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Since his War on Drugs has been such a conspicuous success in the demonstration city of Washington, D.C. -- a/k/a the Crack and Murder Capitol of the Observable Universe -- Czar William Bennett felt compelled to come to Colorado last week and explain how we can solve our drug problems.
It's easy, he said. Simple possession of marijuana is a petty offense in Colorado right now. All we have to do is make it a felony.
You already had nightmares about spending your entire paycheck on Lotto tickets just to pay for more prisons? Don't worry. The czar says that felony convictions will force these drug-addled lunatics to go get some counseling, so they'll clean up their lives and become stable, productive members of society.
For some reason, I know quite a few unstable, unproductive members of society. You won't be surprised to learn that some of them are hard-core pot heads. In fact, during my brief periods of instability and unproductivity -- just 39 years this time around -- I've run across quite a few dangerous dopesuckers:
An administrative assistant to a Republican congressman, several newspaper editors, novelists, musicians, cowboys, cabinetmakers, literary agents, school board members, engineers, carpenters, mechanics, miners, bartenders, candidates for the Colorado General Assembly, radio announcers, teachers, professors, magazine editors, cooks, deacons, waitresses, coaches, computer programmers, designers, typesetters, prison guards, photographers, pipefitters, truck drivers, forest rangers, municipal police commissioners, attorneys and insurance salesmen.
Every one of them an evil felon, each sorely in need of counseling. To be fair, I should point out that none of them, to my knowledge, has ever sold arms to Iran, handed your tax money to Manuel Noriega, or willingly served as a director of a savings and loan while even the docile regulators were aghast at the magnitude of the bonuses that the officers were giving themselves as a reward for running the institution into bankruptcy.
What's even odder is that none of these deranged menaces to civilization ever even hinted that millions of their fellow citizens should be made permanently unemployable and in some states stripped of their right to vote -- that's what happens when you get a felony on your permanent record -- merely for possessing a common weed that grows throughout the inhabited world, and has been used by mankind since before the dawn of history.
But they all need counseling. We all get to pay for hauling them through the courts. That's what the czar says.
And then the counselors will have had so much practice that they may know how to cure a raving dingbat who has totally lost touch with objective reality -- William Bennett.
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