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Have you ever had anybody in your house? If so, then no
matter how pure your lifestyle, your home might get
confiscated during the next zero tolerance
escalation of America's war on drugs.
Check now to
make sure that there's not a seed lurking under the carpet;
one might have fallen out of the pocket of a workman before
you even moved in.
Perhaps it will be uniformed soldiers who occupy your home, since congressional pressure is mounting to use the military to fight this war.
It's a war that won't be won. Just look at our history and traditions. We've always been a nation of drug users who flouted authority.
Our nation was born in a revolution led by the growers of tobacco -- a substance which, the surgeon general says, is more addictive and deadly than heroin or cocaine. Other founding fathers were hemp-growers, rum-runners, brewers and distillers, all pursuits that have since been outlawed from time to time.
A century ago, American society was awash in drugs. Most
patent medicines contained morphine or cocaine. Coca-Cola,
the best-selling beverage in the world, first emerged in
1888. It was not advertised as the real thing
then.
Instead, it had the valuable tonic and nerve stimulant
properties of the coca plant
-- that is, its active
ingredient was cocaine.
Victorian women, respectable and otherwise, consumed vast quantities of laudanum, an opium tincture. Mass magazines carried ads for Bayer-brand Heroin, which cured coughs and sniffles. Nobody seemed to care.
But about 1900, the hysteria began. It resulted from a
curious hypocrisy. The rich could protect themselves from
drug laws, but any substance that the downtrodden enjoyed
was quickly outlawed on scientific
or medical
grounds, abetted by sensational publicity.
As the 20th century dawned, newspapers headlined lurid
accounts of how cocaine turned black men into crazed
killers. Coca-Cola was denounced as the cause of horrid
crimes committed in the southern states by colored
people.
Coca-Cola changed its formula, and by 1914,
cocaine was illegal.
Then it was time to protect the poor, simple working men of America from the ravages of alcohol, and Prohibition arrived. Any wealthy person who wanted a drink could find a speakeasy or summon a bootlegger, but those without means could find themselves blinded or poisoned.
After Prohibition failed dismally, gaudy stories in 1936 paradoxically proclaimed that hemp either made Chicano men shiftless and lazy, or else hyped them into brutal mass murders.
More recently, the federal government was busy with
Operation Intercept
on the Mexican border. That
protected the poor from cheap mood-altering drugs.
Americans who could afford to visit a doctor in 1973 went
through 4 billion doses of Librium, Valium, and other
mood-enhancers. Currently, it appears fashionable to fret
about crack-crazed street gangs.
Throughout our nation's history, drugs have been outlawed or legalized on social and political grounds, not on any scientific or medical basis. Addictive alcohol rots livers and destroys judgment; it's legal. Marijuana's effects aren't nearly as dire as alcohol's -- but one seed can get your property confiscated.
The other lesson from history as the drug war won't ever be won. The first act of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party -- a violent protest against a government attempt to regulate drug traffic (tea has enough caffeine to be addictive, and diaries of that time mention withdrawal symptoms during a boycott).
Our statement of national purpose, the Declaration of
Independence, calls the pursuit of happiness
an
inalienable right. We Americans have persistently pursued
happiness any way we can. A war on drugs
is, in
essence, a war on ourselves, and that's a war that nobody
can win.
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