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Our Government's War against its citizens who use government banned drugs "Vices are not crimes. ....Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. ----Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) Just of few of the reason that any drug prohibition law is stupid and wrong: 1. Drug prohibition laws corrupt law enforcement. Always have; always will. It’s the huge amount of money dealers can make that buys corruption. 2. Drug prohibition laws encourage corruption of law enforcement to violate innocent people to gain access to their victims’ property. If they can’t be bought by criminals, the system (itself) induces them into abuse of citizens. 3. Drug prohibition corrupts law enforcement by offering them a ready easy stream of arrest and convicts. Didn’t you just have a front page picture of a pot bust? Give me a break, why can’t our noble law enforce find the copper thieves who just robbed the company I work for? 4. Drug prohibition has made America the leading holder of its citizens in prisons. More than the former evil empire of the Soviets, more than the Chinese communists. This makes one proud to be American. We are number one in our prison population. 5. Drug prohibition corrupts the justice system because of the volume of arrest over whelms the resources of the system. Plea-bargaining has become rampant. And every time a plea is allow the truth is denied. A plea agreement is by definition a compromise. Justice should have no compromises. If justice is not for the truth, then please tell me, what is if for? Some DA’s career? Some murder’s reduced sentence? Murders, rapist, child molesters, vandals, thefts and robbers get less attention. Bigger budgets are given to where headlines can be made. 6. Drug prohibition laws pour billions and billions of dollars into the hands of organized crime. Not a good idea. 7. Drug prohibition laws have caused an every expanding military-police state in the country. Before organized crime, we did not need the FBI, the BAFA or the multitudes of SWAT teams. Remember where organized criminals get their money, banned drugs! 8. Drug prohibition laws say that the government has sovereignty over your body. And if that is so then where are the rest your individual freedoms and liberties? 9. Drug prohibition laws require the government to lie to the American people about the effect of drug use. The truth is most (by far) users of all illegal drugs only use them occasionally and are not addicted. 10. Drug prohibition laws encourages the hardening of drugs, a classic example is instead of beer being used during Prohibition pure grain alcohol was used. More bang for the illegal dollar. 11. Drug prohibition laws hurt children. Illegal drugs are more available that legal drugs to most urban and poor kids. Also the price of illegal drugs takes money away from kids’ needs. 12. Drug prohibition laws cause a general lack of respect for government. Most citizens know the government lies about drugs. Most know how the huge money involved corrupts government. 13. Drug prohibition laws cost the taxpayers of this country billions of tax dollars every year on enforcement, plus as lost of taxes on the sale of these drugs. Over 50 billion dollars per year (that’s $50,000,000,000 per year and going up)! 14. Drug prohibition laws keep those who are addicted from the medical help they need. It’s not covered on most insurance plans. 15. Drug prohibition laws grow government and its law enforcement bureaucracies. Thereby keeping resources from those things we ready need, like levees and dikes in New Orleans. 16. Drug prohibition laws violate the Declaration of Independence, that states “….We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Now how does the government go about figuring out what your or my happiness would be? How can they know? And if they do not know, how can they prevent one from his or her own devices, being whatever, as only as that person does not violate the property or body of an unwilling other? 17. Drug prohibition laws make the government arrogance. Politicians gain power through fear and wars. Drug prohibition laws are a war by the government on its citizens. 18. Drug prohibition laws are unscientific. Can you show me one scientific study done to prove that we would we worst off as a society with no drug prohibition laws? Just one. I can give you many volumes proving that we are worst off with drug prohibition laws. 19. Drug prohibition laws corrupt the press. Either because of ignorance, laziness or fear of government, the press, propagates the lies about drug prohibition. Without a truly free and diligent press our republic is doomed. 20. Drug prohibition laws are arbitrary. Legal drugs kill 100 to 1000 of times more people (per year) that illegal drugs. But the government tied (Alcohol) Prohibition and is making too much money on refined sugar (killing over 100,000 each year), not to mention tobacco. By the way, how is it the government was not smart enough (for over 100 years) to figure out that tobacco is addictive? 21. Drug prohibition laws cause most deaths by lead poisoning, than drug ODs. Gun battle between dealers is the major reason. 22. Drug prohibition laws cause more deaths because banned drugs are adulterated with God knows what, causing illness and death were legal drugs would not. Doctors have access to pharmaceutical grade drugs and suffer few effects. 23. Drug prohibition laws violate the laws of supply and demand. Economic laws are as valid and true as the laws of physics. The unfretted free market is always right. Always. When government interferes people get hurt. 24. Drug prohibition attracts youth to the forbidden fruit, who then try them. 25. Drug prohibition laws are a war on doctors and patients who need real pain medicine. Again who owns your body? The government? 