by David Jay Brown
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” —HL Mencken
The desire to recreationally ingest psychoactive drugs is deeply rooted in our biological nature. The hunger to get high is as natural as the desire to eat, sleep, and procreate.
Young children have an instinctive drive to change their ordinary state of awareness, as evidenced by the delight that they take in spinning around and around in circles to produce a state of dizziness. According to UCLA psychopharmacologist Ron Siegel, every human culture, and every class of animal, make use of certain plants for their psychoactive properties. In fact, Siegel believes that “the desire for intoxication is actually a fourth drive, as unstoppable as hunger, thirst, and sex.”
Our DNA is programmed to grow brains that crave intoxicating plants and potions. The molecular components of the intoxicants that we use fit so snugly and precisely into our neural receptors that it seems as though our brains were specifically wired to receive them. This symbiotic, co-evolutionary relationship between animal brains and plant intoxicants is as ancient as the birds and the bees. This is why the War on Drugs in America is really a war against human nature.
The War on Drugs (or rather, the War on Some Drugs, as Robert Anton Wilson more aptly puts it) is a fascist attempt to control human behavior by stigmatizing and punishing people for following one of their most natural instincts—to do what feels good. The U.S. government uses Machiavellian scare tactics to fuel the Drug War, because they know that fear is what motivates most of human behavior. The Vatican, the Mafia, street gangs and world governments all recognize this fact, and have learned how to terrorize people to their advantage.
Science fiction author Philip K. Dick summed it up best when he said, “Rome never fell.” Religious orders still emanate from the Vatican, the Military-Industrial Complex still runs the world, and most people are still wage-slaves to the ruling class. Those in control know that scaring people is the easiest way to manipulate them. The scare tactics work even better if people are duped into thinking that what the government is doing is actually for their own good.
The Drug War is an organized attempt to scapegoat and persecute racial minorities, inner-city youth, lower economic classes, left-wing intellectuals, and rebellious government protesters—similar to how the Nazis persecuted the Jews, or the Witch Hunts persecuted pagan women. The Drug War is primarily waged upon low-income minorities who use marijuana.
|Superintendent of the New Jersey State Police reveals
the racist nature of the war on some drugs.
The parallels between the Jewish Holocaust and the American War on Drugs are particularly striking. In Nazi Germany, one by one, every activity in which Jews exclusively took part was made illegal—such as making or selling kosher food. The Nuremberg Act of 1933 was a sweeping set of laws targeted against the Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. These “undesirables” were carted off because they broke laws targeted against them—just as drug users, and those who supply them, are thrown in prison today.
When the federal government says that America has a 70 million person drug abuse problem, they’re trying to make it sound like the streets are littered with heroin addicts. But what that figure really means is 65 million people have used marijuana, and 5 million have used heroin or cocaine. They don’t count alcohol and tobacco (which kill far more people every year than all illegal drugs combined) because they are legal, i.e. the drugs that they peddle.
The feds are talking about an illegal drug “problem”. They use the number of people who have smoked the giggly cannabis flowers to beef up their statistics, so it seems like America is in the midst of a terrible heroin and crack epidemic, when its not. To the U.S. government, all use of illegal substances is defined as abuse.
The entire Drug War is founded on unconstitutional principles. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that allows for the government to imprison people for using certain substances under the pretence that it is to save them from harming themselves. In the early part of the last century the government still understood this. That is why they had to actually add amendments onto the constitution to initiate and repeal alcohol prohibition.
Many historians speculate that marijuana prohibition began because hemp products were seen as competitive to Du Pont financially, or because it was an easy way to scapegoat Mexican immigrants. The hilarious propaganda film that the government made in the Thirties—Reefer Madness—leads me to believe that, even then, they were also aware of the association between marijuana use and youth rebellion.
Whatever the reason why they made marijuana illegal, how the government did it is even more unbelievable. By passing the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937 they required that anyone who bought or sold marijuana had to purchase tax stamps—yet the government didn’t issue any marijuana tax stamps, so there was no way to obtain them. If you had marijuana and no tax stamps, then you were under arrest. Can you believe that people actually fell for this? The Marijuana Tax Act was eventually ruled unconstitutional, however, that didn’t stop the determined drug warriors.
In 1972, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, he tried to figure out how to reduce the number of Vietnam war demonstrators that were giving him such a headache. He made the connection that many demonstrators were getting high on pot, and had a brainstorm—why not simply arrest them for their marijuana use?
Even though the medical research team, that he himself had appointed, recommended that they decriminalize cannabis, Nixon dramatically increased the restrictions on it (through some magical revision of the inter-state commerce-clause, that makes even less logical sense that the unconstitutional Marijuana Tax act). With the exception of Jimmy Carter, every president since Nixon has steadily escalated the Drug War.
By every measure the 28-year Drug War has failed to slow down drug use or the availability of drugs. More people are currently in American prisons than ever before in U.S. history, and more than half of the prisoners are there for non-violent drug offences, yet illegal drugs are more available than ever before. Police corruption and gang violence are currently reaching record highs.
Our hard-earned constitutional rights to privacy are gradually being taken away, and our increasingly-Orwellian government is spying on us more and more. The Bill of Rightshas become virtually worthless. Police routinely storm into people’s homes, wrestle the occupants to the ground at gunpoint, and search their homes for drugs. Many innocent people have been killed in this process. According to Steve Dasbach, the Libertarian party’s national director, 140,000 people have died because of the Drug War. In addition, countless lives have been ruined and many families destroyed.
The federal government is currently spending over twenty billion dollars a year on the Drug War, and that doesn’t include state budgets, which are billions more. While Congress quibbles over a few million dollars for Medicare and Medicaid, no one on Capital Hill even questions the staggering Drug War budget. Remember, every dollar spent on the Drug War is going into somebody’s bank account.
The Drug War is also preventing many students from getting an education. The 1998 Higher Education Act disqualifies young people for financial aid for college if they’ve ever been convicted of marijuana possession—but not if they’ve been convicted of rape, robbery or manslaughter.
Now, if the government was truly interested in helping young people with drug problems, one would think that they would encourage them to get an education, rather than prevent it. This is similar to the way that the Nazis tried to prevent the Jews from gaining power in Germany. I suspect that the government is afraid of educated pot smokers. What other explanation could there be? Rapists and even murders can still get financial aid for college.
Perhaps the most insidious of Washington’s Drug War crimes is their attempt to take away our right to free speech. The so-called “Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act”, sponsored by senators