The Conscience of Abe’s Turn freedom of speech, defense, and life

The Marijuana Policy Project reports on a study examining what happens when we over-inflate the risks of using drugs. The study, recently published in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, notes that when the kids finally learn the truth, “intentions to engage in threatened behavior may be amplified.”

Of course, this is old news, or at least it should be. Telling someone not to do something just makes them want to do it more, and then lying to them about the dangers just encourages them to ignore you. No kidding? Maybe next we can commission a study to prove that water is wet.

My criticism is particularly aimed at government propaganda, funded with our tax dollars, in part by the drug czar. Yes, we hope that Obama’s new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske might soften government policy, but I’m not too confident that he’ll soften the propaganda, because if drugs really weren’t as dangerous as the drug czar’s office purports, then we wouldn’t even need “harm reduction,” and the drug czar would be out of a job. (See also yesterday’s post regarding Kerlikowske.)

My beef is with government propaganda, not what we parents tell our kids, because out here in the real world, American citizens are more and more realizing how baldly we have been duped. A recent Rasmussen poll even showed that more Americans support marijuana legalization than believe that the government “stimulus plan” will actually help the economy.

But what choice do we parents have? If we tell our kids the truth about drugs, we will be censured and contradicted by the state and by the government schools. We could even be charged with child abuse, if we live up to what we really believe.

And then there’s the true risk of using drugs, which could not continue without the propoganda, not the risk of the drugs themselves, but of the ass-fuckers who stand behind and enforce drug prohibition. Cops are still able to pad their budgets using asset forfeiture laws. They commonly terrorize innocent people who have nothing to do with drugs. And you as a parent are at risk for what your kids do, for example, if your kid tries a drug like marijuana. Writes one mother whose home was terrorized in a government paramilitary raid in Carrol County, Maryland, in which 16 SWAT-goon dickheads waved loaded M-16 assault rifles at her family, handcuffed, including her pre-teen son:

We have since learned that over 100 of these warrants have been issued by the judges here in Carroll County during the past year. Apparently if your son or daughter is arrested with even a trace of marijuana in Carroll County, they will follow up and issue a warrant based on one officer’s belief that the person will abuse the drug again. We have now heard horror stories of other families just like ours that have also been traumatized in much the same way.

(Click here to read the whole story.)

Now, I don’t know if there have really been over 100 similar warrants issued. Thanks as usual to Radley Balko for doing the legwork and confirming this woman’s story, at least the part about the raid on her home. And even though she might have a reason to exaggerate the extent of the tragedy, her story does sound reasonable to me, because governments frequently issue no-knock warrants en masse, to “clean up” the drug problem. (Funny that they never seem to succeed, huh?)

Radley Balko responds:

I cringe when I hear the phrase “police state,” because it’s so often overused. But to be honest, I’m not sure how I’d argue to this woman that she doesn’t live in one. Two misdemeanor pot charges against a kid who no longer lives at home, and they send the paramilitary squad barreling into his parents’ house in the middle of the night.

This is exactly the situation I find myself in. Yes, I know. It’s easy to overuse the term “police state,” because there is no precise definition of what makes a “police state.” Police-statism operates on a sliding scale between freedom and terror. But like Radley, I’ve also been bombarded with stories like this for too many years, and it breaks my heart and infuriates my sense of justice. I cannot help but believe that we do live—in some sense—in a police state, when government officials perform acts of violence, under the color of law, against innocents, with impunity, and are even sometimes rewarded for it, because they commit these acts in fulfillment of their duties of upholding the law.

Such is not the standard of justice that fosters a prosperous and peaceable society.

Always watching!
-TimK