Pubdate: Wed, 24 Dec 2003
Source: Naples Daily News (FL)
Copyright: 2003 Naples Daily News.
Contact:  http://www.naplesnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/284
Author: Paul Campos
Note: Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/marijuana+ads
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Goose+Creek

A WAR ON SANITY

The Government Doesn't Even Want You to Have the Right to Protest Its
Stupid War on Drugs.

December is the season for giving, and no one gives more generous
gifts than the U.S. Congress. Of course, Congress has the advantage of
doing its last-minute holiday shopping at someone else's expense,
namely yours and mine.

For example, on Dec. 8, the House of Representatives passed a bill that
gives the White House drug czar's office $145,000,000 of taxpayer money to
run anti-marijuana propaganda ads. My personal favorite in this genre is a
television ad in which police rough up a high school student when arresting
him in the school's marijuana-smoke-filled bathroom. This is followed by a
caption reading, "Marijuana: Harmless? Think again." (And no, I did not
make that up).

Yet this bill contains something far more obnoxious than pots of money
for another round of clueless anti-marijuana propaganda. A section of
the bill prohibits any local transit system that receives federal
funding from running privately funded ads that call for marijuana
policy reform.

In other words, at the same time that the federal government is
forcing you to spend your money to publicize its willingness to engage
in storm trooper tactics to persecute the tens of millions Americans
who smoke or have smoked marijuana, it is trying to prohibit you from
having the freedom to spend your money to protest these same tactics.

If this bill becomes law, it will be illegal for the average American
to buy advertising space on a city bus or in a subway station,
advocating that doctors be given the right to prescribe marijuana as a
painkiller for their terminally ill patients.

Two words that are thrown around far too loosely in political debate
are "fascism" and "unconstitutional." Nevertheless, this sort of thing
has a distinctly fascist tinge. And if the First Amendment means
anything, it ought to mean that the government cannot take away the
right of citizens to engage in public political protest.

Anyone who has doubts that the drug war is wrong ought to consider
what it tells us when our federal government tries to make it illegal
to protest that war. Fence sitters might also want to view a the video
from the surveillance tape at a Goose Creek, S.C., high school, which
on Nov. 5 was raided by police looking for drugs. (A photo from the
tape can be viewed at www.mpp.org).

After an extensive search, the police found no drugs, but they did
terrorize more than 100 students (two-thirds of whom were black, even
though less than 25 percent of the school's student body is black).
With guns pointed at their heads, students were handcuffed and forced
to lie on the floor, or to kneel with their faces to the wall.

One student said he assumed the police "were trying to protect us,
that it was like Columbine, that somebody got in the school that was
crazy or dangerous. But then a police officer pointed a gun at me. It
was really scary."

What's really scary is that incidents such as this seem to stir so
little outrage. What level of government persecution will put a dent
in public apathy about the madness that is the war on drugs?

If the police at the Goose Creek high school had inadvertently shot a
student or two in their zealous search for marijuana cigarettes, would
that be enough to distract people from holiday shopping and channel
surfing? Or would such an incident be shrugged off as another
regrettable accident of the sort that is inevitable in wartime? Take a
look at that photograph, and consider: This is your government on drugs.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake