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| The War On Drugs Is An Infringement on Liberty |
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Posted by FoM on October 27, 2000 at 20:03:16 PT By Donovan Bramwell Source: Idaho State Journal 
There are lots of good reasons for ending prohibition of illicit drugs. Constraints of time and space do not allow me to list them all here, or to offer more than a little explanation. What I do offer in this article is a quick list of good reasons, in no particular sequence, except that I save the most important one for last. I focus on marijuana, but what I say applies mostly to other illicit drugs as well. Here's the list: Prohibition creates more problems than it solves. This was true during the Prohibition Era (the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s), and it is true of the modern prohibition of marijuana and other illicit drugs today. Prohibition creates victimless crimes. In and of itself, drug use is innocent-it does not represent an act of aggression or fraud against another person. Prohibition does not work. People continue to use and sell illicit drugs on the black market. The availability of drugs is mostly unaffected by prohibition. Prohibition succeeds only in artificially raising the market price, thus distorting normal market forces. Prohibition is a waste of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. Prohibition makes criminals rich. Prohibition fosters violence in the streets as black market drug suppliers fight over turf (markets made artificially lucrative by prohibition). Prohibition causes juveniles to be excessively vulnerable to unwise drug use. Black market drug dealers don't ask for identification to verify age. Prohibition moves the illegal drug market toward drugs that are more concentrated and more dangerous, that is, drugs that are easier to hide. For example, from marijuana to crack and meth. Prohibition destroys families (in ways far more harmful and far more serious than drug use does). A pot-smoking mom gets a 10-year sentence, and her two young children end up in foster homes. Prohibition makes drug overdoses and poisonings more likely to occur. Black market drug dealers have no incentive to truthfully label their products as to content, concentration, purity, or dosage. Victims have no legal recourse without exposing themselves to prosecution. Prohibition teaches disrespect for the law and mistrust of the government. Prohibition prevents use of marijuana in its traditional, beneficial applications as an herbal remedy for treating insomnia, drug addiction, appetite loss, depression, and other maladies, and in its modern application as a treatment for the side effects of chemotherapy in cancer patients. The same kind of thing is true of some other naturally derived and chemically derived drugs that are currently illegal. (Meanwhile, big corporations get rich marketing their patented, acceptable alternatives.) Prohibition creates an agenda for interfering wrongly and unnecessarily in the affairs of other nations, for example, sending military equipment and advisors to Columbia. Prohibition wastes the resources (money, time, and space) of the police, the courts, and the prisons-resources that would be better devoted to preventing and punishing real crimes that have real victims. Prohibition represents America's most offensive human rights violation. Of all the nations of the world, the U.S. has the highest percentage of its people in prison, largely because of the government's so-called War on Drugs. (It's really a war on an unpopular group of citizens.) Prohibition creates an opportunity for government agents to use excessive force and violence in their enforcement efforts. That's the end of my list. Notice, please, that I am not advocating unbridled or irresponsible drug use. Drugs should not be made freely and legally available to minors. It should not be legal for people to drive or operate machinery while intoxicated. People should not be absolved of responsibility for their conduct while intoxicated, or for any adverse consequences of their drug use. I am simply advocating that people be given freedom and responsibility. I'm advocating that we end the government's so-called War on Drugs. I'm advocating that we make responsible drug use legal, and I'm saying that we should start with marijuana. Donovan Bramwell, a Lewisville farmer who works part-time as a technical writer, is the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Congress, Idaho District 2, running against Republican Mike Simpson and Democrat Craig Williams. You can visit his web site at: http://www.lp-idaho.org/campaigns/bramwell/index.htm Source: Idaho State Journal (ID) CannabisNews Justice Archives: Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help |
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Comment #10 posted by rash on October 28, 2000 at 16:48:01 PT:
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| Comment #9 posted by Lehder on October 28, 2000 at 13:51:01 PT |
| Comment #8 posted by Lehder on October 28, 2000 at 13:46:34 PT |
I wish to emphasize that it is not retribution or vengeance that I am promoting here, although it is often difficult not to wish the very worst for those who have so egregiously, knowingly and willfully diminished our culture, our reputation as a nation, and every one of our lives. I seek prosecution of drug warriors as a preventive measure so that we will never again, as we have for so long, been the victims of ruthless politicians who find it expedient not to lead or enlighten their constituencies, but to manipulate them with ignorant slogans and appeals to thoughtless bigotry. For this behaviour is not leadership. It is an abuse of the public trust that destroys lives, promotes crime, abuses children, makes a mockery of science and reason, and humiliates us in the eyes of the world.
Joe McCarthy fell from power as soon as he appeared on television. After destroying thousands of good people's lives with his vile bigotry, people quickly perceived that his intemperate persecutions were motivated solely by the needs of his own twisted ego and had no proper basis in reality.
There is a good book ( by Hannah Arendt! ), whose title I forget now, which has a chapter called "Lying in Politics". It discusses how time after time throughout our involvement in Vietnam, presidents and congressmen utterly ignored the expert advice of the CIA and the conclusions of many well researched academic studies by both private groups and by government. When Johnson was informed by people who spent their careers studying Vietnam and communism that the war there was unwinnable and that the "domino theory" was nonsense, he proceeded to expand our committment there. When Nixon was told by the CIA that North Vietnam was not sufficiently industrialized to be much affected by bombing, he proceeded with massive daily bombing. Read Hannah's chapter - you'll be amazed by our leaders' contempt for those wiser and more learned than they. And having learned after McCarthy's fall how to control the power of television to manipulate public opinion, our errant leaders brought us a decade long war that ended in our humiliating defeat by a primitive army that was better motivated and better commanded than our own. All the while, every day, the leaders told us on TV the exact opposite of what their own experts - the people whose tax-supported business it is to know - told them. Even secretary of defense McNamara, 30 years after the fact, admitted that he himself knew better yet said nothing. This is not leadership. It is crime.
