The video below is a rather legnthy, but excellent, lecture by Richard Posner, who is a judge on the United States 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and a senior lecturer with the University of Chicago Law School.

“I don’t think we should have a fraction of the drug laws that we have. I think it’s really absurd to be criminalizing possession or use or distribution of marijuana,” he says at one point in the video. “I can’t see any difference between that and cigarettes.” The audience reacted with applause.

“But also I’m skeptical about the other drug laws,” Judge Posner added. “The notion of using the criminal law as the primary means of dealing with a problem of addiction, of misuse, of ingesting dangerous drugs — I don’t think that’s sensible at all.”

- Joe Klare

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