Posted on 01/02/2004 10:07:44 AM PST by Fred Kevlin
December is the season for giving, and no one gives more generous gifts than the U.S. Congress. Of course, Congress has the advantage of doing its last-minute holiday shopping at someone else’s expense, namely yours and mine.
For example, on Dec. 8, the House of Representatives passed a bill that gives the White House drug czar’s office $145,000,000 of taxpayer money to run anti-marijuana propaganda ads. My personal favorite in this genre is a television ad in which police rough up a high school student when arresting him in the school’s marijuana-smoke-filled bathroom. This is followed by a caption reading, “Marijuana: Harmless? Think again.” (And no, I did not make that up).
Yet this bill contains something far more obnoxious than pots of money for another round of clueless anti-marijuana propaganda. A section of the bill prohibits any local transit system that receives federal funding from running privately funded ads that call for marijuana policy reform.
In other words, at the same time that the federal government is forcing you to spend your money to publicize its willingness to engage in storm trooper tactics to persecute the tens of millions Americans who smoke or have smoked marijuana, it is trying to prohibit you from having the freedom to spend your money to protest these same tactics.
If this bill becomes law, it will be illegal to buy advertising space on a city bus or in a subway station, advocating that doctors be given the right to prescribe marijuana as a painkiller for their terminally ill patients.
Two words that are thrown around far too loosely in political debate are “fascism” and “unconstitutional.” Nevertheless, this sort of thing has a distinctly fascist tinge. And if the First Amendment means anything, it ought to mean that the government cannot take away the right of citizens to engage in public political protest.
Anyone who has doubts that the drug war is wrong ought to consider what it tells us when our federal government tries to make it illegal to protest that war. Fence sitters might also want to view a the video from the surveillance tape at a Goose Creek, S.C., high school, which on Nov. 5 was raided by police looking for drugs. (A photo from the tape can be viewed at www.mpp.org).
After a search, the police found no drugs, but they did terrorize more than 100 students (two-thirds of whom were black, even though less than 25 percent of the school’s student body is black). With guns pointed at their heads, students were handcuffed and forced to lie on the floor.
One student said he assumed the police “were trying to protect us, that it was like Columbine, that somebody got in the school that was crazy or dangerous. But then a police officer pointed a gun at me. It was really scary.”
What’s really scary is that incidents such as this seem to stir so little outrage. What level of government persecution will put a dent in public apathy about the madness that is the war on drugs?
If the police at the Goose Creek high school had inadvertently shot a student or two in their zealous search for marijuana cigarettes, would that be enough to distract people from holiday shopping and channel surfing? Or would such an incident be shrugged off as another regrettable accident of the sort that is inevitable in wartime? Take a look at that photograph, and consider: This is your government on drugs.
Nope, that couldn't be it....hmmmm. Maybe it's just pent up frustration.
You're getting closer...if you had left off the "but you" you would have hit the nail square on the head.
I think you mean for keeping the crap thread bumped. You're welcome.
You can't avoid that...just an ingrained talent. You're funny as hades.
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