Pubdate: Sun,  8 Dec 2002
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2002 The Denver Post Corp
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Chris Buors
Referenced:  http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n2152/a02.html?1224

PHARMACRACY

Gov. Bill Owens has discovered that moralizing with the coercive force of 
the state is very expensive. Too bad the idea that drug users might just be 
sinners rather than criminals or victims is never presented.

"Pharmacracy" would be a better word to describe what passes for government 
in America today. The marriage of medicine and government delivers the 
therapeutic state, which evolved from the theologic state Thomas Jefferson 
freed mankind from. Sadly, Americans have learned how to do their 
moralizing in medical terms.

Persecuting drug users with incarceration or treatment is a perversion of 
justice. Eventually, the error of that madness will see the therapeutic 
state destroy itself. In Jefferson's time, lust and gluttony explained 
addiction.

As Jefferson wrote: "Were the government to prescribe to us our medicine 
and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in 
France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potato as an 
article of food.

"Government is just as infallible (sic), too, when it fixes systems in 
physics. Galileo was sent to the Inquisition for affirming that the earth 
was a sphere. ... It is error alone which needs the support of government. 
Truth can stand by itself."

CHRIS BUORS

Winnipeg, Canada
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