Former President Bill Clinton and a number of other world leaders are declaring the “War on Drugs” a failure in a new documentary about the remarkable violence, illegal activity and mass incarceration caused by worldwide drug prohibition. The free online film notes the immense “taboo” for politicians against discussing shifts in drug policy. Below are some of the most noteworthy statements from national and world leaders, including Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, the first sitting president to call for new approaches to drug policy and possible legalization:

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton:

Obviously if the expected result was that we would eliminate serious drug use in America and eliminate the narco-trafficking networks, it hasn’t worked. […]

We could have fighting, killing over cigarettes if we made it a felony to sell a cigarette or smoke one. So we legalized it. If all you do is try to find a police or military solution to the problem, a lot of people die and it doesn’t solve the problem. [...]

I think there should be safe places where people who have addiction could come, and not think they’re gonna be arrested and will have basic needs met. I have experience with this including personal experience. I have a brother who was addicted to cocaine, so I know a lot about this.

Former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso:

When I was in office in Brazil, of course I was aware of the situation of the drugs, but I was convinced that true repression would be possible to stop  the production of drugs. But I was wrong at the time.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos:

I think a new approach, or at least to open up or break the taboo is what the world should do. There are many possibilities, including the possibility of legalizing drugs. Politically, I know that this has cost a lot. I have already incurred this cost. They have attacked me for saying what I am saying to you. But I don’t think politicians or leaders of any country can only say what people want to hear.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter (from the film’s web page):

Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.

Former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria:

I personally fully disagree with the U.S. saying that they are being more successful just because they have more people in jail or because they have more sentences against traffickers than they had 20 or 10 or five years ago. That is not a good way to say that a policy is successful. … If they had less violence and less consumption, well that would be a success.

Former Swiss President Ruth Dreifuss:

I am sure that regulation by the state with very clear limitation is the solution.

Jorge G. Castañeda, former Foreign Minister of Mexico:

I think the war has created the situation. The situation did not create the war. The problem is that the Mexican military is not trained for this. It’s not trained for police missions. This is a police task and you’re asking it to fight a war it cannot win and it knows it is not winning. And so the military go in and they shoot. That’s what soldiers do. All of this has been going on now for 4 or 5 years and it’s getting worse and worse and worse.

Dr. Peter Moskos, criminologist and former police officer:

In the neighborhood I policed [in Baltimore], men who are born there have about a 12 percent chance of getting murdered in their lifetime. It seems like these problems are far more important than some sort of futile goal of creating a drug-free society. People should care more about all these deaths and by and large the vast majority are related to prohibition.

The documentary notes that two U.S. states passed ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana after filming was complete. Even more recently in late November (and not mentioned in the film), the United Nations ceded to calls from Latin American leaders to hold a symposium devoted to exploring new drug policy approaches — another indication that the moment may be ripe for a shift away from the War on Drugs.

According to a report from Sports Illustrated, at least seven NFL players have gotten rid of their personal firearms following this month’s horrific episode when Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend dead, then turned the gun on himself.

One player reportedly turned in multiple weapons to his franchise’s security detail, “telling his team’s personnel that he didn’t trust himself with the guns.”

Firearms have again entered the public debate after the Belcher tragedy, with normally-non-controversial commentators like Bob Costas noting correctly that if the linebacker hadn’t possessed a gun, “he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.”

Studies show that having a gun in the home increases the chances of homicide two to three times, and gun death rates are seven times higher in states with high household gun ownership rates. The presence of a firearm in the home also increases the risk of homicide for women by five times and two-thirds of women killed with guns each year die in domestic disputes.

The nation needs a comprehensive immigration plan, and it is clear from a recent poll that most Americans support reforming the U.S.’s immigration system. In a new poll, nearly two-thirds of people surveyed are in favor of a measure that allows undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship over several years, while only 35 percent oppose such a plan. And President Obama is expected to “begin an all-out drive for comprehensive immigration reform, including seeking a path to citizenship” in January.

Several top Republicans have softened their views on immigration reform following November’s election, but in the first push for reform, House Republicans advanced a bill last month that would add visas for highly skilled workers while reducing legal immigration overall. Providing a road map to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. would have sweeping benefits for the nation, especially the economy.

