The laws, enacted on 9/1/73 (I remember the day) are perfectly content to put a naive country bumpkin 18 year old with an ounce of pot together with murderers, heroin dealers, gang members and violent criminals in order to "rehabilitate" them. Kinda like attacking Iraq to keep Arabs from wanting to become terrorists.

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need "treatment" - other than the for profit addiction industry...

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The laws won't change as long as Jim Crow dictates policy in the legislatures of America. Jim Crow is the reason that Richard Nixon, in collusion with the Dixie-crats, created the war on drugs. And perpetuation of Jim Crow is the reason that the war on drugs continues.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Drug Arrests and Race in the United States
MARCH 2, 2009
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/03/02/decades-disparity-0

"This 20-page report says that adult African Americans were arrested on drug charges at rates that were 2.8 to 5.5 times as high as those of white adults in every year from 1980 through 2007, the last year for which complete data were available. About one in three of the more than 25.4 million adult drug arrestees during that period was African American."

The war on drugs is how the racist right-wing of America subverted the Voting Rights Act and the 26st Amendment. The war on drugs uses criminal disenfranchisement to deny thousands more people their voting rights every year.

Barack Obama would never have been allowed to be president had he opposed the war on drugs. He supports it and most all of his drug warrior cabinet reflects this. VP 'Jim Crow' Joe Biden is one of the most aggressive drug warriors in America.

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Reform of the Rockefeller drug laws won't work. Though admirable in intent, with reform
hopelessly stalled by a dysfunctional NY State government, another approach is sorely needed.

In 1923, America was three years into federal alcohol prohibition and every state except Maryland had enacted its own version of Prohibition. State courts became jammed with liquor cases, illicit commerce in alcohol caused rampant violence, and organized crime took hold.

In response to this crisis, NY State Senator Louis Curvillier introduced a measure he claimed would give badly needed relief to the NY State criminal justice system. It was ingeniously simple and did not require any funding. The measure merely repealed NY State prohibition laws, and replaced them with nothing. The bill passed the legislature and was signed into law by Governor Al Smith.

The effect of this law was to shift the burden of enforcing the prohibition laws from state to federal authorities for the ten remaining years of Prohibition. Not only did this unburden the NY State criminal justice system and save money, it reduced most of the Prohibition-related violence that plagued other parts of the country.

We now have a drug Prohibition that has the same pernicious effects as the old alcohol Prohibition and adds racial and economic discrimination. Eighty-six years ago, NY State set a precedent of common sense. It needs to
do so again.

Repeal the Rockefeller drug laws, and replace them with nothing. This would be a wonderful way to start the 21st century.

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It seems to be a no brainer to say that the drug laws as signed into law by Rockefeller are stupid and should be repealed and replaced by drug therapy and a law legalizing drugs in this country as they do in England.
Take the drugs out of the hands of criminals and grow up as a society. Let drug addicts register with the government and get treatment for their problem. But close the damn jails!

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The Proceeds of Crime
Posted March 3, 2009
The US and British governments have created a private prison industry which preys on human lives.


By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 3rd March 2009

It’s a staggering case; more staggering still that it has scarcely been mentioned on this side of the ocean. Last week two judges in Pennsylvania were convicted of jailing some 2000 children in exchange for bribes from private prison companies.

Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan sent children to jail for offences so trivial that some of them weren’t even crimes. A 15 year-old called Hillary Transue got three months for creating a spoof web page ridiculing her school’s assistant principal. Mr Ciavarella sent Shane Bly, then 13, to boot camp for trespassing in a vacant building. He gave a 14 year-old, Jamie Quinn, 11 months in prison for slapping a friend during an argument, after the friend slapped her. The judges were paid $2.6 million by companies belonging to the Mid Atlantic Youth Services Corp for helping to fill its jails(1,2,3). This is what happens when public services are run for profit.

It’s an extreme example, but it hints at the wider consequences of the trade in human lives created by private prisons. In the US and the UK they have a powerful incentive to ensure that the number of prisoners keeps rising.

The United States is more corrupt than the UK, but it is also more transparent. There the lobbyists demanding and receiving changes to judicial policy might be exposed, and corrupt officials identified and prosecuted. The UK, with a strong tradition of official secrecy and a weak tradition of scrutiny and investigative journalism, has no such safeguards.

The corrupt judges were paid by the private prisons not only to increase the number of child convicts but also to shut down a competing prison run by the public sector. Taking bribes to bang up kids might be novel; shutting public facilities to help private companies happens - on both sides of the water - all the time.

The Wall Street Journal has shown how, as a result of lobbying by the operators, private jails in Mississippi and California are being paid for non-existent prisoners(4,5). The prison corporations have been guaranteed a certain number of inmates. If the courts fail to produce enough convicts, they get their money anyway. This outrages taxpayers in both states, which have cut essential public services to raise these funds. But there is a simple means of resolving this problem: you replace ghost inmates with real ones. As the Journal, seldom associated with raging anti-capitalism, observes, “prison expansion [has] spawned a new set of vested interests with stakes in keeping prisons full and in building more. … The result has been a financial and political bazaar, with convicts in stripes as the prize.”(6)

Even as crime declines, law-makers are pressed by their sponsors to increase the rate of imprisonment. The US has, by a very long way, the world’s highest proportion of people behind bars: 756 prisoners per 100,000 people(7), or just over 1% of the adult population(8). Similarly wealthy countries have around one-tenth of this rate of imprisonment.

Like most of its really bad ideas, the last Conservative government imported private jails from the US. As Stephen Nathan, author of a forthcoming book about prison privatisation in the UK, has shown, the notion was promoted by the Select Committee on Home Affairs, which in 1986 visited prisons run by the Corrections Corporation of America. When the corporation told them that private provision in the US improved prison standards and delivered good value for money, the committee members failed to check its claims. They recommended that the government should put the construction and management of prisons out to tender

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The platform of the Green Party of New York State includes a section entitled "End the Drug War in New York State" calling for repeal of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, retroactive pardon for nonviolent drug offenders, and ending prohibition once and for all.
You can see the Green Party of NY's platform at http://gpnys.org/

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