War On Drugs?

America has overused the war metaphor to the point that it has become meaningless. We have a war on poverty, obesity, crime, waste, disease, terror, ALS, cancer, graffiti, graft and gangs to name a few. If one were to simply follow a list generated by alphabetically adding a letter to "War on (A to Z) where each represents a letter, a whole list of "wars" can be obtained. What is the purpose of this other than to give the illusion that massive armies of do-good intended government agencies are looking out for the interest of the average person and are working, just as a soldier, to preserve a safe and secure life for each and every citizen.

What a crock. There is no real war on crime or waste. There isn't a war on cancer and wars on gangs are nothing more than the gang of police fighting the gang of some neighborhood organization dealing with distribution of some substance about which there is another war.

But I'm going to focus on the War on Drugs for a couple of reasons. First, it is a real war with deployment of military people to stop the manufacture and distribution of several types of drugs entering America by a number of means. (By the way, I have read most of the Iran/Contra hearing documents and can say that members of our government became drug traders to finance all kinds of operations. Do you wonder how this could have happened? Well, read the transcripts which are available on line and your eyes will open. Did you know that the cocaine and other drugs used in the operations to fund the contras were brought in through one major point? That point was the airport in Little Rock, AK. The governor at the time was one William Jefferson Clinton who interestingly enough became president of the US. Possibly he carried on the tradition of the person he was named after. Thomas Jefferson grew hemp on his plantation. Hemp was used for ropes of all kinds but were especially used by naval ships.) So we have government agents of different sorts bringing in drugs to America while Americans a being told that we are winning the War on Drugs. Well, winning may be correct. We got rid of foreign drug dealers so that our own dealers could reap the huge profits from the drug trade.

There are people who believe that all potential and real intoxicants should be controlled by the government. Even those who are for decriminalization want the government to control one or more of the substances and tax them as a source of revenue. Where in our constitution is this idea founded? Well, the commerce clause has been so widely interpreted that we have had many basically unconstitutional laws passed based on the commerce clause.

My position mirrors that of Sen. Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley. Both questioned the right of government to have any say or control over any drug of substance other than to guarantee safety and purity of product. In other words, if one were selling tincture of opium in a pharmacy, the government should ensure that the tincture was really opium. For other drugs, things are somewhat different.

Marijuana is a plant that can be grown by anyone. It has psychotropic effects and, as an intoxicant, is quite safe. Of course, long term or chronic use can lead to medical problems just like tobacco but one must remember that a cigarette is not a pure tobacco product. All kinds of things are added to the product to make it "taste" better and to increase addiction.

I could go through the moralistic arguments ad nauseum. Every religion has restrictions against self intoxication but none are more logical than the others. So I am going to simply ignore them and deal with the nature of living on planet earth.

We live on the planet under any of a number of different political systems. Each of these systems is designed to control behavior. The only real exception is America where the overriding document is one which protects citizens from government excesses. While this document has been perverted into something almost unrecognizable today, the intent was clear: government should be controlled, not the people living under that system. Too bad we have forgotten this.

Outside of legal issues and enacted laws, there is nothing that states that the government can control what a person ingests. In simple terms, the constitution never mentioned it. So if you want to imbibe, you can but you may suffer from being ostracized if you drink too much. But there was no inherent meaning or intent of the founding fathers to give government control over substances of intoxication. The Eighteenth Amendment was basically unconstitutional because it represent a sumptuary law. Sumptuary laws are those which seek to control the ingestion of substances. Examples of these are alcohol restriction on Sundays in certain states in the South known as the Bible belt, bars closing at certain hours, prohibition (This was not only tried in America but in many other countries including Canada, Russia, England and others. Today, alcohol is totally banned in many countries that follow Islamic law.) and laws covering other drugs. But there is nothing inherent in life, living, aging or dying which states or implies in an a priori way that drugs are bad and should be controlled.

The constitution does not indicate that drugs should be controlled any more than it suggest that guns should be controlled. We are living under a government imposed prohibition based on a set of assumptions that have no reality. We know that prohibitions lead to law breaking and we know that excessive taxation to control usage leads to tax evasion. Our republic has become no better than the most stringent Islamic state in the numbers of laws passed and the enforcement of drug usage. We have been lied to about the "potential" effects of letting people be free and instead have learned to live under a system of repression based on drug ingestion that is as draconian as anything Stalin could have dreamed up.

We are either free or we are not. In the case of drugs, we are not free and we have come to live under this lie as if it is freedom.

FB