Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, we hear a lot of people from the president on down talk about America being the land of "freedom-loving people." We are a land of free people and freedom, just not too much freedom, which evidently is not a good thing. But we are not a free country, not as the founders of the land wanted. Not as we, the people that put these people into office in the first place, deserve.
There are things we can not do or put into our bodies because someone somewhere sometime decided that it was wrong and immoral. Mind you, that may very well be. But who is is he to decide what is right for me and you?
These immoral actions are called "consensual crimes."
con·sen·su·al (k…n-sµn“sh›-…l) Law. Existing or entered into by mutual consent without formalization by document or ceremony: a consensual marriage; a consensual contract.
crime (krºm) n. 1. An act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it and for which punishment is imposed upon conviction. 2. Unlawful activity: statistics relating to violent crime.
(Before I go on, much of what is contained within this rant come from Peter McWilliams' Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, a fabulous book written a few years before his death on consensual crime legislation in this country. I ask of you, no I implore you, to check out the link below to read the full text of his book online.)
Roughly half of the arrests and court cases in the United States each year involve consensual crimes -- actions that are against the law, but directly harm no one's person or property except, possibly, the "criminal's."
More than 750,000 people are in jail right now because of something they did, something that did not physically harm the person or property of another. In addition, more than 3,000,000 people are on parole or probation for consensual crimes. Further, more than 4,000,000 people are arrested each year for doing something that hurts no one but, potentially, themselves. (This statistic is a few years old as I write this in the late part of 2001. In truth, the numbers might be much higher.)
What does consensual crime mean? Well, a consensual crime is when
you do something with one or more consenting adults that someone else does
not think is moral. Jerry Falwell had his Moral Majority. He did
such a good job that by the late 80s, he declared victory and disbanded
the majority. Pat Robertson has made a killing with his "700 Club" and
the Christian Coalition, serving up hatred and intolerance of anything
that isn't white, male and moral. Robertson, of course, gets to define
what is moral. As Jermome Skolnick said, "Whether or not legislation is
truly moral is often a question of who has the power
to define morality."
The idea behind laws against consensual activities is that if some people are in a bad relationship with something, then that thing should be banned. The problem is, that solution doesn't solve anything: the problem doesn't lie with the thing itself, but with some people's relationship to it.
Yes, there are some things with which it is easier to be in a bad relationship than others. Cigarettes practically beg for a bad relationship. But then, they were designed that way. (Like Lord Conesford said, "I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.")
Throwing people in jail is one extreme. If you can throw people in jail for something, you can fire them for the same reason. You can evict them from their apartments. You can deny them credit. You can expel them from schools. You can strip away their civil rights, confiscate their property, and destroy their lives -- just because they're different. They're not "like us."
Over the past thirty years, we have witnessed in this country more and more of our freedoms being taken away. The War on Drugs was invented in the 80s to combat the vicious new drug of choice, crack cocaine. However, none of the evidence suggests that crack is anymore addictive than the two most addictive drugs known to man, nicotine and caffeine. Also, if cocaine were legal, research indicates that no one would take crack anyway; they would snort it and, more likely, drink it.
That's the dirty little secret that the drug warriors don't want us to know, that drugs are not our enemies. Many people have had ongoing healthy relationships with drugs for many years, Robert Downey Jr. notwithstanding. Drugs are not the scourge that they want you to think. Not as many people do drugs and far fewer are actually addicted. Furthermore, most of the addictions occur because the drugs are illegal. Certainly the vast majority of drug-related crime would be reduced if drugs were legal. Most drug-related crimes come into play because because of turf wars between controlling interests -- gangs in the major cities, fat guys in pick-ups in the smaller southern and mid-western towns -- or because a consumer (ruthless, godless drug addict, if you will) is not satisfied with the goods he or she was sold.
The U.S. Government uses these victimless crimes to control and manipulate its citizens. Prosecuting victimless crimes is driving our country into debt, destroying the Bill of Rights, destroying families and leaving more of our population in prison than any other country. Most of the people in prison now are there because they were the willing participant is a victimless crime. In fact, often rapists and murderers are released on parole ("good behavior") to make room for these victimless "criminals."
Often the hysteria of victimless crimes traps innocent people and destroys their lives. Victimless crimes also erode respect for the law. The government can and does get away with a lot of restrictions "for the good of the people". This can be used to justify almost any law. Who decides what is good for the people though? And something that may not be good for you may be fine and dandy for me.
