't you think that it is time to stop the madness and restore sanity to our society? Legalizing drugs, all drugs, is the only way to do that.

[FrodosPet]

39. No one illegally sells legal products?

No one is bootlegging booze and smokes? No one is hijacking trucks? No one is doing smash and grabs at party stores and tobacco shops?

For what you are proposing, drugs would not only have to be legal, they would have to be wide spread and affordable, otherwise if they are taxed the way people advocate, then the criminals will steal legal supplies and/or keep producing them and still managing to make a nice cut.

Or they will just turn to theft, robbery, and violent crime.

As for the Portugal experiment - drugs are decriminalized, not legalized. In general I like their approach of pushing treatment instead of incarceration.

I found what seems to be the most authoritative site on the Portugal solution at http://www.idt.pt/EN/Paginas/HomePage.aspx

In particular, I would like to call people's attention to a paper on the Portuguese Drug Strategy:

http://www.idt.pt/EN/RelacoesInternacionais/Documents/2009/estrategia_eng.pdf

And finally, I found an interesting story in The New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_specter

------------------------------------------

"For people caught with no more than a ten-day supply of marijuana, heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, or crystal methamphetamine—anything, really—there would be no arrests, no prosecutions, no prison sentences. Dealers are still sent to prison, or fined, or both, but, for the past decade, Portugal has treated drug abuse solely as a public-health issue. That doesn’t mean drugs are legal in Portugal. When caught, people are summoned before an administrative body called the Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction. Each panel consists of three members—usually a lawyer or a judge, a doctor, and a psychologist or a social worker. The commissioners have three options: recommend treatment, levy a small fine, or do nothing. In most respects, the law seems to have worked: serious drug use is down significantly, particularly among young people; the burden on the criminal-justice system has eased; the number of people seeking treatment has grown; and the rates of drug-related deaths and cases of infectious diseases have fallen."

- snip -

"Unfortunately, nothing about substance abuse is simple. For instance, although many people maintain that addiction would decline if drugs were legal in the United States, the misuse of legally sold prescription medications has become a bigger health problem than the sale of narcotics or cocaine. There are questions not only about the best way to address addiction but also about how far any society should go, morally, philosophically, and economically, to placate drug addicts."

------------------------------------------

Portugal seems to have the best idea that I have seen, but don't mistake that they have legalized drugs, or are accepting of them, or that they are consequence free.

[MadHound]

44. What is the proportion of illegal booze sold compared to legal booze?

Oh, yeah, minuscule. Same with tobacco. Thus, your argument falls flat before it even gets out of the gate.

Oh, and I'm not talking about just Portugal, but other European countries. Keep up your research, you might actually learn something.

Meanwhile, how is that War on Drugs going? How effective has it been? Has it stopped, or even slowed down the use of drugs in this country?

No, in fact just the opposite.

You must do your dope smoking in the comfort of a suburban, safe neighborhood. Try taking a look at how those, drug users and non-drug users, live in parts of this country that are rife with dealers. I lived in such a neighborhood. I heard the sounds of gunfire virtually every night. I had my car get caught in the crossfire of dueling crack dealers, and felt fortunate that it was only my car, not my body or the body of my wife. I now live in a rural area, relatively safe, but being in Missouri, still subject to the scourge of meth heads. I've had an AC unit stolen for the scrap metal it would bring. I've been run off the road while walking my dogs by meth freaks driving like bats out of hell. Oh, and down the road is a black patch back in the weeds, the remains of a meth lab that blew up, and whose toxins make the land uninhabitable.

That is all minor compared to people who have lost children due to drive-bys, loved ones who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hell, look at the violence down at the border, violence caused a drug war being raged by drug lords intent on controlling the illegal trade. Guess what, that weed you're smoking, it is a contributing factor in that violence. So while you toke up in the comfort of your own, safe home, your demand for an arbitrarily illegal drug is fueling violence that is killing innocents every single day.

Legalize drugs and virtually all that violence goes away. Virtually all that crime goes away. Kids will be safe from random bullets, citizens will be safe from robbery, and the violence on the border will be greatly reduced(no, it won't go away, because part of that violence is also being fueled by smuggling in illegal immigrants, but it will be greatly reduced).

We have tried Prohibition for decades now, and it simply hasn't worked. To continue down that path is simply madness. It is past time that we ended that madness.

[roody]

46. After 35 years of using marijuana,

I have never coughed up anything like that. I get a cough up cold maybe once a year.

[TheWraith]

19. Holy crap, you and me agree on something!

You missed one thing, though--people who don't believe that this is the case need to look at the history of alcohol prohibition in the US, which demonstrates many of the same realities. Drinking went underground, resulting in a highly violent black market, and actually MORE alcohol consumption than either before or after prohibition. Not to mention being the source of the old myth that homemade moonshine makes you go blind. Since methanol was never illegal (as opposed to ethanol, since ethanol gets you drunk but methanol gets you dead) unethical bootleggers would sometimes cut a little methanol into their product to boost the proof. As you said, purity and safety.

Here in the US, a study of Department of Justice statistics showed that roughly 89% of murder suspects have prior criminal records--and so do 75% of their victims. That's the face, right there, of gang warfare over the drug trade. When we eliminated prohibition and got rid of alcohol as a source of black-market fighting the crime rate in the US fell by almost two thirds. I have no doubt the same thing would happen with drugs.

[MadHound]

26. Well it does happen once in a blue moon.

Actually I suspect that we agree on a lot more than what we disagree on.

Your comparison with Prohibition is spot on, one would think that our experience with that would lead us to make rational decisions when it comes to drugs, but apparently not, apparently we have to beat our head against this wall time and again.

