Preckwinkle: Reagan deserves 'special place in hell' for war on drugs

[Drale]

CHAMPAIGN—
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle today said former President Ronald Reagan deserves “a special place in hell” for his role in the war on drugs.

Preckwinkle, a staunch advocate of decriminalizing pot, made the comment about Reagan, who died in 2004, during a conference led by former Republican Gov. Jim Edgar at the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs in Urbana-Champaign.

Preckwinkle was defending the recent move by city officials to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, saying out of whack drug laws unfairly lead to more minorities behind bars.

Republican state Rep. Chapin Rose questioned whether such an approach includes drug treatment for those who are ticketed. Preckwinkle said no, arguing that drug treatment should be part of health care system, not criminal justice. She said Reagan deserves a "special place in hell" for his involvement in "making drug use political."

I'm not really a fan of Toni Preckwinkle but she's a billion times better then any repuke would be and a trillion times better then our last county president Todd Stoger. She is dead on with this though.

[AngryOldDem]

1. That, and for a whole lot of other stuff, too. n/t

[DefenseLawyer]

2. Actually Nixon started the "war on drugs"

but Ronnie definitely turned it up a notch

[rurallib]

3. always called the war on drugs "Nixon's Revenge"

[Egalitarian Thug]

5. Actually, in my research for a college paper a million years ago, I found that the original WOD was

declared by Wilson. And there's another asshole the world would have been better off if nobody but his family had ever heard of.

[DefenseLawyer]

7. The infamous Marijuana Tax Act

was brought to us in 1937 by the Roosevelt administration. Plenty of blood on lots of hands in the last 100 years of folly.

[Blue_In_AK]

6. Exactly.

[Egalitarian Thug]

4. It's times like this that I thoroughly understand the appeal of the "someday after you die" fantasy.

Unfortunately, reason keeps butting in and I'm assured that there is nothing to that worthless piece of shit but a rotting corpse.

[cordelia]

8. 'Special place in hell' period. I'm good with that. n/t

[surrealAmerican]

9. great statement

It takes guts to come out and say that. She's a brave politician.

[eShirl]

10. I'M NOT SAYING IT WAS MORMONS,

but it was Mormons.

With help from some people in Salt Lake City, associated with the Mormon Church and the Mormon National Tabernacle in Washington -- with their help and a lot of work we found out what the genesis was of the first marihuana law in this country. Yes, it was directly connected to the history of Utah and Mormonism and it went like this.


-----SNIP (for the sake of DU's policies regarding fair use)-----


In 1910, the Mormon Church in synod in Salt Lake City decreed polygamy to be a religious mistake and it was banned as a matter of the Mormon religion. Once that happened, there was a crackdown on people who wanted to live in what they called "the traditional way". So, just after 1910, a fairly large number of Mormons left the state of Utah, and indeed left the United States altogether and moved into northwest Mexico. They wrote a lot about what they wanted to accomplish in Mexico. They wanted to set up communities where they were basically going to convert the Indians, the Mexicans, and what they referred to as "the heathen" in the neighborhood to Mormonism.

By 1914, they had had very little luck with the heathen, but our research shows now beyond question that the heathen had a little luck with them. What happened apparently -- now some of you who may be members of the church, you know that there are still substantial Mormon communities in northwest Mexico -- was that, by and large most of the Mormons were not happy there, the religion had not done well there, they didn't feel comfortable there, they wanted to go back to Utah where there friends were and after 1914 did.

And with them, the Indians had given them marijuana. Now once you get somebody back in Utah with the marijuana it all becomes very easy, doesn't it? You know that the Mormon Church has always been opposed to the use of euphoriants of any kind. So, somebody saw them with the marijuana, and in August of 1915 the Church, meeting again in synod in Salt Lake City decreed the use of marijuana contrary to the Mormon religion and then -- and this is how things were in Utah in those days -- in October of 1915, the state legislature met and enacted every religious prohibition as a criminal law and we had the first criminal law in this country's history against the use of marijuana.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm

[mopinko]

11. i love that woman.

[The Midway Rebel]

12. Along with Judas, Adolph and Jim (Jones)...

I love that song...