The Liberated Centrist

 Printed in the Friday, February 18th issue of The New Hampshire This legislative session, freedom-friendly lawmakers have chosen to pursue the passage of a bill to protect medical cannabis patients from arrest and prosecution for medicating with their preferred method. Currently, HB 442 has eight co-sponsors in the General Court: four Democrats and four Republicans with one co-sponsor in the Senate. Prospects for the bill are less than spectacular. Given the latest shift in the state legislature from last November's election, don't expect drug law reform to be on the minds of a class of legislators elected to balance the budget and turn the state away from the perils of impending bankruptcy that so many face today. Recently, I spoke with State Senator Jim Forsythe, a liberty-minded Republican who is the sole sponsor of HB 442 in the Senate. During our conversation, he expressed to me his skepticism that the bill could make it through the current Senate w...

Printed in The New Hampshire, "From the Right" February 4th, 2011 Last Thursday, President Barack Obama took questions submitted online in video and text format in the spirit of his State of the Union address two days earlier. The President has conducted these in previous years, but this year's town hall was a bit different. The most popular video this year was one from retired deputy sheriff MacKenzie Allen, a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). He took his time to ask the president whether there should come a time for us to discuss the possibility of legalization, regulation and control of all drugs in hopes of an alternative to the current system of zero-tolerance prohibition. Where the President would've laughed this question off to the anxious-to-please audience in D.C. in years past, this year he chose to air and answer Mr. Allen's question. In his answer, President Obama called the policy change an "entirely legitimate topic for deba...