Here are the top 10 reasons why the U.S. needs comprehensive immigration reform:

1. Legalizing the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States would boost the nation’s economy. It would add a cumulative $1.5 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product—the largest measure of economic growth—over 10 years. That’s because immigration reform that puts all workers on a level playing field would create a virtuous cycle in which legal status and labor rights exert upward pressure on the wages of both American and immigrant workers. Higher wages and even better jobs would translate into increased consumer purchasing power, which would benefit the U.S. economy as a whole.

2. Tax revenues would increase. The federal government would accrue $4.5 billion to $5.4 billion in additional net tax revenue over just three years if the 11 million undocumented immigrants were legalized. And states would benefit. Texas, for example, would see a $4.1 billion gain in tax revenue and the creation of 193,000 new jobs if its approximately 1.6 million undocumented immigrants were legalized.

3. Harmful state immigration laws are damaging state economies. States that have passed stringent immigration measures in an effort to curb the number of undocumented immigrants living in the state have hurt some of their key industries, which are held back due to inadequate access to qualified workers. A farmer in Alabama, where the state legislature passed the anti-immigration law HB 56 in 2011, for example, estimated that he lost up to $300,000 in produce in 2011 because the undocumented farmworkers who had skillfully picked tomatoes from his vines in years prior had been forced to flee the state.

4. A path to citizenship would help families access health care. About a quarter of families where at least one parent is an undocumented immigrant are uninsured, but undocumented immigrants do not qualify for coverage under the Affordable Care Act, leaving them dependent on so-called safety net hospitals that will see their funding reduced as health care reforms are implemented. Without being able to apply for legal status and gain health care coverage, the health care options for undocumented immigrants and their families will shrink.

5. U.S. employers need a legalized workforce. Nearly half of agricultural workers, 17 percent of construction workers, and 12 percent of food preparation workers nationwide lacking legal immigration status. But business owners—from farmers to hotel chain owners—benefit from reliable and skilled laborers, and a legalization program would ensure that they have them.
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Last February, the Washington legislature enacted a law prohibiting anyone from “advertising [the] commercial sexual abuse of a minor if he or she knowingly publishes, disseminates, or displays, or causes directly or indirectly, to be published, disseminated, or displayed, any advertisement for a commercial sex act.” The goal of this law — preventing child sex trafficking — is laudable, but the law’s wording was also sufficiently ambiguous that it could have endangered common social media websites or Craigslist-style classified ad pages. Indeed, the Internet Archive, a website that facilitates research by maintaining public archives of the World Wide Web, supported a lawsuit challenging the law because it feared that it could face felony charges for providing comprehensive web archives that would include some forbidden web advertisements. Last July, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law.

In the wake of these challenges, the state of Washington now admits that the law cannot be defended in federal court:

The state of Washington has abandoned its defense of legislation passed earlier this year that could have exposed website operators to legal liability if they inadvertently hosted advertisements for child prostitution. . . . . The legislation, known as SB 6251, was designed to fight the sexual exploitation of minors. But critics said language criminalizing the dissemination of advertisements which include “an explicit or implicit offer for a commercial sex act to occur in Washington” went too far. The Internet Archive worried that such ads could effectively make its archives of the Web illegal, since some websites included in the archives could fit the law’s definition of material soliciting prostitution. So it joined a lawsuit by Backpage.com, which was also challenging the law. . . .

And that’s not all. The state will pay $200,000 to defray the plaintiffs’ legal expenses, and Washington state attorney general Rob McKenna will “work with the Washington State Legislature to repeal the current unconstitutional version” of the law.

Virginia State Senator Charles "Bill" Carrico Sr. (R)

Virginia State Senator Charles “Bill” Carrico Sr. (R) has become the latest swing state-Republican to propose a scheme to rig presidential elections for future Republican candidates. Blue Virginia reports his proposed SB 723 would award the state’s electors based on which candidate gets the majority of votes in each gerrymandered Congressional district — rather than based on who gets the most votes statewide.