[Little Star]

28. +1

[cbrer]

15. Yeah, just like our doctors prescribe alcohol. (eyeroll)

[Fozzledick]

17. I would very much like for doctors to be able to prescribe heroin

for management of extreme pain, particularly that suffered by late-stage terminal cancer patients. Current law forces them to substitute fentanyl, a synthetic narcotic that is actually more addictive, more toxic, and more debilitating to the patient, but less effective at relieving the extreme pain caused by the final breakdown of the body's major organs.

And for what it's worth, cocaine is already legal when prescribed as a local anesthetic, most commonly used for oral and ocular surgery.

[TheWraith]

20. Actually, they do prescribe heroin, kind of.

Heroin is a chemical sibling to morphine, as well as various other medical painkillers such as codeine and hydrocodone. All of them are derived from the same source as opium.

[Warren DeMontague]

21. I think "quotation" marks should be more "tightly" regulated

their "misuse" is a "serious" "problem"

http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

[Taverner]

33. I do! It's called "harm reduction"

Would you rather a heroin addict take his chances with the black tar shit off the streets, or from a pharmacy where the dose is calculated and the risks are less?

[riverwalker]

9. the drugs came from a doctor

Whitney's were Xanax, Valium, and Ativan. Jackson's were Rx. drugs as well.
I love Tony Bennett, but this statement is a bit goofy.

[DCKit]

14. But his heart is in the right place. nt

[Taverner]

34. So fucking what?

Wouldn't you rather addicts got their junk from a pharmacy, where purity and regulation were at work, or would you rather have this:

[Ter]

18. Legalizing drugs would have kept Amy Winehouse alive?

How so, she was a hardcore drug addict?

[Warren DeMontague]

23. The only thing that could have kept Amy Winehouse alive was Amy Winehouse.

We need to grok that, and stop trying to legislate people out of their own self-destructive choices. $60 Billion a year for the drug war- most of it aimed at pot smoking- is NOT working.

[Warren DeMontague]

22. If the ONLY choices are full legalization and what we've got now, I'll go with full legalization.

I think addiction to so-called 'hard drugs' should be treated as a public health issue, not a law enforcement one. Marijuana should be legal, regulated and taxed.

I tend to err on the side of consenting adults being free to make their own decisions about their own bodies, but I have trouble envisioning meth being sold at the 7-11. That said, I think harm reduction is a better approach with those substances than trying to incarcerate our way out of the problem.

[Little Star]

27. I was thinking that if drugs were legal people..

could choose them instead of garbage like meth. No? I don't use so I really don't know.

[Warren DeMontague]

32. I think the best advertisement against meth is meth users themselves. But when anti-drug programs

lie to kids, like telling them smoking pot will get them date raped or make their testicles fall off (that was the tack DARE was taking a few years ago, if I remember) then they're not going to believe ANYTHING anyone says, even about truly bad shit like meth.

I'm in agreement. I think if, say, pot were legal, the use of stuff like meth would go down.

[jessicasiny]

24. good topic

good topic!


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A101 Android 2.3 Dual SIM Cellphone

[Initech]

36. What we should be doing is calling for stricter regulations on Big Pharma.

What killed Michael Jackson? Dangerous anesthetics.

What killed Heath Ledger? Prescription pain killers.

What killed Whitney Houston? Most likely prescription pain killers.

While i completely agree with ending the BS war on drugs, notice a pattern here?

[FrodosPet]

40. Is the pattern that legal products are still abused?

Is the message that drugs produced in a sterile factory, using strict quality controls, are bad, but meth cooked up in Harley Harry's laundry room is OK and should not be restricted?

[Initech]

42. No - I'm saying the stuff Big Pharma produces is just as dangerous.

I'm not contrasting the two even slightly. I'm saying without regulating Big Pharmaceutical companies in addition to what you said, they'll continue to get away with selling dangerous prescription drugs like that.

[FrodosPet]

43. Perhaps nationalize the pharmaceutical industry?

As bad as some of the risks and side effects of these drugs are, most all of them have a medical benefit. I'm just wondering if nationalizing and strictly monitoring their production and distribution would give the Federal government the ability to reduce the problem of abuse?

[Proud Liberal Dem]

37. I like Tony's singing

but he's wrong here IMHO. There is no connection between drugs being illegal and what happened to any of the people he mentioned here (as some have already pointed out).

There are some good arguments to be made that some drugs (i.e. pot) that pose less risk to people and have less potential of severe negative consequences should be legalized but there are a lot of other, more harmful drugs (i.e. Meth, Coke) that should NEVER be legalized. That being said, I definitely think that we need to change our focus on drugs from punishment to prevention/treatment and focus more time, energy, and resources on community programs than on incarceration.

[Dreamer Tatum]

41. So basically, the government can get rich from drug users instead of 'gangsters.'

Drugs were effectively legal for Whitney Houston. If you want drugs legal, that's fine, but what happened to her is an IMPLICATION of legalization, not a cost of non-legalization.

[Uncle Joe]

45. Would a representative government be more accountable to the people than the gangsters?

Would the people force the government to use any funds from the selling of drugs for education and rehabilitation?

Whitney gave interviews in which she spoke of using crack and/or cocaine, those aren't legal.

The question becomes with all the legal drugs that wealth can buy, why would someone with her income and fame risk it all with illegal ones?

The fact is our corporate media speaks with two faces, on the one hand demonizing some drugs while pushing others for every ailment under the sun on the primetime network news which sould be starting any minute now.

Flip through the networks with your remote and count the drug messages all just within 30 minutes time span, of course this doesn't include the rest of the day and night's drug messages.