The War On Freedom
- posted by Elmo on 2001-05-26 00:49:00
Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes, because you just might get it. I wanted more people to read and respond to the rant. He he. For those of you who didn't read my last rant, or Jeff Arnett's response to it, you can read both here. This rant is my response to it.
In the rush to cure all the ills to which humans are heir, liberty is too often an innocent bystander -- and an accidental casualty. --Barry Goldwater, 1964 The War On FreedomAs a person holding libertarian views, I often find myself accused of being conservative. In many ways this is justified--I am for the limited government as laid out in the Constitution, not the out-of-control runaway train we have in Washington now. And I'm for dismantling the oppressive and ridiculous tax system that is sucking the American people dry. If the government went back to just performing the tasks that our Constitution permits it to do, all of its bills could be easily paid for without having to steal badly-needed, hard-earned wages from working people (a.k.a. income tax), force them to pay rent on property they supposedly already own (property taxes), or steal half of what few assets they have left when they die (inheritance taxes). And I am absolutely no-compromise when it comes to the Bill of Rights. Not only must we nix the relentless assaults on them that seem to come almost daily these days, but we also must demand that they be fully restored and all laws to the contrary be repealed or officially declared Unconstitutional by the courts. Even the slightest so-called "common sense" abridgement of our unalienable rights essentially nullifies their "unalienability", leaving them vulnerable to future attacks--which we see more and more of these days. We The People must adopt a "Zero Tolerance" policy toward Unconstitutional legislation and demand that our elected public servants do likewise.
However, I am for enforcement of the entire Bill of Rights, not just a select few of them. And I must point out that not all of the Constitution's enemies are on the so-called "left wing", although a massive number of anti-Constitutional attacks do come from that end of the political spectrum. But there is a large plethora of anti-American insanity coming from the so-called "right wing" as well. As I said in an earlier rant, most ideological "liberals" are every bit as communist as conservatives allege, but their ideological counterparts the "conservatives" are also just as fascist as their detractors allege. Remember, it was the Republicans who gave us NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and every other globalist sovereignty-threatening treaty that has come out of Congress the past six years, as well as countless "big brother" proposals including a national ID card database. It is important to note that President Clinton was the one who betrayed his Democratic support base by railroading those Trojan horses through, not the Republicans betraying their base of rich corporate donors. And as if we didn't have enough land grabbing under Clinton's administration, now G.W. Bush wants to give electric companies the unchecked ability to also condemn and steal more of our land, in order to run power lines. (And take it from someone who knows firsthand, those jerks don't care who or what they have to go through. When we first had electricity installed on our land around 15 years ago we still had this beautiful great oak tree growing there--by far the largest tree on our land and probably one of the largest in the county--by its size we guessed it was well over 100 years old. But the jerk-offs at Penniryle Rural Electric would not veer even a few feet from the path they had laid out, in order to save that awesome tree that had been on my family's farm for generations.)
Just as "liberals" suffer from the mass delusion that they can somehow legislate equality, "conservatives" suffer from a similar delusion that they can somehow legislate morality. Not only are these misguided approaches to governance systematically undermining everyone's freedom, but they are also the ultimate exercise in futility. While the liberals are trying to police our every thought, the conservatives have been trying to put the lock down on our bodies for some time now. And there is no greater example of the colossal failure of right wing fascism than the so-called "War on Drugs".
I've certainly never been in the trenches like Jeff has, but I do have plenty of secondhand knowledge when it comes to the War on Drugs--my father was a police officer for over 10 years, including the Hopkinsville PD, Christian County PD and Chief Deputy of the Christian County Sheriff's Dept. He frequently did undercover work for the Narcotics division. He's told me many stories of how frustrating is was for the officers to spend weeks putting a case together against a drug dealer only for them to released the very day they are brought in. They destroyed thousands of marijuana plants every year, but they barely made a dent in Kentucky's "number one cash crop".
