Just Say No?
Barry Evans' column today in the Lost Coast Outpost deals with high incarceration rates in the U.S. He also tends to point the finger at the late Nancy Reagan for contributing to those high incarceration rates with her Just Say No to drugs campaign she started. Disclosure: I'm a Nancy Reagan fan, but I don't think it's fair to point the finger at her. Evans even writes he's not trying to blame her specifically.
I wrote a comment to Evans' column. I'll try and make the same point here. I don't see how someone can criticize Nancy's Just Say No campaign. It seems to me that would be the most libertarian way of addressing the issue allowing for personal choice, if nothing else- the decision to use drugs, or not, made by the kids themselves. Not unlike guidance by parents meant to keep their kids from doing bad things.
It wouldn't surprise me if she supported long confinement times for drug use but I don't recall hearing of her advocating that. Regardless, if she did, she wasn't the only one and that others jumped on the anti- drug bandwagon, eventually leading to harsh penalties, I won't blame Nancy for all the others that jumped on the issue and escalated it.
Evans also mentions the formation of the failed Drug Abuse Resistance Education that started back then. He points out kids subject to that program were actually more likely to use drugs snd be arrested than those that weren't. I'm actually one of them. I got arrested for drugs at school back in 1969 when it was a big deal. Maybe one of these days I'll tell that story here.
posted by Fred Mangels @ 10:34 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
I couldn't agree more. Well said, Fred.
Damn, i want some of what you are smoking. Do words even have meaning any more?
A government program with a 1.7 billion dollar annual budget that encouraged kids to turn in their parents and friends. To call that libertarian minded is a slap in the face to liberty.
Within 4 years of the programs start, most of the laws that decimated the inner cities were passed.
Do you know what the word DRACONIAN refers to? Look it up.
Here's the most ironic part of it all. Reagan allowed cocaine imports to triple every year he was in office. He was caught exchanging coke money for weapons in the Iran contra scandal. The Reagan kids were coke heads who partied like kings while their parents were locking up anyone who wasnt white or rich for doing the same drugs. The same same drugs that they were allowing to be shipped into our country!
"A government program with a 1.7 billion dollar annual budget that encouraged kids to turn in their parents and friends. To call that libertarian minded"
I'vw never read anything that suggested Nancy Reagan proposed turning in drug using parents, although I'm aware of such things happening. It wasn't her idea, though. She just suggested to kids they should just say No when offered drugs.
Seems like a good suggestion to me, although I never followed it.
You've never read about DARE? Really? It encouraged people to turn in others.
I know that you respect Reason Magazine. They published a piece called "DARE:Tearing apart families since 1983". Look it up
You only think it's a good suggestion since you got busted. As a libertarian, I've got a feeling that you don't lIke the idea of people getting in trouble for things that don't hurt anyone except themselves....
Ditto, if anything, Nancy Reagan was a frail woman who had an ideological stance. How many law enforcers played off that ideology is important as it is cops on the street that abuse, conspire to imprison men since men are the real threat to the establishment. Drugs still are a mechanism to imprison those that makes the establishment shake and shiver. Afterall, the establishment preaches how big and bad, hardcore criminals are. When crap hits the fan, it is men who are feared, not women.
Who really believes Nancy Reagan could ever be in the position she was as a frail white woman of privilege .....
IF
An establishment did not exist or was so weak it has little societal value.
Don't blame Nancy Reagan, blame those who took the ball and started assauling the fans.
All that other stuff was not Nancy Reagan doing, but more likely federal agency types who took the ball and started pummeling the Spike Lees in the audience.
It is not as if NR was handing down orders to a naval battleship to have some 19 year old disillusioned schmuck depress a button to launch a tomohawk missle or bunker buster dropped from a plane.
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