Pubdate: Tue, 07 Aug 2001
Source: Daily Gazette (NY)
Copyright: 2001 The Gazette Newspapers
Contact:  http://www.dailygazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/105
Author: Chris Buors
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1403/a03.html

LEGALIZE DRUGS

In case Christine Siler Haus didn't understand, justice flew out the window 
the day America criminalized the vice of drug taking. That Draconian 
sentences are the norm is supported by the public, which voted for the 
politicians who promised to save America from the evil scourge of drugs.

What Americans do not seem to understand is that there is an even more vile 
and evil than drugs. The Founding Fathers would be horrified that the 
natural rights Thomas Jefferson told us are inalienable in the Declaration 
of Independence have been circumvented by abuse of the interstate commerce 
laws to enact drug prohibition.

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are 
injurious to others," said Jefferson several times in many different 
writings. Vices are not crimes.

The drug war, because it seeks to make a crime of things that are not 
crimes, has perverted American justice to the point that many innocent 
lives have been destroyed. The pleas of Christine Siler Haus for justice in 
the case of her brother will resonate about as much as the screams of 
witches on the pyre resonated with the righteous when religion instead of 
medicine was the instrument of oppression in America.

Restore our natural right to drugs. Ceremonial drug use is as old as 
mankind is itself; it is an amoral idea to try and stamp it out. Corruption 
of the police, the courts and of justice itself would not be possible if 
the sage advice of Jefferson and the fathers had been adhered to.

CHRIS BUORS Winnipeg, Manitoba
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jo-D