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John P. Walters just can't seem to contain himself. Give the career powercrat a job with the imperial appellation of "Drug Czar" and he just instinctively grasps for more. Last summer, for example, the Top Drug Thug made headlines by declaring that simple, nonviolent marijuana gardeners are dangerous terrorists. While you puzzle over that oxymoronic disconnect, consider this further quote from the Redding Record Searchlight: "Marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and safety, as well as to the environment." Apparently, Walters wants to proclaim himself Terrorist Czar, Public Health Czar, Safety Czar, and Environmental Czar as well. The authoritarian thought process that leads the power-addicted to equate a grower of weeds with a fanatical jihadist offers an easy comparison between the language of Thuggery and the language of Freedom. For example, speaking in the language of Thuggery, the same article quotes Walters as saying, "Don't buy drugs. They fund violence and terror." Noting that the War on Drugs has caused more misery -- loss of life, loss of money, loss of property, loss of freedom -- than actual drug use, a libertarian speaking the language of Freedom would respond, "Don't pay taxes. They fund government violence and terror." Of course, it's infinitely more likely that buying gasoline made from Saudi Arabian crude funds violence and terror, but there's no evidence that Walters and his Praetorian Guard are running amok raiding Exxon stations. Following pot raids on clandestine gardens throughout California last summer, the Weed Warrior warned that some growers were armed with assault rifles. "Assault rifle" is the language of Thuggery. In a free society where people have the right to defend themselves from coercive thugs who work for illegal, unconstitutional government agencies, these weapons would be known as "self-defense rifles." That's the language of Freedom. "These people are armed; they're dangerous," the Federal Weed Whacker further fulminated, and then went off the charts by calling them "violent criminal terrorists." Of course, drug-enforcement hoods are also armed, dangerous, violent criminals, and they terrorize innocent people. No-knock military raids at wrong addresses are not merely the isolated incidents Drug War apologists claim. The libertarian Cato Institute calls it "an epidemic of 'isolated incidents.'" Author Radley Balko documents the wrong-address military-style raids that terrorize innocent people, brutalize children, and kill family pets and bystanders in his book Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. Considering that roughly 90 percent of what the government does is unconstitutional, the drug thugs are the real criminals because they serve a criminal government. Walters warned that too many people write off marijuana as harmless. "We have kind of a 'reefer blindness,'" he claimed. "Reefer Blindness?" Sounds like a made-for-cable remake of the laughably mindless government propaganda shtick-flick Reefer Madness that suckered many an uninformed voter of the 1950s into believing that marijuana was a Devil Weed that caused young men to go stark raving loony-bonkers and drove good little white middle-class teenage Christian girls into lives of depravity by succumbing to frenzied orgiastic sex with (gasp!) Negroes and Mexicans. Yes, drug prohibition was racist from the beginning. Still is. According to the ACLU, America has 260,000 people in state prisons for nonviolent drug charges, and more than 70 percent of them are black or Latino. By this standard, if pot farmers are terrorists, John Walters is racist. If you believe in the Drug War you have taken the Blue Pill, gone over to the Dark Side, and become an evil Ringwraith of Sauron in a lost land formerly known as The Republic of These United States. Postscript: There's a bright side to this story. The article describes how, after raiding a remote pot patch, "the officers who are destroying the gardens are performing hard, dangerous work in rough terrain." See? Who says Americans won't work jobs illegal immigrants work? Join the DEA. Work like an honest Mexican. |
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