Pubdate: Tue, 03 Oct 2006
Source: Brownsville Herald, The (TX)
Copyright: 2006 The Brownsville Herald
Contact: http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/contact.php
Website: http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1402
Author: Tibor Machan
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

WILLIE NELSON, PUBLIC ENEMY?

In the midst of the United States going nearly broke from the Iraq 
war, the war on terror, and a rupturing corporate and personal 
welfare state, I cannot imagine something more pointless and wasteful 
than the war on drugs. In my own neck of the woods, several busts 
have occurred recently, bringing to "justice" cultivators of patches 
of marijuana in various swanky neighborhoods, at huge cost to 
law-enforcement organizations, which is to say, to the citizenry that 
funds them. But that is not really the worst of it.

Willie Nelson, the musician -- who looks to me to be about as 
harmless a soul on the entertainment-celebrity roster as one can 
imagine -- was recently busted for having and using some pot on his 
tour bus. That, by all accounts, is the reality and the symbol of the 
worst aspects of this utterly insane undertaking, the war on drugs.

The man was doing no one any harm -- he could have been sipping a 
beer, chewing tobacco or having a martini but, instead, his choice of 
drugs was one that happens, quite irrationally, to seriously offend 
influential elements of the voting public and politicians. This new 
prohibition is, of course, no more sensible, nor any more in accord 
with principles of a just human community -- which is supposed to 
leave us free of out-of-control, offended meddlesome folks -- than 
was the previous nationwide prohibition of alcohol that finally had 
to be scrapped because of the bona fide crime it spawned. In the case 
of Willie Nelson, though, there is something else that this insane, 
immoral war illustrates.

American prisons are filled with such harmless drug offenders! I was 
recently visiting one of those, in Lompoc, Calif., and some 70 
percent of the inmates are there for having been convicted of 
drug-related offenses. Some are users, some are pushers or dealers, 
some are probably more involved on the enforcement side of the 
industry (which, being illegal, cannot count on the official police 
to provide any remedy for the commercial malfeasance that plagues 
many enterprises).

All this is happening in what President George W. Bush and his pals 
so proudly call a free country. Indeed, as they would have it, the 
only country on the face of the globe truly involved in spreading 
liberty to all. What a crock that is, and how hypocritical it must 
come off to most observant foreigners, including, sadly, the worst of 
them whose hatred of America and its professed system, a free 
capitalist society, is very likely fed by it.

Also, since the United States has more prisoners than nearly any 
country around the world, and since that's something people tend to 
find disturbing about a society, namely its huge prison population -- 
given that this suggests widespread serious criminal activity in the 
place -- the proclamation by our leaders that we are a bastion of 
liberty can only be most embarrassing and self-defeating.

Of course, free men and women can become criminals. No one should 
expect a free society to be a utopia. Yet, it does reflect badly on 
the United States to have so many of its citizens turn to crime. And 
when looked at without a careful consideration of what counts as 
crime in the country, this bodes ill for the very idea of a free 
society. It makes it look like freedom and crime go hand in hand. So 
the very objective that supposedly animates Bush & Co. in the Iraqi 
war -- spreading freedom to the world's enslaved and oppressed -- can 
seem rather pointless and even counterproductive, given this 
association of what is deemed a free society and the proclivity to 
crime by so many of its citizens.

Yet, of course, the crimes these citizens have a proclivity for are 
phony crimes. It is as if eating hot dogs were a crime, or dancing, 
or watching professional sports on TV. No wonder the prisons are full 
- -- prisoners occupy them who have been put there unjustly, without 
any good reason.

The statistics do not, of course, show this. But if one extrapolates 
from the prison I visited to all the rest, it looks like the criminal 
element in the country is but a fraction of those who are officially 
deemed to be criminals.

I do wish Willie Nelson could generate a revolution from his own 
perfectly unjust and vile arrest on the charge of indulging in the 
use of marijuana. We need this war on drugs ended, immediately. Maybe 
that would not only improve our reputation abroad but could divert 
the misused monies funding it to something worthwhile -- for example, 
tax reduction.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman