Last week, El Paso’s City Council took an interesting stand on Federal drug policy.
The City Council had voted unanimously last week on a resolution originally drafted by the city’s Committee on Border Relations that expressed support for Juarez and called upon the federal government to take several steps to aid Juarez and Mexico.
Those steps included clamping down on gun-running and money-laundering; the controversy arose when O’Rourke amended a portion of the resolution calling for less focus on incarceration and more on rehabilitation to asking for an “honest open national debate on ending the prohibition on narcotics.”
There is, of course, a good deal of debate on whether what Robert Anton Wilson called “The War on Some Drugs” is a sensible policy or not; it’s one of those things that people disagree on, usually strongly. But this was a resolution, not something binding; its value lies in an indication that an official local government agency thinks that a particular policy position is important enough to make an official stance on it. We see this sort of thing happen all the time, ranging from nuclear energy to same-sex marriage to the war in Iraq: so it’s acceptable, right?
Only if you’re not a Texas Democrat. If you are, you have to threaten the City Council.
Continue reading Democrats shut down Drug War debate in El Paso.