My friend Robert Pummer could tell you about the time when he lived in Florida and his four year old son came home one day wagging a golf ball-sized rock of crack cocaine given to him by the local crack dealer at the end of the street. Bob tried to go through legal channels, but this guy had the local cops and the DA (Janet Reno's sister) bought and paid for. They wouldn't do anything about it, so he decided if he couldn't shut the guy down he would "help out his business" instead. He printed up hundreds of flyers advertising the guy's crack house--"FOR THE BEST CRACK ROCK IN TOWN, CALL ###" and posted them all over the neighborhood. He coordinated this with a media campaign that was so pervasive that the cops finally were so embarrassed that they had to do something, and they did. But not everyone has the gonads to pull off something like that, and as they say, no good deed goes unpunished. From then on through legal harassment the local authorities made Bob's life so miserable that he ended up leaving Florida and moving back to Kentucky.
If the local grapevine is to be believed, half the judges in this state snort cocaine on a regular basis. Many foreign papers reported rumors that President Clinton also snorted on a regular basis while he was in the White House, but of course none of that ever made the American rags. And as everyone knows, G.W. Bush has never confirmed nor denied the allegations that he used to be a cokehead. No one can say for sure, but logic dictates that if he wasn't guilty, then of course he would deny those allegations soundly. But these hypocrites put tens of thousands of everyday people (including a highly disproportionate number of African-Americans) behind bars every year for the terrible crime of engaging in the same habit that they do.
The bottom line that conservatives need to realize is that no matter how despicable and immoral this society has become, the government will never be able to change that by passing more laws. They tried that in the 1920's, with alcohol Prohibition, and it failed miserably. All it did was give way to black market whiskey, and allowed gangsters like Al Capone and Bugs Moran to build huge empires. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And the same is true with drug prohibition today. Very interesting that the government needed a Constitutional Amendment to ban alcohol back then, but they later pulled off drug prohibition with nothing but a few statutes. Just goes to show how far we've strayed from the Constitution, and the restraints it rightly placed on the federal government's power.
I don't have a problem with anti-drug programs like Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign, or D.A.R.E.--though some critics argue that by introducing sheltered kids to the concept of drugs and what they can do, they are actually whetting their curiosity about them and perhaps leading them to experiment when they wouldn't have otherwise. What I personally have a problem with though is the fact that close to half of the inmates in our prisons didn't commit serious crimes--they are there for drug possession charges. Taxpayers should not be paying over $30,000 a year--far more than the cost of rehab programs that might actually be effective--because of something these people chose to put in their own bodies that didn't hurt anyone else.
So many people are used to it being this way that they don't ever think beyond the box on issues like this. Since I don't use drugs and have never really had a desire to use drugs, I feel my opinion is at least objective. This so-called war has gotten way out of hand. They have used the drug war as an excuse to obliterate the 4th Amendment--random roadblocks are unconstitutional, random searches are unconstitutional, and wire taps are unconstitutional without a court order. But they are routinely being done in the war on drugs. You should have seen the "know your customer" plan that the banks were almost forced to implement on us, keeping track of all of our financial transactions and reporting anything "suspicious or unusual" to the feds. Fortunately they weren't able to sneak that one past us without people finding out about it, and the mass outcry of the people that resulted put a swift end to it. But the worst outrage of all, badly written federal asset forfeiture laws are allowing the feds to seize innocent people's property without due process, and the burden of proof is on the victim to prove that they are innocent. How many amendments does that violate, for those of you keeping track?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not defending black market drug dealers... I want to get rid of them. And while I'm against government regulation in many areas, I think it is needed here. If contraband drugs were decriminalized, and made available by prescription only, you would see a lot of things change in our society. For one, the majority of your street thugs are just addicts, out to score some gee any way they can so they can get that fix they crave. If their drugs were legal to buy and didn't cost a small fortune, perhaps they could support their habit honestly. The black market drug dealers would go the way of the dodo, just as Capone's bootleggers have become ancient history since Prohibition ended. If drugs were available from licensed pharmacies, which were heavily regulated, and required a doctor's prescription to get and supervision to stay on them (just like any other strong prescription medicine), many of the health problems associated with them would be diminished. They wouldn't have to worry about their stuff being "laced" with lord knows what--it would come from trusted sources. Mothers having babies born addicted might still be a problem, but doctor supervision would minimize that. Most importantly, people with drug problems wouldn't have to keep it in the closet for fear of incarceration, but could actually seek genuine help. Alcoholism is recognized as a medical disease requiring treatment, why isn't drug addiction which is often far more painful given the same recognition?
