It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong (22 page)

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And Lastly, the Drugs . . .

Drug prohibition is a failed public policy that must be abolished in the United States. Drugs continue to be available (whether you are looking for them or not) on street corners and in schools across America. Surveys taken of high school seniors, year after year, reveal that 85 percent say that marijuana is “easy to get.”
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You can smell pot at concert venues in San Francisco. You can witness cocaine residue in bathrooms in New York City restaurants. You can see the explosions of meth labs in small Nebraska towns. It is no secret. Drugs (and their dealers) flourish just fine under the “watchful” eye of the United States government.

No drug in this country was illegal prior to 1914. Hemp is the product from which marijuana is made. In fact, for much of our history, school textbooks were made from hemp! Even many of the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson and Washington, grew hemp. So why then did drugs go from being a major lawful industry to the scourge of society? Early in the twentieth century, a number of business tycoons saw the hemp industry as a major competitor, and thus a barrier to growth (hemp was an alternative to wood in paper production, for example). These tycoons included the DuPonts, Andrew Mellon, and William Randolph Hearst. They began by initiating a smear campaign against marijuana, portraying it as a great social evil, causing everything from insanity to violence (watch the vintage film
Reefer Madness
if you don't believe me). The public bought this nonsense hook, line, and sinker. If this was not enough, congressional hearings on the matter contained deliberately falsified information, such as the following letter from an editor of a newspaper:

Two weeks ago a sex-mad degenerate, named Lee Fernandez, brutally attacked a young Alamosa girl. He was convicted of assault with intent to rape and sentenced to 10 to 14 years in the state penitentiary. Police officers here know definitely that Fernandez was under the influence of marijuana. But this case is one in hundreds of murders, rapes, petty crimes, insanity that has occurred in southern Colorado in recent years.
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In reality, Fernandez was drunk, not high.
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Eventually, in 1937 the Marijuana Tax Law was passed, which made marijuana illegal. Thus, a mainstay of the American criminal law was based off of nothing more than a secretive attempt to destroy business competitors. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Since President Nixon's declaration of the “War on Drugs” in 1970, the government has spent over one trillion dollars trying to combat them. Law enforcement agencies have locked up more than 2.3 million people, a higher incarceration rate than any other county.
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What's more, 60 percent of these incarcerations are for non-violent crimes. What's the point? These people are not invading my body or my rights or my property, or yours. These people are not harming anyone but themselves—and they have the freedom to do that. What's more, the state is spending vast amounts of our nation's resources (tax dollars) attempting to fight an un-winnable fight. When something like drugs (or prostitution) is prohibited, black markets pop up with all the corollary problems that surround them. When free exchange is permitted, a legitimate and workable market develops with supply and demand to act as a check.

The Lies the Government Tells You 2.0

My Fox News colleague John Stossel recently aired a show on the Drug War and debunked some government-created myths like “some drugs are so addictive that you are hooked the first time you use them.” John makes the argument that drugs are not quite as addictive as the government wants us to believe, and the statistics back him up.

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health gathered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 8.5 million people have tried crack, while only 359,000 are regular users (regular users are defined as those who use it at best once in thirty days); 3.8 million have tried heroin, while only 213,000 are regular users. If these drugs are so addictive, why is there not a greater retention rate? Where are these first-time user addicts of whom the government speaks?

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Also, the government wants us to believe that if drugs were to be legalized, there would be far more abuse of them. John Stossel maintains that there is very little evidence to support this assumption. As many know, in the Netherlands, marijuana has been legal for years. The Dutch, however, are far less likely to smoke than Americans. Fully 38 percent of American adolescents have smoked pot, while only 20 percent of Dutch teens have; in other words, marijuana rates in the Netherlands, where pot is legal, are half the rate of those in the United States, where pot gets you jail time!
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The Dutch government's answer to this discrepancy is telling: “We've succeeded in making pot boring.”
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The United States government should follow suit.

Drug Legalization Would Save the Government Money!

Jeffrey Miron, a professor of economics at Harvard, authored a study on the economics of marijuana legalization. He concluded that marijuana legalization would reduce government spending by $7.7 billion annually.
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Its legalization would generate $2.4 billion of tax revenue annually if marijuana were taxed like all other goods and $6.2 billion annually if marijuana were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco.
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To put this amount in perspective, Miron takes this calculation and asserts that the $14 billion in combined annual savings and revenues would “cover the securing of all ‘loose nukes' in the former Soviet Union in less than three years.” “Just one year's savings would cover the full cost of anti-terrorism port security measures required by the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002.”
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Talk about putting money to good use! The esteemed Nobel Laureate in Economics, Milton Friedman, and more than five hundred economists called for this drug debate to be brought to light as there is taxpayer money to be saved and government power to be tamed.

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Surprise, Surprise: The State Breaks Its
Own
Laws in Combating the “Drug War”

If the government would profit financially from the legalization of drugs, why won't it concede? Because it likes to waste your tax dollars and assert control over you by violating your privacy and other rights in the process. Don't believe me?

Every day, the government uses unconstitutional means to conduct SWAT raids on homes that may (or may not) have drugs inside. Often, these police tips come from unreliable sources, but the government goes in anyway. According to these police, no judicial due process or search warrant is required, and the government is not obligated to knock at your door. Law enforcement may enter your home, unannounced, in the dead of night.

