Share this
Twitter
Myspace
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Facebook
Export PDF
Print
E-mail
Tags
BY BOB HOLT
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Singer Tony Bennett won a Grammy award Sunday night for a duet performance on “Body and Soul” with the late Amy Winehouse.
Winehouse died at 27 in 2011 after battling with drugs and alcohol. The late Whitney Houston admitted in 2009 that she had used cocaine and marijuana while she was married to Bobby Brown. Bennett, 85, had cocaine problems of his own late in the 1970s.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, at a pre-Grammy party on Saturday, Bennett said, "First it was Michael Jackson, then Amy Winehouse, now the magnificent Whitney Houston. I'd like every person in this room to campaign to legalize drugs."
Bennett said, according to Rolling Stone, “Legalization would get rid of all the gangsters that make people hide. When you say 'Don't do this' to young people, that's the one thing they're going to try and do. Once it's legal there is no longer the desire to do something that nobody else can do.
Bennett says he wished he could have helped Winehouse. "Woody Allen's manager, Jack Rollins, said he knew Lenny Bruce(who died young of drug problems)," Bennett said to MTV. “Rollins said one sentence that changed my life: He said, 'He sinned against his talent.' I had to leave because we were touring all over the world making this album. I wanted to tell her that and I never got a chance to do it.”
Addiction specialist at Caron Treatment Center Marty Ferrero felt Bennett’s remarks were out of place because the deaths he was discussing involved abuse of legal prescription drugs. He told Fox News, “To me it had nothing to do with what we are talking about here. On the face of this tragedy it was ill-timed, inappropriate and misleading.”
* Colombia, Peru, Mexico or Afghanistan with their coca leaves, marijuana buds or poppy sap are not igniting temptation in the minds of our weak, innocent citizens. These countries are duly responding to the enormous demand that comes from within our own borders. Invading or destroying these countries, thus creating more hate, violence, instability, injustice and corruption, will not fix our problem.
* A rather large majority of people will always feel the need to use drugs such as heroin, opium, nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, sugar, or caffeine.
* The massive majority of adults who use drugs do so recreationally - getting high at the weekend then up for work on a Monday morning.
* Apart from the huge percentage of people addicted to both sugar and caffeine, a small minority of adults (nearly 5%) will always experience the use of drugs as problematic. - approx. 3% are dependent on alcohol and approx. 1.5% are dependent on other drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine, heroine etc.
* Just as it was impossible to prevent alcohol from being produced and used in the U.S. in the 1920s, so too, it is equally impossible to prevent any of the aforementioned drugs from being produced, distributed and widely used by those who desire to do so.
* Prohibition kills more people and ruins more lives than the drugs it prohibits.
* Prescription drugs kill over 200,000 Americans every year-- even when taken as directed and not abused.
* Due to Prohibition (historically proven to be an utter failure at every level), the availability of most of these mood-altering drugs has become so universal and unfettered that in any city of the civilized world, any one of us would be able to procure practically any drug we wish within an hour.
* Throughout history, the prohibition of any mind-altering substance has always exploded usage rates, overcrowded jails, fueled organized crime, created rampant corruption of law-enforcement - even whole governments, while inducing an incalculable amount of suffering and death.
* Apart from the fact that the DEA is the de facto enforcement wing of the pharmaceutical industry, the involvement of the CIA in running Heroin from Vietnam, Southeast Asia and Afghanistan and Cocaine from Central America has been well documented by the 1989 Kerry Committee report, academic researchers Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott, and the late journalist Gary Webb.
* It's not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons, but prohibitionists wish to waste trillions of dollars in an utterly futile attempt to keep them off our streets.
* The United States jails a larger percentage of it's own citizens than any other country in the world, including those run by the worst totalitarian regimes, yet it has far higher use/addiction rates than most other countries.
* Prohibition is the "Goose that laid the golden egg" and the lifeblood of terrorists as well as drug cartels. Both the Taliban and the terrorists of al Qaeda derive their main income from the prohibition-inflated value of the opium poppy. An estimated 44 % of the heroin produced in Afghanistan, with an estimated annual destination value of US $ 27 Billion, transits through Pakistan. Prohibition has essentially destroyed Pakistan's legal economy and social fabric. - We may be about to witness the planet's first civil war in a nation with nuclear capabilities. - Kindly Google: 'A GLOBAL OVERVIEW OF NARCOTICS-FUNDED TERRORIST GROUPS' Only those opposed, or willing to ignore these facts, want things the way they are.
* The future depends on whether or not enough of us are willing to take a long look at the tragic results of prohibition. If we continue to skirt the primary issue while refusing to address the root problem then we can expect no other result than a worsening of the current dire situation. - Good intentions, wishful thinking and pseudoscience are no match for the immutable realities of human nature.
Never have so many been endangered and impoverished by so few so quickly!
* The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it. - H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor, essayist and philologist.