At the worst, I don't think it would be a bigger problem if drugs were decriminalized than it is now. I don't think you'd see a whole lot more addicts, because of the public awareness campaigns that would grow exponentially, since much of that money now going into the drug war could be used to promote staying clean. What's more, once drugs are no longer forbidden fruit, a lot of their "bad boy/girl" appeal will be lost.
Anyhow, my main concern is medical marijuana, because I see that as one more issue where the powers that be are stifling the little guy. Despite Jeff's skepticism, it has proven medical value--it is quite effective against migraines, nausea, ms, depression, glaucoma, epilepsy and seizures, AIDS, cancer suffering, and more... yet Congress has ruled it has NO medical use. Marijuana is arguably THE least dangerous of all illegal drugs. It is in fact arguably less dangerous than alcohol, which has been legal since the end of Prohibition. Yet paradoxically, marijuana is not allowed to be prescribed for any reason, while HEROINE, one of THE MOST dangerous narcotics, is allowed to be prescribed for medical uses. California voters decided en masse that this wasn't right and passed a referendum to allow medical marijuana, but the Federal Government led by Bill "I didn't inhale" Clinton, did everything in their power to make it difficult on all Doctors and patients who participated. And now the Supreme Court has rendered one of its few unanimous decisions in recent history, ruling in favor of the big pharmaceuticals and the street gangs over the common man.
Jeff, you want to talk about side effects? What about the side effects of ridilin, which is being prescribed about to about ten times as many children as whom actually need it, because the education machine has found it easier to control them by altering their brain chemistry than by actually disciplining them? Ridilin is an amphetamine that effects the brain very similarly to cocaine. I was diagnosed "hyperactive" as a child (translation, I was smarter than the other students and bored with the slow pace of my class and the teacher couldn't deal with me), so I was prescribed ridilin back before it was the trendy thing to do that it is now. I took it for a couple of years before my parents finally realized that it was doing me more harm than good and took me off of it--thankfully before I reached puberty and the potential damage became greater.
And what about the side effects of Prozac and all the other antidepressants that so many children are addicted to today, prescribed for a similar reason. You want to tell me Marijuana is more dangerous than they are? Prove it. If you don't want to spend three days typing out all the data, then send me a link to some resources. I'm willing to cede that you may have access to data that I don't. But from what I've read so far, I am convinced there are far more dangerous drugs being prescribed in epidemic proportions today, while marijuana is being blocked for political reasons.
Jeff, you want to talk about carcinogens? What about microwave ovens, cell phones, high voltage power lines, all of the radio waves that we are being bombarded with lately. How about the saccharine, NutraSweet, and all that fluoride in the water that the American Dental Association claims fights cavities. How about those mercury-containing amalgam fillings that they are still putting in people's mouths? A century ago, before all of our modern advances, cancer wasn't that common of an illness--today you're chances of coming down with a form of it are about 1 in 3. And like Mark King said in his response, we have NO IDEA what causes it. That is another issue where countless doctors have come up with remedies that show great promise, but the powers that be discredit them and then suppress the technology because it might compete with their chosen cancer treatment, which happens to be as profitable as it is painful and physiologically destructive--chemo-therapy and radiation treatment. Talk to someone who's gone through either of those treatments, and then compare their suffering to those side-effects of marijuana you're so worried about.
So why do I believe that medical marijuana is being stifled? Because it is so easy to grow hemp, and the pharmaceutical companies can not patent it because it is a natural growing herb. The pharmaceutical companies are the ones who lobby heaviest for keeping it illegal even for medicinal purposes, along with the organized crime syndicates that profit so much from keeping drugs illegal.
Hemp is a very useful plant for other things. Prior to drug prohibition, they used it for rope. It made very strong rope. It makes very good quality paper and would save a whole lot of trees. It can be used to make clothing. It can even be used as a source of fuel--it is estimated that if one third of the nations farmland was dedicated to growing hemp for fuel, ALL of America's energy needs would be met. There is even an industrial version of the plant that has virtually no THC content--your chances of getting high from smoking hemp are about as likely as your chances of getting drunk from drinking a bottle of O'Doul's. The commonwealth of Kentucky is a very poor state. It is a rural area and there are still a lot of people here dependent on farming. Since the tobacco suits, farmers are hurting bad and need a decent money-making crop. Just legalizing industrial hemp would be an enormous economic boom for my state.