Some of these laws are:
A single arrest, even without a conviction, is, in many cases, enough to ruin a life; a conviction and a year in jail are almost guaranteed to. All this, of course, is "for their own good." In fact, I would think that more lives have been ruined by their arrest for a victimless crime than by any other consequences of their actions.
Once armed with a search warrant, anything the police recover of an "illegal nature" or even a "suspicious nature" is fair game. They can dismantle and destroy anything that might hold any illegal substance -- and, considering how compact certain drugs are, this means that they can dismantle and destroy anything. They can take with them any "suspicious substances" for laboratory testing. This could include the entire contents of your medicine cabinet, kitchen pantry, and garage. Anything that might be used to "document" your criminal activity can be confiscated. This means all files, correspondence, notes, diaries, address books, phone bills, video tapes, audio tapes, and even your computer. If you do business from your home, a police search can put you out of business immediately.
The sick truth to this is that some people are put through this not because they were in the privacy of their own homes doing what they wished (not hurting the person or property of an unwilling participant) but because someone said (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) they were in the privacy of their own homes doing what they wished, something that the person doing the saying did not deem "moral."
If you are arrested for a consensual crime involving drugs, it will be harder for you to obtain the services of an attorney than if you had been arrested for, say, murder. If an attorney takes your case for a drug charge and you are found guilty, the courts can force the attorney to give all the money he or she has made from your case to the law enforcement agency that arrested you. It's part of the assets forfeiture law. The courts have ruled that not only are your house, car, money, land, investments, bank accounts, and other tangible assets forfeitable, but everything you've paid your attorney as well. Consequently, criminal attorneys are hesitant to take on drug cases. Murderers, rapists, and robbers are getting better legal representation than casual pot smokers.
A famous anti-drug ad shows photographs of Janice Joplin, John Belushi, Jimi Hendrix and River Phoenix. The announcer pipes in: "We were told celebrity endorsements help sell things." Then the title "Partnership for a Drug-Free America" flashes on the screen. This is an especially irritating commercial because if drugs weren't illegal, these people would not have died of accidental overdoses.
According to The Nation, The Partnership for a Drug Free America received $150,000 each from Philip Morris (Miller beer and Marlboro cigarettes), Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser) and R. J. Reynolds (Camel) over 1988–91. Other contributors: American Brands (Jim Beam and Lucky Strike), Pepsico, and Coca-Cola. Contributing pharmaceutical companies included Bristol-Meyers Squibb, CIBA-Geigy, Dow, DuPont, Glaxo, Hoffman-La Roche, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Schering-Plough, Smith-Kline and Warner-Lambert. It could be said that these companies have a vested interest in keeping drugs that are currently illegal permanently legal. Never mind that their ads use the worst kind of scare tactics, misinformation and out right lies to get their message across.
All right, enough of all that. So what am I saying? Well, first of all, marijuana should be legalized today, along with every other drug known to man. Take the pot, the acid, the coke off of the streets, out of the labs in some broken down part of town, and put it on Main Street. We already have the ABC stores (red dot stores) that sell liquor. Why not have a true drug store? You would be able to go down to the corner, pick up a newspaper, maybe a candy bar and a Coke, and then pick up a weeks supply of morphine and cocaine or any other substance that is now illegal.
The best part of this is that now that they are legal, they would be regulated by the federal government, just like everything at the red dot just across the street. If you picked up a biggie sized case of heroin, you would know the potency just by reading it off the carton. As it is now, when you buy any drug from anyone, you do not know what's mixed up in there. Rat poison? Talcom powder? Anthrax? It is common knowledge that drug dealers dilute their supply in order to stretch it out. More white powder equals more money. This would not be a problem if the feds were regulating the meds.
Also, most of the people who die of drug overdoses would not die of drug overdoses since they would know what was in there too. So commercials listing the deaths of such celebs as River Phoenix, Shannon Hoon and Kurt Cobain would not have to be made. Maybe that's what Neil Young's song, "The Needle and the Damage Done," means.
Another part to this -- taxes. Like Will Rogers said, why not just make everything legal and then tax it to death? Not only would our taxes not go to fighting the War on Drugs, a losing battle, as everyone knows, but we would actually get money from drugs. This money could be used to pay our teachers more in public schools that could also be fixed up. More money could be spent on making our roads safer. The cops could have more money to catch speeders and people who should not be driving as it is now.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tackling the
problem of making victimless crimes criminal. In fact, it's not even the
tip of the iceberg. It's more like the tip of the tip of the tip of the
iceberg. Click on the "book" below and get to the iceberg. The two parts
I ask you to read more than the rest is Part 2: Why Laws Against Consensual
Activities Are Not A Good Idea and Part 5: What To Do?