These pointless wars with invented enemies have now reached the absurd stage of imprisoning more than a million innocent American citizens. This is crime on the grandest scale. If we simply legalize drugs without clearly demonstrating the criminal nature of the war on drugs, then we will have gained very little. Because the government will quickly invent a new "enemy", will identify some new group of harmless people to villify and decimate for an easy profit. This must stop; it's too expensive, too evil, and it Wastes My Time and yours.
Trials for drug warriors would:
1) Send a clear message to politicians that their lofty, conceited sense of a personal morality superior to our own does not qualify them to overide the Constitution or the rights or voice of citizens.
2) Send a clear message to politicians that their lofty, conceited sense of personal character attributes superior to our own does not make them more expert in academic matters than the academicians.
And most importantly,
3) Protracted prosecutions heavily covered by TV would educate the populace as to how they can be victimized and manipulated by the expediences of criminal, ignorant politicians.
Until Americans learn to recognize a totalitarian movement, whatever noble cause or name it may take, for what it is at the outset and are intellectually equipped as a democracy to quash it, we will be victim again and again to similar hateful and destructive movements that will inevitably rise from the fears and unthinking prejudices of unfit leaders.
In short, we need these trials - for the children. Because this war will not be truly won until we, like the Jews, can say "Never Again".
| Comment #7 posted by ras james on October 28, 2000 at 13:00:12 PT |
| Comment #6 posted by freedom fighter on October 28, 2000 at 11:54:43 PT |
| Comment #5 posted by Thomas on October 28, 2000 at 10:05:53 PT |
| Comment #4 posted by Thomas on October 28, 2000 at 09:59:43 PT |
| Comment #3 posted by Lehder on October 28, 2000 at 07:29:06 PT |
I think it very important that trials of the drug warriors be held and appropriate punishments for their crimes be imposed. In the last half century we have seen at least three times how the scourge of bigotry destroys the lives of children and families and how it devastates society. We began mid-century with McCarthyism, graduated to the war in Vietnam and have now been carrying on the drug war at a high intensity for decades. Each time, Americans have been required by government to swear allegiance to an invented, imaginary enemy. Each time, we have been required, on pain of social condemnation and worse, to give up our time, money and personal security to conform to the government's narrowly defined concept of "politically correct". So simply legalizing drugs and leaving a large repressive bureaucracy and civil war apparatus intact will only allow the government to discover of some new "enemy" that "devastates society" or "threatens our way of life". And we will all be required, in order to be "good Americans", to waste our lives and our money, for the pleasure and profit of government and its army of ignorant bureaucrats. Once again, society will be turned upside down by the din of constant, insipid propaganda as all of us, in fear of our own rulers, swear allegiance to the government's new war against its new "enemy". This must be prevented - for the children. I don't want another generation of children wasted by some expensive and illegal government war against a contrived enemy. I don't want kids forcibly subjected to the blight of sloganeering warpigs in the classroom when they should be learning the marvels of our true culture.
We need trials of drug warriors for crimes against the Constitution. The principle that "following orders" is no excuse was established at Nuremberg. We need to establish the principle in America that, with all the world's resources at our disposal, when the government's own think tanks advise that a course of action is unwise or destructive, then Ignorance is no excuse.
That is what I want to see in order to secure our future against the devastations of ignorance and bigotry. If we can imprison a few tens of thousands of lying drug warriors to make an example of them, to send a clear message to government that the Constitution must be respected by all, then the lives of tens of millions of children whom we save from the scourge of ignorance and the devastations of institutionalized bigotry will have been worth the riddance of a few scumbag enemies of civilization.
So wise up, drug warriors. You're wanted for questioning. And you had better have your answers ready because I'm coming. Simply legalizing drugs, or allowing some large corporation to sell seedless dope, or replacing imprisonment with mandatory "treatment" are not going to satisfy me. They're too little, too late. I want full legalization of all natural products, a sharp reduction in the size and budget of government, an end to government forays into morality, an end to presidents who pray for America but have no intelligence or honor, a release of drug war POWs, reparations for drug war victims, prosecution of drug warriors, and security from government tyranny. I demand Justice.
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Comment #2 posted by Ed Carpenter on October 28, 2000 at 06:49:35 PT:
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Why can the government now prohibit things at will? What happened? What has changed? Get the answer to these and many other questions by getting the Constitution back into government.
When people are elected, they start off by swearing to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Then they go about trashing it. The Bill of Rights is a joke.
Demand that the Constitution and Bill of Rights be mandatory teaching at all government (public) schools. It isn't mandatory teaching now; it hasn't been for years, and look where this country is as a result.
I can remember when the words "under God" were inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance between "one nation" and "indivisible." That was back in the days when the Lord's prayer was also acceptable, but things change.
Also in the pledge, are the words "and to the Republic for which it stands." Can anybody tell me anything about the Republic? Any volunteers? I didn't think so but don't worry, you're not alone. The students have no clue either.
I teach in a public school, and
| Comment #1 posted by Doctor Dave on October 27, 2000 at 23:59:32 PT |
It is about the clear failure of Prohibition on every front: US-financed foreign civil war / farmer invasion
neglect of medical needs of US citizens
criminalization of consensual acts
wasteful spending of $30 billion / year
supression of needed research about medical properties of various substances
The poor brown and black community can't afford to buy political campaigns of rich white lawmakers, so instead the incomes of the rest of the population pays an industry for their oppression.
Think about it.
Doctor Dave
"A nation that makes war on huge numbers of its own people can never truly be free."
http://www.lp.org
http://www.marijuananews.com
http://www.kubby.com
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