26. Drug prohibition laws can never be successful. Our efficient government cannot keep drug from its prison population, much less from crossing its borders. All the government can do is ruin people’s lives. There is no hope for eradication of illegal drugs. But the truth is the government does not wish the end to illegal drugs, there is too much money and power to be had from this fake war. 27. Drug prohibition laws not only cause devastation here in this country, because of our size, these laws end up devastating other countries. Do you know what is going on in Peru, Columbia or the Golden Triangle? 28. Drug prohibition laws aloud other corrupt government agencies to cause more misery. There is more than just a little evidence that the CIA has been involved with the illegal drug industry for decades. 29. Drug prohibition and the war on citizens who use ban drugs has been going on since 1880, and expanding every year. 30. Drug prohibition triggers overseas interference with our military forces. Thus we intrude with the internal affair of foreign nations, against the advice of our founding fathers. 31. Politicians continue to use fear mongering to further drug prohibition and their careers. Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II all use the lies about banned drugs to grow the government. 32. Drug prohibition has done more to destroy the Bill of Rights that than two World Wars and several undeclared wars. The fake war on terror is making up ground on violating individual rights, 33. Drug prohibition causes more cases of HIV because of the reuse of dirty needles. Drug prohibition corrupts government from the top to the bottom. It is a government intrusion into the lives of its citizens. It is used to grow government and lessen the rights of its citizens. It declares that the government knows what is best of each and every one of its citizens, and will always act the best interest for them. The War on Drug is a lie. It is a war by the government on its citizens. The government will continue to go from one lie to the next to maintain it power. Can you tell me where the “crack babies” are? Have you ever seem the movie “Reefer Madness?” Where are the brain dead users? Sad are the tens of thousands those who use banned drugs, whose lives are destroyed not by the drugs themselves but by the government. Sadder still is the state of affairs of our country, losing our individual freedom and liberty to live one’s life as one chooses, without government interference. _____________________________________________ Bibliography 1. Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, by Dan Baum, Boston : Back Bay Books, 1997 2. Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything, Edited by Gene Healy, Cato Institute, 2004 3. Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America, by Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato Institute, 2003 4. The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs, by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine, 1972 5. Drug War Clock, http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm, 6. “Drug Wars, From both side of the battlefield, a 30-year history of America’s war on drugs—a war with no rules, no boundaries, no end,” Frontline PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/ , 2000 7. “An Open Letter to Bill Bennett” by Milton Friedman, PhD, Nobel laureate, September 7, 1989, issue of The Wall Street Journal, http://www.fff.org/freedom/0490e.asp 8. DRUG WAR FACTS, http://www.drugwarfacts.org/ 9. Multitude : war and democracy in the age of Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, New York : The Penguin Press, 2004 10. “CRITICS TAKE ISSUE WITH ANTIDRUG CAMPAIGN,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, 30 Dec 2002, Philadelphia Inquirer, http://www.mapinc.org/newscsdp/v02/n2344/a04.html 11. “Judge Calls For Easing Of Drug Penalty,” by Bill Murphy, Nov. 20, 2006, Houston Chronicle, http://www.november.org/dissentingopinions/McSpadden.html 12. “More Than Half a Million Drug War Prisoners”, by Jacob Sullum, October 28, 2005, Reason Magazine, http://www.reason.com/blog/show/111508.html 13. Ain’t nobody’s business if you do : the absurdity of consensual crimes in a free society, by Peter McWilliams, Los Angeles, Calif. : Prelude Press, 1993, http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/books/ 14. “The doctor is not a criminal: a painful drug-war case in Virginia,” by Jacob Sullum, National Review, May 23, 2005, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_9_57/ai_n15674193 15. Drug war heresies : learning from other vices, times, and places, by Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter, New York : Cambridge University Press, 2001 16. “This Is a Bust: The futility of drug interdiction - drug industry economics will always foil war on drugs,” by Richard Lowry, National Review, July 9, 2001, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_13_53/ai_76167309 17. Why our drug laws have failed and what we can do about it : a judicial indictment of the War on Drugs, by Judge James P. Gray, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2001 18. “DRCNet Online Library of Drug Policy, World’s Largest online library of drug policy,” http://www.druglibrary.org/ 19. “The Drug War’s Immorality and Abject Failure,” by Anthony Gregory, http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory121.html also search at http://www.lewrockwell.com/ “drug war” 20. Drug War Crimes, The Consequences of Prohibition, Jeffrey A. Miron, The Independent Institute, Oakland, CA http://www.independent.org/publications/books/book_summary.asp?bookID=13 21. “The American Drug War: Anatomy of a Futile and Costly Police Action,” July 2000, The Independent Institute, Oakland, CA, http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=323 22. “The Eternal Drug War,” by William Anderson, Prof. Frostburg State University, Frostburg, MD, http://www.mises.org/story/959 23. Addicted to the Drug War, by Ilana Mercer, http://www.ilanamercer.com/ 24. The Ethics of Liberty, by Murray N. Rothbard, New York University Press, 1998 25. The Tyranny of Good Intentions, How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice, by Paul C. Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, Forum, Prima Publishing, Roseville, CA, 2000 26. Against Leviathan, Government Power and a Free Society, by Robert Higgs, The Independent Institute, Oakland, CA, 2001 |