cannabisnews.com: How I Became a Dove 





How I Became a Dove 
Posted by FoM on July 13, 2000 at 10:07:13 PT
By Chris Burlingame
Source: Spintech Magazine
During the 1996 presidential campaign, Sen. Robert Dole, that geriatric wunderkind, labeled President William Jefferson Clinton "soft on drugs." He used the recent spike in marijuana usage among teens to damn Clinton as a reluctant prosecutor of this "necessary" war. How, he asked, could voters trust someone who claimed to have smoked, but not inhaled, marijuana to prosecute said war? 
How could someone who is the embodiment of the '60s draft-dodging pothead credibly tell the nations youths (pronounced "utes") to stay away from the demon weed (among other "gateway" drugs)? The implication was that a vote for Bill Clinton was a vote for libertine illicit consumption. I wish Bob Dole were right. Unfortunately, the truth is that the Clinton administration has relentlessly prosecuted the war on drugs to great public fanfare (and my heretofore mostly private chagrin). Reviewing the consequences of fighting this war, the fair observer is hard-pressed to reach a conclusion other than the same one Walter Cronkite reached when he visited Vietnam in the late 1960s: This war is unwinnable and should be ended. Make no mistake: I am not an antigovernment libertarian who believes one has a constitutional right, if he so desires, to get as high as a kite. And I would certainly prefer to live in a neighborhood where drugs are not readily available. But my general approach to drugs vis a vi the freedom question has come to be tethered to the famous line that your right to swing your arms freely stops at the tip of my nose. I am also increasingly deeply troubled by the assault on civil liberties and our health that is being waged from the White House and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Lies, Damn Lies: Dr. Samuel Johnson famously said that in war the first casualty is the truth. The drug war is no exception. Barry McCaffrey, the General Westmoreland of the war on weed, is most responsible for the campaign of misrepresentation in furthering his propaganda campaign against drugs. For example, Gen. McCaffrey did really say, with a straight face, "there is not a shred of scientific evidence that shows that smoked marijuana is useful or needed. This is not medicine. This is a cruel hoax." This could be the most ridiculous scientific quote since Gustave Le Bon wrote in 1879: Women represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. ... Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely. (Gen. McCaffrey also farcically declared that the Netherlands, where drug laws are more permissive, has a murder rate double that of the United States.) As Jacob Sullum has written in Reason magazine, McCaffrey asked the very credible Institute of Medicine to conduct a study on the medicinal benefits of marijuana. The results directly contradicted the two significant arguments that McCaffrey has been propagating since becoming drug czar: that marijuana has no medicinal value and that marijuana use as medicine indirectly leads to marijuana use by healthy people. His response? Ignore the results. Of course it one thing to dig up a few embarrassing quotes from public figures who mouth millions of words to the press every year. It is another to look at actual performance on the job. What has McCaffrey done as drug czar to fight the war on drugs? In a word: He has propagandized it. Thanks to reporting by Salon.com, we know that the Office of National Drug Control Policy has used its influence to put an anti-drug message into popular television shows. They have also convinced magazine editors to write anti-drug articles in exchange for not having to sell ad space to the ONDCP for a smaller price than normal. This includes such midlist magazines as U.S. News and World Report and The Sporting News. But McCaffrey's war isn't all talk. When looking at the drug war, it's also important to look at the case of Peter McWilliams, a libertarian writer who recently died because of the war on marijuana and the subject of this issue of Spintech. Because McWilliams was not one to go along quietly with the government's war, he was relentlessly prosecuted by former California attorney general and gubernatorial loser Dan Lungren for growing marijuana to shut him up. Then, when Lungren lost the election, the case was prosecuted in federal court over the objections of the will of the people of California, who voted for a referendum liberalizing medicinal marijuana. To understand why the government would want to silence McWilliams, one need only look at an article he wrote for Playboy Magazine at the end of last year. McWilliams had the gall to point out that McCaffrey's move to allow the drug Marinol to be available through prescriptions would do the opposite of what he planned. Since Marinol is synthetic THC ("the most psychoactive of marijuana's many cannaboids"), McCaffrey thought he could continue fighting marijuana as a controlled substance, while conceding that there is a medically useful element of marijuana that is available as a safer drug. McWilliams wasn't having