If you are concerned at all about liberty, the economy, the Constitution and the power of the Federal Government – you cannot ignore our longest and most costly war – the War on Drugs.
But no matter how long it lasts, how much is costs, how many lives are disrupted, and how much it fails – the war rages on.
Why? Well, because Federal “authorities†don’t care what your local laws are, don’t care what your personal choices are and don’t care what reason you have for your choices.
All they care about is their own power. Period.
Joel Turtel takes note of this in his recent article, “The Sick and Futile War on Drugs.” Here’s an excerpt:
The fact that the head of our government’s War on Drugs is called the drug “czar†reveals a great deal about the sick “war†on drugs. Czars were the absolute rulers of Russia for a thousand years. They were totalitarian dictators, above the law.
Unfortunately, our drug czar is too close a relative-in-spirit to the Russian czars. He wages war against the American people’s basic liberties, their right of free choice. Drug laws promote arbitrary confiscation of peoples’ cars, homes, and bank accounts. Drug laws condone violent, middle-of-the-night raids on people’s homes by SWAT teams who break down doors without warrants, and sometimes kill innocent people. Drug laws let airport police conduct “cavity†searches on innocent travelers’ bodies, and searches of their luggage. They allow arbitrary police searches of cars on our highways, without warrants or probable cause. Drug laws condone long prison terms for millions of Americans whose only “crime†was simple possession of a single joint of marijuana.
The Drug War knows no bounds. The Tenth Amendment clearly limits the federal government to powers that are specifically listed in the Constitution:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.â€
A simple reading of the Constitution would make it quite clear that there’s nothing that empowers the federal government to engage in the criminalization of drugs – in fact, it says nothing about drugs at all.
In fact, the only crimes that are considered federal crimes by the Constitution are – treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. Nothing more. Nothing less.
But yet, national laws, including those that are definitively prohibited by the Tenth Amendment, are continually held to be superior to state and local laws; all to the detriment of your personal liberty.
In a free country, you would be the owner of your own body, and you could decided if you wanted to take marijuana, or prozac, or no drugs at all. Again, Joel Turtel hits the nail on the head:
In a free country, along with freedom comes risk and personal responsibility. If you harm yourself with drugs, alcohol, or fatty hamburgers, you will pay the consequences. That is part of what freedom means. You reap what you sow. Risk is part of liberty, and risk is part of life. You cannot legislate away personal risk. To imprison people for the alleged “crime†of doing harm to their own bodies is morally obscene.
To do that takes away our most precious possession, our freedom. If every person in this country wanted to fry their brains with drugs if they became legal, that is their right, the right of free men and women, of free citizens. No drug “czar,†no self-righteous legislators, no “moral majority†has the right to abrogate our liberty because some stupid people harm themselves with drugs.
And that’s the truth.