But it is forbidden for anyone to grow hemp because of... you guessed it... it might make work more difficult for law enforcement who wouldn't be able to easily distinguish between it and marijuana--can't do anything to jeopardize the war on drugs, after all. Just a piece of useless trivia for you--America's first President and founding father, George Washington made his living as a hemp farmer (bet you never learned that in your high school history class). Kind of puts things in perspective when you realize that the father of our country would be rotting in a prison cell if he were alive today, imprisoned by the very country he led a bloody war to help create.
By the way, the war on drugs is a big part of the reason why prescription drugs are so ridiculously expensive. My brother's first job was as a "drug runner" of the legal kind. It is illegal to send many pharmaceuticals by mail or UPS or FedEx... it has to be delivered by private carrier. And a few years ago my brother lucked into a job working for the Medicine Shoppe delivering shipments of medicine between the Medicine Shoppe in Hopkinsville and the one in Paducah. And he made a minimum of $50 a day for the trip, which is all the more amazing considering most of the time there were only two or three bottles in his shipment. I went with him on the trip a few times, and I couldn't help but wonder how much they had to mark up this medicine in order to pay for the delivery.
So, just to summarize, I stated that the war on drugs is insane because... (a) it isn't working, anyone can get drugs who wants them--even in prison...
(b) it is costing taxpayers billions a year, with nothing to show for their money--drug abuse is more rampant today than it was 8 years ago...
(c) it creates a caste of black market dealers who are getting rich off of others' misery...
(d) it fills up our prisons with nonviolent offenders resulting in the real criminals (rapists, child molesters, murderers, et nausium) being let back out on the streets because there isn't enough room for them...
(e) it "justifies" the constitutional rights and freedoms of everyone (not just drug offenders) being violated
(f) it is beyond hypocritical in the case of hemp/marijuana...
(g) it results in astronomical prices on other legal prescription medicines... I say decriminalize drugs and stop filling up our prisons with addicts, license and regulate drugs to the hilt, and carry on public awareness campaigns to discourage people from doing them.
No one wants to make it easier for children to get drugs, but believe it or not decriminalization would make it a lot harder. It takes the profit, and therefore the incentive, away from the street gangs. Things will go back to the way they were prior to drug prohibition, where you did have some unfortunate people who did become addicted to their medicine, but they didn't have to share a prison cell with "Bubba" for several years because of it. And they weren't out prostituting themselves or killing others in order to pay for their habit, because it was no more expensive than any other medicine. And no one was out there pushing it on small children. Think about it, who's going to make the sales pitch to the children to try drugs when the street gangs are out of business--the pharmacists? I don't think so. A Crash Course in Federalism The preamble to the Constitution states that "We the people do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States." In other words, all the power that the federal government possesses has been delegated to it by we the people; as far as the Constitution is concerned, we are the ones who set up the central state.
Those enumerated powers in Article 1, Section 8, limit the government precisely because they are enumerated -- that's all the power we the people delegated to them. And just to make sure the Congress would behave itself, our founding fathers -- most of whom trusted the state about as far as they could throw it -- reiterated their intentions in the 9th and 10th Amendments.
Amendment 9: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 10: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
(Bob Dole claimed he kept a copy of this one in his suit pocket, even though he apparently never read it while in Congress)
So to make a long story short, the Supreme Court got it bass ackwards. The right to control substances for any purpose, medical or otherwise, is nowhere given to the feds in the Constitution -- so guess what? That means it's up to the states to decide, not Congress. The Controlled Substances Act can't trump state initiatives to legalize pot because the states trump the feds wherever a governing role is not clearly given to them, and in this case none is. Instead of siding with government lawyers, the Supreme Court should have ruled that no medical exemption is needed to protect marijuana users from federal prosecution because there's no legitimate federal law under which to prosecute them.
But that's what you get when you stack the court with activist judges, "liberal" or "conservative", instead of people who interpret the Constitution based on what it actually says.
Until next time,
Elmo
PS. As for a "murder is good" law, a lot of pro-life conservatives would argue we've had that one on the books since Roe Vs. Wade. But I'm not about to go into that topic tonight!
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