I’m extremely conservative. I’m so conservative that I’d like to keep my liberties, the ones granted by God and guaranteed by the US constitution. I’d like to be able to move my money around in cash without reporting it to the Internal Revenue Service. I’d like to open the newspaper and not see editorials demanding another gun ban because a pair of crackheads shot it out with each other over drug turf the other day. I’d like to live in a country where you don’t have to get urine tested everywhere you work. Of course, you don’t have to have the test done, and you don’t have to have a job, either . . .
We should have learned from alcohol prohibition that the drug laws don’t make less addicts, they make more criminals. We should have learned that idiots machine gunning each other over contraband is the norm, not the exception. We should have learned that organized crime is not afraid of being murdered by rival gangs, so prison isn’t a much more serious threat. We should have looked at Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who I consider the absolute worst president this country ever had, and we should have seen how he started the drug prohibition and used it as one of the many federal overreaches he made.
If you’re wondering, no, I don’t get high. In fact, I spent eight years as an EMT doing CPR on people who overdosed. My grandmother died from alcohlism. My brother died at age 38 after he had three back surgeries, got addicted to Vicodin, and was put on methadone. The methadone reacted to the non narcotic pain killers he was given and killed him. He was also broke at the time.
We did reduce the use of recreational drugs, but I think it happened mostly because of a concerted campaign to make it socially unacceptable. The prisons are still full of addicts and of people who sold a product other people wanted to buy.
So now the price of a $1500 rifle is over twenty grand, and the semi automatic version of it is banned in a half a dozen states because of the drug war. And if you get caught with the twenty thousand dollars in cash that you might need to legally purchase one of those $1500 rifles, you better pray that your money came straight from the bank so it hasn’t got drug residue on it. Because if it does, or if you failed to report the withdrawal, your money is confiscated.
That, I think, is a far worse assault on liberty than a dope head next door.
Recreational drug use is a venture into stupidity, not conservatism.