All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day
The UP recently headlined an article with the title "Wary Court Considers Medical Marijuana." The "wary court" is our timid and brain-dead US Supreme Court. The article said that "The Supreme Court appeared hesitant Monday to endorse medical marijuana for patients who have a doctor's recommendation." Even funnier, the case is called "Ashcroft v. Raich, 03-1454." Even when the evil bastard has quit and run to lower ground, Ashcroft is cursing the country with his existence.
It's pretty funny stuff, Pat Clement, Bush's big deal lawyer, pretends that he's concerned that people with terminal diseases, using pot to relieve the symptoms of their godawful therapies or the end stages of their diseases might be exposing themselves to "health dangers." What the hell could be more unhealthy than chemotherapy or dying of cancer?
There hasn't been a lick of evidence that the Bush Administration contains a single person with one iota of concern for the health, safety, or comfort of their fellow citizens. So, let's not fool ourselves into imagining that the government's opposition to legalizing marijuana is about concern for public health. The Bushies have wiped out environmental protections, health care protections, and workplace protections without a moment's concern for the consequences.
The Bushies argue that "Congress has found no accepted medical use of marijuana." Isn't that a laugh? Just when did Congress stock its membership with medical experts. Or any kind of experts in any sort of intellectual endeavor? The Bushies are also arguing that they need to hang on to all of their irrational drug laws to be able to "eradicate drug trafficking and its social harms."
Let's talk about social harms. How about putting more citizens in prison than any other "civilized" nation on the planet? How does warehousing citizens for victimless crimes provide some social good? How does employing thousands of government workers as guards for American citizens who have done no harm to anyone other than themselves, in the rare occasion that they have harmed themselves. Which seems incredibly unlikely in the case of the thousands of citizens who have been imprisoned for marijuana use. At the worst, those people have done almost as much harm to themselves as the average cigarette smoker. Of course, the Bushies love cigarette smokers.
The Republican Congressional dirtbags are chanting their favorite psychobabble in begging the court to imagine that the 20,000 people who supposedly die from drug abuse are in some way connected to medical marijuana use. Even the dumbest conservative has to wonder exactly how someone could die of medical marijuana use, especially when that person is already dying of cancer? One of the beauties of being a conservative, especially one of the religious right, is that reality, common sense, and justice have no effect on your decisions. Delusions of competence, and Viagra, are what make these folks get up in the morning.
Personally, I'd be less offended at the conservative outrage if they were simply honest about their concerns. Of which there are two: pride and money. Way back in the 1930s, the mob traded Congress legal alcohol for illegal drugs, especially cocaine and marijuana. That allowed the federal government to be drunk and to tax drunks while the mob got to hang on to its monopoly of the rest of the recreational drug market. Changing the rules now would be admitting that the rules have been asinine for the last seventy years. They have been, get over it.
Even more important to Congress and the federal and state bureaucracies is the money they will be giving up if they let go of their anti-drug pretense. Cops, from the CIA to local police departments, have been raking in the cash from "the War on Drugs" for seventy years, but they became especially enamored of the phony battle during the Reagan years when they were given special gifts of power and corruption over the average citizen. The feds and state hacks have been hauling in billions of taxpayer dollars to toss into the black hole of prisons, prison guards, and the giant and ineffective apparatus with which they have constructed to play their paintball war on "crime" and they don't want to kill this golden goose.
If they didn't have drugs to pretend to regulate, we might expect them to fight real criminals, especially the super dangerous ones wearing suits and heading the international corporations that do the most damage to the nation's communities and security. Imagine a justice system that actually chased real criminals, instead of inventing crimes and criminals? Nah, not in this country. No money in it.
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