More Prohibition! (Since it worked so well in the 1920's!)

This is the way it goes. A vocal minority passes itself off as the righteous majority, stupid laws get passed, some people end up jailed at great expense to taxpayers, or dead, while others make ridiculous amounts of money (untaxed) by breaking the stupid law, or get killed.

Fab system, guys. Truly a wonder.

Let's review.

The U.S. Senate passed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 18, 1917, and was ratified on January 29, 1919, having been approved by 36 states, and went into effect on a Federal level on January 29, 1920. It lasted until repealed with ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, on December 5, 1933.

You couldn't legally make, buy or imbibe alcohol in this country from 1920 to 1933. And it worked great! Just ask the mobsters that ran the bootlegging enterprises. They made money "hand over fist," and fought bloody street wars to protect their empires.

Fast forward 36 years. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, claiming it has "a high potential for abuse and no acceptable medical use." Suddenly a bunch of relatively harmless potheads are felons, and genuine criminals - much like the bootleg empires of the 1920's - suddenly have entry to a huge, lucrative (and tax-free!) market.

A few years later, enter, stage right, the "D.A.R.E." program. Lies, damn lies, and propaganda. I don't know of anyone personally who avoided drugs because of D.A.R.E., but I do know plenty of people who got so pissed off at being lied to that they DID experiment, and made their own decisions on whether or not to continue using drugs. (For the record, most of them tried many things but stuck with only one: marijuana.)

A few more years, and we get the ridiculous PSAs on TV about "smoking pot supports terrorism." Wut?! Smoking pot supports the snack industry, that's for sure, and probably MTV as well. Terrorists know the score, and the smarter criminals can do the math: cocaine and heroin products are more compact to smuggle and give a higher return on investment at street level.

Now a moment for comparison. How many people have been killed by drunk drivers in this country, plus the number of deaths from lung cancer in people who smoked tobacco (alcohol and tobacco being legal and highly taxed commodities), versus the number of people killed by drivers under the influence of marijuana, plus the number of people who have developed lung cancer from smoking marijuana? (I don't have the figures myself, but we can all estimate that set one is a significantly higher number than set two.)

And then you have incidents like what happened to Rachel Hoffman.

More here, including relevant links:

From SpiritCompanion.com blog:
"Police caught Hoffman with pot but promised to drop charges if she agreed to go undercover in a drug bust. She was killed soon afterward.

Rachel Hoffman is dead. Rachel Hoffman, like many young adults, occasionally smoked marijuana.

But Rachel Hoffman is not dead as a result of smoking marijuana; she is dead as a result of marijuana prohibition.

Under prohibition, Rachel faced up to five years in a Florida prison for possessing a small amount of marijuana. (Under state law, violators face up to a $5,000 fine and five years in prison for possession of more than 20 grams of pot.)"

http://tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080512/NEWS01/805120325/0/COMP
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5442615&page=1
http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?wtm_view=&Group_ID=4530
http://www.abcnews.go.com/print?id=5442615
http://tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080509/VIDEO/80509031
http://stash.norml.org/2008/04/04/stoners-in-the-mist-more-prejudiced-propaganda-from-ondcp/
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=5454035
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/63988/

And now, in the infinite wisdom of our government, we have a ban on contraceptives looming.

Seriously, people, am I the only one who sees something WRONG with this?!

We don't need MORE government in our lives. We need better education and more personal responsibility. The more freedoms we allow our government to take away, the less able we are to take care of ourselves, which gives the government more opportunity to restrict our freedoms. It's a cycle we need to break, and it's not like it's hard to see. They aren't doing this in secret. There's no back-room, clandestine operation here. It's going on RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU and only by speaking up, raising a fuss, refusing to be quietly complacent out of apathy, fear, or disgust can we stop this.

Please, people of America, if you love what this country should stand for, if you believe what we pledge about "liberty and justice for all," STOP BEING SO STUPID and take back control of our nation.

cross-posted at my LJ