David Soares is a political fraud ostensibly promising drug law reform while expanding the costly war on drugs in a different direction. He was elected to the office of the Albany County District Attorney running on a platform seeking to repeal New York’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws. Many progressive anti-prohibition organizations fell in love with his rhetoric. To Soare’s credit, his campaign was influential in the passage of minor Rockefeller drug law reforms although critics have charged that the changes do not represent real reform.

Prosecutor David Soares continues to strongly criticize the U.S. war on drugs as an abysmal failure. His 2006 speech at the International Harm Reduction Association conference in Vancouver, where he warned Canada to stay as far away from U.S. drug policy as possible, earned him praise from drug law reformers.

Yet at the same time Soares was criticizing the failure of the ”war on drugs”, he was aggressively invigorating the nation’s “war on steroids“; he abandoned his efforts to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws in favor of a costly steroid witch hunt. The inescapable hypocrisy of David Soares’ actions suggest a political opportunist who lacks a principled stance on drug law reform [Read more...]