monkeymondays.com
Did They Listen, Nooooooo...

It's my Dad's birthday so I expect to be on the phone for a long time tonight and I may not post more than this op-ed from 1999 that my friend and neighbor unearthed today. He wrote it in response to an editorial in the The Amarillo (TX) Globe-News.

The Globe-News criticized Gary Johnson, who was governor of New Mexico at the time, for daring to suggest legalization and regulation was a better solution to the war on drugs than the policies that still being employed today. The original editorial is archived here.

Bob's response is not archived, so I post it in full. Considering Amarillo just paid five million dollars out of their own municipal coffers to settle the Tulia case, his words still cut to the chase.

3 November 1999
The Amarillo Globe-News

Johnson has the right to speak

by Robert Merkin

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. -- Your Oct. 20 editorial, "Law enforcement 'drug' into Johnson mess," isn't about drugs, drug laws, drug policy or law enforcement. It's a demand by an American newspaper that an American citizen and elected official be silenced.

Ten years ago, nobody minded when the occasional hippie on a San Francisco sidewalk said, "Legalize it." No one in mainstream political power recognized the slightest obligation to respond.

Five years ago, it was still possible to ignore an increasing number of former public officials and ivory-tower academics, like Joseph D. McNamara, former police chief of San Jose, Calif., and Kansas City, Mo.; former Secretary of State George Shultz; and Nobel economist Milton Friedman when they wrote "Legalize it" in obscure journals.

Even their credentials weren't enough to lure mainstream politicians and policy-makers into a public debate.

Baltimore Mayor and Rhodes scholar Kurt Schmoke's challenge to national drug policy was also marginalized. He is, after all, the African-American mayor of an inner city, and national drug policy is an overwhelmingly Caucasian invention of the suburbs.

We now have two elected governors calling for fundamental debate about the war on drugs. One belongs to a third party and became famous as a professional wrestler, in the tradition of Gorgeous George -- he's easy to marginalize.

New Mexico's governor, however, is a Caucasian Republican, straight-arrow triathlete and self-made financial success. His public critiques of the war on drugs have triggered all the alarm bells. Prison construction companies, private prison corporations, prison guard unions, prosecutors and police should be screaming bloody murder. Under current national drug policy, they're all guaranteed careers, financial security, enormous profit, and growing political power forever.

A true, open national debate threatens the keystone of the war on drugs: the mass imprisonment and disenfranchisement of annually increasing numbers of mostly non-white Americans.

But an American newspaper should be ashamed to demand that Gov. Gary Johnson be silenced. Its editorials should debate the truth and wisdom of what he really says, but applaud and celebrate Johnson's right to use his experience, as a young man and as a successful politician and public official, to speak his mind.

His right to speak out is precisely the Amarillo Globe-News' right to speak out: the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

If you succeed in stifling Gov. Johnson's freedom of speech, your "success" will surely come back to haunt you.

They should have listened to him then.