While SWAT raids are supposed to be used to disperse violent situations, they are increasingly used in non-violent situations to search and seize the premises of homes, thereby violating every civil liberty held by you or me as a human being. There are 100 to 150 SWAT raids
per day
in the U.S. and about 50,000 performed per year.
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Since the late 1980s, SWAT raids have increased dramatically, almost 1,500 percent.
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Many of these raids end up at mistaken addresses, causing injury, deaths of dogs, and deaths of humans. The only common thread is the lack of consideration for freedom to live safely and peacefully in one's own home.

Gore Vidal, a playwright and novelist, sees through the government's lies clearly:

The bureaucratic machine has a vested interest in playing cops and robbers. Both the Bureau of Narcotics and the Mafia want strong laws against the sale and use of drugs because if drugs are sold at cost there would be no money in it for anyone . . . will anything sensible be done? Of course not. The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money—and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them.

Ironically, the actions our government seeks to control and regulate are the creations of the government itself. The state has perpetuated the dreadful consequences of prostitution—violence and disease—by attempting to prohibit it. The government has lengthened the kidney waiting list by outlawing compensation and incentives to donors. The government has brought on its war on drugs by trying to quash their use. When will it ever learn? It is time the government gets out and stays out of our bodies.

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Conclusion

The government's god-like complex has taken its power trip too far. If you want to consume trans fats, the government should not stop you. If you want to ingest drugs, the government should not stop you. If you find prostitution to be a viable option for employment or enjoyment, the government should not stop you. If you need a new kidney and have the economic resources to purchase one, the government should not stop you. If there are no feasible treatments available for your illness but Switzerland is testing a drug, the government should not stop you from choosing to try it. The moment the government interferes with our right to do with our bodies as we please, the state has unconstitutionally, immorally, and unnaturally overstepped its enumerated powers and has violated our rights as individuals. The purpose of the federal government is to protect our constitutional and natural rights—not to restrict or inhibit them.

When we are children, our parents raise, educate, groom, teach, and lead us to make the important decisions that life will surely demand of us. We will make good decisions. We will make bad decisions. We have the right to make these bad decisions. The poor decisions help us grow and learn to become productive members of American society, and the government must not deprive us of these opportunities. The bottom line is we, as adults, are big boys and girls who can make our own assessments and conclusions. The government should mind its own business, and worry about its own problems (and it has many).

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Chapter 8
Sticks and Stones Will Break My Bones:
The Right to Self-Defense

The Constitution does not allow the government to experiment with your constitutional rights. The Founders did not tell us when we can be baptized, what God we can worship, where to register our religion, when we can speak freely, what books we can read, or where speech free zones exist. Yet, the government today tells us when we can purchase a gun, what guns we can purchase, where we must register the guns, how we can use the guns, and in what areas guns are prohibited.

What the government ignores is that our right to keep and bear arms is a natural or fundamental right. For example, if someone breaks in to your home and attempts to swing his fist at you, it is your natural right to raise your arm and try to defend yourself. You also have the right to use whatever force is necessary to stop the intruder. This is the ancient, and until 1934 in America, universally recognized personal right to self-defense. Today, the use of guns is merely the contemporary exercise of the right. Without the right to defend oneself, individuals would be incapable of protecting themselves against ordinary thugs and tyrannical governments. In fact, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 guaranteed English citizens the right to bear arms, and stripped the power to prohibit guns away from the state. This provided individuals with the necessary force for their own self-defense and removed any reliance on the state to protect them.

In addition, the right to keep and bear arms removes a monopoly of force (i.e., the government) and creates a pluralistic use of force, which is the power of multiple individuals. This in turn creates a respect for Natural Law and other natural rights, such as property. As James A. Donald, a libertarian commentator, explains,

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Similarly a belief in natural rights tends to result in pluralistic use of force, because people obviously have the right to defend their rights, whereas disbelief in natural rights tends to lead to an absolute monopoly of force to ensure that the state will have the necessary power to crush people's rights and to sacrifice individuals, groups, and categories of people for the greater good.
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Without this right, we would be unable to defend our property from others and our own government. Fortunately, our Founding Fathers recognized the importance of this natural, or fundamental, right and created the Second Amendment, so as to assure that no government in America could infringe upon it.

Enacted in 1791, the Second Amendment states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” While the language of the Second Amendment appears clear, controversy over the true meaning of the language swirls to this day. Yet, controversy did not always surround the idea of protecting the right to self-defense. The 1689 English Bill of Rights explicitly protects a right to keep arms for self-defense. And when James Madison proposed the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment was the least “debated” amendment.

In fact, the right to bear arms was not debated at all at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. During the 1788 state ratification debates, Federalists and anti-Federalists often campaigned on opposing platforms. However, on this issue, there was a consensus regarding the importance of the right to own and use guns. But politics being politics, a “debate” ensued. On one side, anti-Federalists lobbied for the right out of a fear the government would disarm individuals and impose a standing army or select militia. On the other side, Federalists argued the right was adequately protected because the Constitution embodied the limited powers of the federal government.
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Consequently, the “debate” turned into a competition as to who would take credit with constituents for the virtues of the Second Amendment.