A free society will not remain free unless all of its citizens actively participate.
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Read The Murder of Peter McWilliams here.
Here's what people are saying about consensual crimes:
"I believe there is something out there watching over us. Unfortunately,
it's the government."
--Woody Allen
"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of
Congress. But I repeat myself."
--Mark Twain
"The growth of drug-related crime is a far greater evil to society as
a whole than drug taking. Even so, because we have been seduced by the
idea that governments should legislate for our own good, very few people
can see how dangerously absurd the present policy is."
--John Casey
"It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need
to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more
baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol
addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts._
--Rep. Shirley Chisholm, September 17, 1969, House Select Committee
on Crime
"A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no rights
or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different."
--Chief Justice Warren E. Burger
"In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most
sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes. Man's ultimate responsibility
is to God alone."
--Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury
"The laws against nudity make no sense. The idea that Jerry Falwell
can go topless while Cindy Crawford cannot is an absolute affront to logic,
common sense, and the 5,000-year human struggle for aesthetic taste."
--Peter McWilliams
"Homosexuality is Satan's diabolical attack upon the family that will
not only have a corrupting influence upon our next generation, but it will
also bring down the wrath of God upon America."
--Jerry Falwell
"Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation,
or creed."
--Bertrand Russell
"We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing."
--Henry Kissinger
"If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert, and a drug
addict, all it means is that
you've read his autobiography."
--P.J. O'Rourke
"You got to know the rules before you can break 'em. Otherwise, it's
no fun."
--Sonny Crockette, "Miami Vice"
"I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy.
But that will change."
--Vice-president Dan Quayle
"There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts
to enforce a law not supported by the people."
--Hubert H. Humphrey
"The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status
quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest
pain is the pain of a new idea."
--Martin Luther King Jr.
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of
comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and
controversy."
--Martin Luther King Jr.
"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite
at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
--President Ronald Reagan
"One of the things that really bothers me is that Americans don't have
any sense of history. The majority of Americans don't have any idea of
where we've come from, so they naturally succumb
to the kind of cliched version that Ronald Reagan represented."
--Robert Massie, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian
"We simply do not catch a high enough percentage of users to make the
law a real threat, although we do catch enough to seriously overburden
our legal system."
--Jackson E. Reynolds, The Washington Post
"A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point
of doubtful sanity."
--Robert Frost
"Heterosexuals don't practice sodomy."
--Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC)
"Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad
name."
--Henry Kissinger
"I think your slogan 'Liberty or Death' is splendid and whichever one
you decide on will be all right with me."
--Alexander Woollcott
"America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole."
--Bobcat Goldthwaite
"One day I sat thinking, almost in despair; a hand fell on my shoulder
and a voice said reassuringly:
'Cheer up, things could get worse.' So I cheered up and, sure enough,
things got worse."
--James Haggerty
"Freedom and the power to choose should not be the privilege of wealth.
They are the birthright
of every American."
--President George Bush, 41
"I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean."
--G.K. Chesterton
"You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with
a kind word alone."
--Al Capone
"We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost the right of
free speech will be extinguished
throughout the world."
--Richard Nixon, 1965
"As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce
children; therefore, they must
recruit our children."
--Anita Bryant
VICTIM'S GRIEVING WIDOW: "Do you know what it's like to be married to
a wonderful man
for fourteen years?"
DETECTIVE DREBIN: "No, I can't say that I do. I did . . . uh
. . . live with a guy once, though,
but that was just for a couple of years. The usual slurs, rumors, innuendoes
-- people didn't understand."
--"Police Squad"
"We have read the Navy report on Tailhook yet we have concluded that
it would be wrong -- fundamentally wrong -- to ban heterosexuals
from serving in the military."
--Rep. Gerry Studds
"History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with
history."
--Clarrence Darrow
"I see that you, too, put up monuments to your great dead."
--A Frenchman, upon seeing the Statue of Liberty
"For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality
of life, please press 3."
--Alice Kahn
"Human beings are not animals, and I do not want to see sex and sexual
differences treated as casually and amorally as dogs and other beasts treat
them. I believe this could happen under the ERA."
--Ronald Reagan
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