any. He pointed out that use of Marinol and marijuana are indistinguishable in all legally recognized urinalyses. Therefore, a frequent drug user could get a prescription to Marinol and fail a drug test without any repercussions. It's easy to see why the government would want to kill this guy. It's unfortunate that they succeeded. The other casualties, beside the truth, that need to be examined in the war on drugs are civil liberties. "You Had the Right." In the relentless pursuit of purified bodily fluids, people are being convicted every day because of testimony from unnamed snitches while property is being confiscated and lives are being ruined. Writing in The Washington Post, columnist William Raspberry recently told the story of a woman who was convicted of drug trafficking not because she was a drug dealer, but because she had the misfortune of giving birth to one. Really. Some local prosecutor thought that arresting and trying a guy's mother would force him to turn himself in. It didn't work and now Mom is a convict. This case is not an isolated incident. A Supreme Court decision in 1983 (Illinois v. Gates) authorized the use of anonymous snitches as witnesses. Enter the drug war. Many arrestees, in order to receive a lighter sentence, are pressured to give the names of anyone they might have met. The snitches don't even have to testify against the person they named. If a District Attorney tells a jury that someone is a drug dealer, based on anonymous sources only, that person is still likely to be convicted by a jury made up of middle-class people who don't want any hint of drugs in their neighborhood. The constitutionally protected right to face one’s accusers in court has been taken away. Not that anyone would notice. We are fighting a war, aren't we? An article in Harper's Magazine appropriately titled "This is Your Bill of Rights, On Drugs," detailed how many local police forces are using favorable seizure laws to make improvements and increase their budget because states are telling them to seize equipment, rather than budget for it. Property can be seized because of suspicion. Due process and probable cause are unheard of. Even people who have been acquitted have often found it impossible to get their stuff back. And, just for the fun of it, let’s take a look at racial profiling as well. Motorists, almost exclusively minorities, are being stopped en masse because they fit a certain stereotype and this is justified as necessary to stop drug commerce. Of course, many goo-goo types still insist that it's necessary to fight this war on drugs with renewed vigor. Well, the Constitution was written long before Nancy Reagan told us to "Just Say No" and I find it difficult to understand why a lower drug rate and political correctness enforced at the point of a bayonet are preferable to perpetuating the very freedoms that were drafted in the late 18th century by some people who knew a thing or two about freedom and repressive governments. No, I’m afraid Bob Dole was wrong about Bill Clinton being soft on drugs. The opposite is true. Bill Clinton and Barry McCaffrey have presided over a war that is dishonest, at best, with the electorate about the effects of certain drugs. This same war is compromising the very freedoms we take for granted. People are losing the right to face their accusers in court and losing the right to be secure in their possessions. And the use of snitches has made it so that having any unsavory acquaintances is the equivalent to being a drug dealer. McCaffrey is hailed as a hero by many in the media (usually the same ones he is guilty of manipulating and buying off) for whatever reason. "Imbalanced tyrant” might me a more accurate description. One of the non-sycophants, Andrew Sullivan, wrote in The New Republic, "Because the president can't bring himself to be honest about his own past inhalations, the rest of us have to put up with an authoritarian fanatic in the White House's drug office in order to neutralize the social right." It’s kind of an anticlimax but I have to wonder where we'd be if Bill Clinton would have just inhaled. E-mail: chris americanpartisan.comChris Burlingame is a regular contributor to Spintech Magazine.Direct Link To Article:http://www.spintechmag.com/0007/cb0700.htmPublished: July 12, 2000Copyright 2000 Chris BurlingameRelated Articles & Web Sites:For A Hereohttp://www.forahero.com/McWilliams.comhttp://www.mcwilliams.com/All My Books On Line For Freehttp://www.mcwilliams.com/books/books/Peter McWilliams Tribute Pagehttp://homepages.go.com/~marthag1/Peterm.htmPictures Of Peter McWilliams 1950 - 2000http://mischiefmarketing.com/mcwilliams/pics_01.html Mission Accomplishedhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6380.shtmlThe Life and Death of Peter McWilliamshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6340.shtmlDrug War Hypocrites Kill A Troublesome Authorhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6167.shtml
Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help




Post Comment


Name: Optional Password: 
E-Mail: 
Subject: 
Comment: [Please refrain from using profanity in your message]
Link URL: 
Link Title: