but the sensible ones will tell you that drug decrim/legalization is a losing issue.

Note how incredibly silent they've been lately.

I love the sound of a blue dog's frightened whimpers.

It's not an unpopular stance... and people seem to like to be given a choice.

He and another El Paso City Commissioner, Susie Byrd, wrote "Dealing Death and Drugs: The Big Business of Dope in the U.S. and Mexico: An Argument to End the Prohibition of Marijuana."

He tried to initiate a conversation about the failed War on Drugs & Reyes put an end to that. I am so pleased, so excited, so hopeful. I only wish I could move to El Paso to vote for him!

This man must have something really going on to have accomplished winning this primary.

I never heard his name until today.

Thanks for the comments. Clearly he has made lots of waves already!

Hugh Grant.

Then the mayor vetoed it, and when the council was ready to vote to override, Rep. Reyes started warning that a vote for it could cost federal dollars and intimidated the council into accepting the veto.

Voters in El Paso are close enough to the border to know what bullshit the drug war is.

A drug warrior bites the dust. We need to see a lot more of that.

trigger the end of this deadly, ill-chosen, stupid, violent money-making effort to fill our prisons, and build new ones as fast as possible.

What kind of self-respecting country would even consider behaving this way?

It's great to see Reyes step back now.

This is going to be a very important election to watch for the rest of the country, too. A lot of good could come from it.

That's a solidly Democratic seat in a solidly Democratic county.

Just saying... Doesn't hurt!

My guess is somewhat less than zero..

he should have retired some time ago.

I remember something about him claiming he would "investigate" the destruction of the torture tapes?

"The War on Drugs" particularly cannabis has no redeeming value, is counter productive to its' stated mission, destabilizes Mexico along with other nations in Central and South America, empowers and enriches organized crime while raping the Bill of Rights with continuous excuses for erosion.

"The War on Drugs" alienates vast swaths of the American People from their government by turning what should be educational, medical and personal privacy concerns in to a criminal/warfare issue, thus criminalizing and in turn disenfranchising the people from the vote and political process.

The government is thus weakened as organized crime and corporate penal profiteers turned in to the "middle men;" come between the people and their government, as time progresses the American government; is increasingly disconnected from its' citizenry and corrupted from the bottom to the top.

In the long run, the "War on Drugs" is anathema to any freedom loving people much less a nation claiming to be a "Shining city on a hill" of representative democracy.

Thanks for the thread, Judi Lynn.