Entries Tagged 'War on Drugs' ↓

Some college bureaucrats around the country are banding together to send a message that the federal nanny system isn’t working in regards to drinking age.

Top university officials in Maryland - including the chancellor of the state university system and the president of the Johns Hopkins University - say the current drinking age of 21 “is not working” and has led to dangerous binges in which students have harmed themselves and others.

Six college presidents in Maryland are among more than 100 college and university presidents nationwide who have signed a statement calling for a public debate on rethinking the drinking age.

One of the biggest gripes I’ve had with the drinking age is the mentality that goes with it. Parents should set the drinking age. When the state sets the drinking age it sends a subtle message that the state owns you. This is the same message that is sent with any prohibition type rules, regulations and legislation.

If you believe, as I do, that you own your own physical being and your own mind, then the state has no place telling you which substances are legal to put into your body. As long as you are not injuring other people you cannot commit a crime by ingesting a substance. Injuring yourself is not a crime because you are damaging your own property. The problem with this is that our current society teaches that the state has an obligation to take care of all of us individuals collectively. That means that all of us are expected to give up individuality to some extent.

We teach young adults that they are not responsible enough to decide for themselves what they put into their bodies instead of explaining the available options and allowing them to decide for themeselves in responsibly managed environments. Because of the nanny state, young adults have to hide their experimentation with substances that alter reality. This means that they are more likely to get into serious trouble or be injured during the learning process.

Instead of patronizing young people, we should teach them individual responsibility. Few legal adults, no matter how young or old, want to be coddled and talked down to. It’s time we recognized the hypocrisy of making someone a legal adult at 18 while telling them they are still not responsible enough to consume an alcoholic beverage. It’s time we understood that prohibition always causes more problems than it addresses.

Scientists sometimes introduce a predator into an ecosystem in order to take care of a pest that is threatening say, the potato crop. These experiments often go wrong - the predator turns out to be more dangerous than the pest. Social engineers do the same thing as scientists, except with human beings. One example is China’s one child policy to control overpopulation. The jury is still out on whether or not that policy will benefit the world or China in the long term. It certainly doesn’t benefit human freedom.

In the United States, our greatest social engineering experiment is something most people called The War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is actually a war on freedom, when thought about literally. It is also an experiment in introducing a predator to take care of a pest. What do you do when the predator you introduced to take care of the pest turns out to be much worse than the pest?

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The violent assault on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home late last month was certainly not the first bungled raid by a government SWAT team, but the bad publicity it generated should make it the last time these trigger-happy squads target innocent civilians. Tracking a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, Prince George’s sheriff’s deputies forcibly entered the mayor’s home on July 29 and killed his two dogs before handcuffing him and his mother-in-law.

But like so many other SWAT team raids across the country, this one turned out to be a big mistake. After reviewing the case, State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey acknowledged that the Calvos were victims of a multistate drug ring that used innocent people’s names and addresses to hide shipments of contraband drugs. But the mayor and his family were also victims of a home invasion by the SWAT team, based entirely on what turned out to be a false premise.

Some of you who read these words may want to argue with me. The police are here to help us you’ll say. Yes, some of them help some people some of the time. Unfortunately the helping is on the decline and the abuse is on the uptick. Survey 100,000 random citizens of the United States before the so called drug war began on their level of trust in the police. That would probably be a pretty high number. Survey 100,000 random citizens now. Most likely the numbers will be pretty low. Chances are that a lot of these people know someone who has been locked up for a consensual non-violent crime. You only have to be beaten up once by uniformed authorities to develop a lifelong distrust of all authorities. You only have to be locked up for a few months to learn to lie to the cops when they come around. After all, they are not your friends. They protect and serve only themselves. That is the lesson many have learned.

Public servants do not shoot family dogs. Peace officers do not initiate violence, they are supposed to prevent it. SWAT teams should be used so sparingly that when they are used, people are amazed. Instead, they are used so frequently it is almost like a car alarm going off - no one pays any attention. We’ve learned to ignore the sights and sounds of our freedom going away.

When the men in masks come to your neighborhood with concrete barriers and rolls of concertina wire just remember that they are there to protect you from yourself. If your family dog gets shot or you get beaten while trying to stop them from raping your daughter or your wife it is your own fault for questioning the authorities. They are just here to deal with pesky drug addicts and you got in the way.

Hmm. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so willing to give away the Constitutional rights of others. Maybe it is time to stand up and let your government know that you aren’t going to tolerate this sort of behavior.

The most important decision the Supreme Court has ever made is coming soon.

This month, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide District of Columbia v. Heller, the most important Second Amendment case in the court’s history.

More than five years ago, six Washington, D.C., residents challenged the constitutionality of the city’s 32-year ban on all functional firearms in the home. If the challenge is successful, it will mean the court has revisited and perhaps reversed United States v. Miller, the second most important Second Amendment case in the court’s history. For nearly seven decades, gun controllers and gun rights advocates alike have struggled to apply the murky doctrines propounded by Justice James Clark McReynolds in his 1939 Miller opinion.

The Heller decision will be a practical choice. The “War on Drugs” is really a war on citizens - citizens who believe that they, not the state, are the ones who are in the best position to decide what should or should not pass into their own bodies. The “War on Drugs” created a new subset of Americans who are automatic criminals because they believe their bodies belong to them and not the state. If the Supreme Court decides that citizens have no individual right to bear arms, they will be creating another artificial class of criminals - people who believe that it is the individual and not the state that bears primary responsibility for his or her own security. If the Court creates an unnecessary, foolish and short-sighted “War on Guns” it will make the 40-year-old and completely unwinnable “We Own Your Body” war pale in comparison.

And Americans’ civil rights will continue to be spit on, ground into the dirt and thrown down the toilet. Let us all hope that the Court does not force my fellow gun owners and I to rise up and resist tyranny.