Dave Brownlow on Drugs Constitution Party Senate Challenger

Move from incarceration policy to treatment based solution

A: DO NOT SUPPORT--we allow Americans to kill themselves with cigarettes, alcohol, extreme sports, overeating, and unnatural sexual activities. Why single out just this one self destructive behavior to go after? The rights we have given up fighting the "war" on drugs are enormous and far outweigh any benefit. We need to move from an incarceration oriented policy to a treatment based solution.

The "war" on drugs has been a spectacular failure

The amount of peripheral crime that is generated around the illegal drug trade is absolutely huge, which has obviously had a very negative impact on the non-drug abusing portion of society.

We need to admit the failure of this "war" and change our whole drug policy away from enforcement and incarceration and move to a decriminalized, treatment oriented policy. Do we want to help these people or just punish them? We should throw the book at violent offenders, but if the threat of jail (500,000 jailed and counting) were an effective deterrent to the average drug user, then we would no longer have a drug problem. Something is not working.

Tobacco & obesity kill many more people than drug abuse

Additionally, if we are going to have an honest discussion about behaviors that will ruin your life, we need to talk about the annual deaths that are the direct result of tobacco use (430,000 killed), obesity (325,000 killed), & alcoholism (81,000 killed). Why pick on just one self destructive behavior to go after? Based on the numbers, maybe we should send people to jail for smoking, drinking, and getting fat!

Obviously, we should discourage the abuse of any drugs. But let's spend our time and energy solving the issues that will have the biggest impact in cleaning up the mess we have made for ourselves.