The Carrico bill would award one of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to the presidential candidate who gets the most votes in each of the Commonwealth’s 11 Congressional Districts. The remaining two electors would go to the candidate who won the majority of Congressional Districts. With a Republican-controlled redistricting passed earlier this year, Virginia Democrats were heavily packed into three districts. Under these maps, Obama won Virginia by almost a 4 point margin, yet he carried just four Virginia Congressional Districts. Were Carrico’s scheme in place, Mitt Romney would have received seven of Virginia’s 11 electoral votes despite receiving just 47.28% of the vote statewide.

Carrico’s proposal is part of a troubling national trend by Republican legislators in GOP-controlled states won by President Obama in the 2008 and 2012 elections. The Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader and Ohio Secretary of State have suggested similar schemes in those states. While constitutional, the scheme would make it far more likely that the popular choice for president would not be elected to that office. No such efforts have emerged in GOP-controlled states won by the Republican nominees.

Indeed, if this plan to rig the Electoral College had been law in several key Republican-controlled states that President Obama won last month, America would now be looking at a very different future. Had the Carrico plan been instituted for the 2012 elections in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin, it is quite likely Mitt Romney would be the president-elect despite President Obama’s 51-47 majority.

With the possibility of meaningful filibuster reform looming next month, at least four Republican senators are now claiming that they are willing to strike a deal that would change the Senate rules without requiring Senate Democrats to invoke a procedure enabling them to do so with only 51 votes:

[T]op Senate Republicans — including John McCain of Arizona, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — are trying to head off the showdown. They’re reaching out to Democrats who have expressed concerns about changing the rules by 51 votes, including Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Carl Levin of Michigan. And Republicans are reaching out to a key Reid ally, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the No. 3 Senate Democrat and chairman of the Rules Committee, to see whether a deal can be cut before the new Congress convenes in January.

McCain called it a “meeting of the minds.”

“I’d like to see what we agree on and where we can share our mutual concerns,” the Arizona Republican said.

There are a number of moderate rules reforms that reasonable Republicans should be willing to support if they are willing to deal with Senate Democrats in good faith. Last week, for example, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) proposed eliminating a quirk of the current rules which allows filibustering senators to force up to 30 hours of floor time to be wasted every single time the Senate confirms a nominee. This rule serves no purpose other than delay — if it were eliminated, minority senators would still be able to block nominees they oppose strongly unless the majority could produce 60 votes to break their filibuster — and if McCain, Alexander and their colleagues want to make a deal, agreeing to eliminate these 30 hours would be a good way to demonstrate that they are serious.

Nevertheless, Senate Democrats should be cautious of striking a deal in light of recent history. Two years ago, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agreed to a “handshake deal” that ultimately achieved nothing more than a minor bill eliminating Senate confirmations of multiple low and mid-level appointees. The Senate minority’s practice of obstructing judges and other key appointees remained unchecked, and it continues to this day.

Similarly, in 2005, when Senate Republicans threatened to enact filibuster reform by a majority vote in order to end filibusters of a handful of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees, many Senate Democrats eventually agreed to a deal that confirmed three of Bush’s most ideological judges. These included Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who once compared Social Security to cannibalism and who recently authored an opinion claiming that all labor, business or Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect; and Judge Priscilla Owen, who took thousands of dollars worth of campaign contributions from Enron when she sat on the Texas Supreme Court and then wrote a key opinion reducing Enron’s taxes by $15 million.

So Senate Democrats have a history of agreeing to lopsided deals on filibuster reform that favor the other party. If they have the 51 votes necessary to move forward with reforms this time around, there is no good reason for them to accept a lesser deal for its own sake.

A large majority of Americans think that the federal government should stop enforcing its marijuana laws on states that have passed contradictory reforms, a recent Gallup poll shows.

Where federal law on cannabis stricter than state law — as is now the case in Colorado and Washington — 64 percent of respondents said that the feds should leave the states alone. Only 34 percent said that the feds should get involved.

Interestingly, the poll showed that even among those who oppose legalized marijuana, support for states’ rights is strong: 43 percent said the states should work it out without the federal government. Support for marijuana reform was highest among young people, 18-29, and among Democrats. In both demographics, support is around 60 percent.