WILLIE NELSON, PUBLIC ENEMY?

In the midst of the United States going nearly broke from the Iraq
war, the war on terror, and a rupturing corporate and personal
welfare state, I cannot imagine something more pointless and wasteful
than the war on drugs. In my own neck of the woods, several busts
have occurred recently, bringing to "justice" cultivators of patches
of marijuana in various swanky neighborhoods, at huge cost to
law-enforcement organizations, which is to say, to the citizenry that
funds them. But that is not really the worst of it.

Willie Nelson, the musician -- who looks to me to be about as
harmless a soul on the entertainment-celebrity roster as one can
imagine -- was recently busted for having and using some pot on his
tour bus. That, by all accounts, is the reality and the symbol of the
worst aspects of this utterly insane undertaking, the war on drugs.

The man was doing no one any harm -- he could have been sipping a
beer, chewing tobacco or having a martini but, instead, his choice of
drugs was one that happens, quite irrationally, to seriously offend
influential elements of the voting public and politicians. This new
prohibition is, of course, no more sensible, nor any more in accord
with principles of a just human community -- which is supposed to
leave us free of out-of-control, offended meddlesome folks -- than
was the previous nationwide prohibition of alcohol that finally had
to be scrapped because of the bona fide crime it spawned. In the case
of Willie Nelson, though, there is something else that this insane,
immoral war illustrates.

American prisons are filled with such harmless drug offenders! I was
recently visiting one of those, in Lompoc, Calif., and some 70
percent of the inmates are there for having been convicted of
drug-related offenses. Some are users, some are pushers or dealers,
some are probably more involved on the enforcement side of the
industry (which, being illegal, cannot count on the official police
to provide any remedy for the commercial malfeasance that plagues
many enterprises).

All this is happening in what President George W. Bush and his pals
so proudly call a free country. Indeed, as they would have it, the
only country on the face of the globe truly involved in spreading
liberty to all. What a crock that is, and how hypocritical it must
come off to most observant foreigners, including, sadly, the worst of
them whose hatred of America and its professed system, a free
capitalist society, is very likely fed by it.

Also, since the United States has more prisoners than nearly any
country around the world, and since that's something people tend to
find disturbing about a society, namely its huge prison population --
given that this suggests widespread serious criminal activity in the
place -- the proclamation by our leaders that we are a bastion of
liberty can only be most embarrassing and self-defeating.

Of course, free men and women can become criminals. No one should
expect a free society to be a utopia. Yet, it does reflect badly on
the United States to have so many of its citizens turn to crime. And
when looked at without a careful consideration of what counts as
crime in the country, this bodes ill for the very idea of a free
society. It makes it look like freedom and crime go hand in hand. So
the very objective that supposedly animates Bush & Co. in the Iraqi
war -- spreading freedom to the world's enslaved and oppressed -- can
seem rather pointless and even counterproductive, given this
association of what is deemed a free society and the proclivity to
crime by so many of its citizens.

Yet, of course, the crimes these citizens have a proclivity for are
phony crimes. It is as if eating hot dogs were a crime, or dancing,
or watching professional sports on TV. No wonder the prisons are full
- -- prisoners occupy them who have been put there unjustly, without
any good reason.

The statistics do not, of course, show this. But if one extrapolates
from the prison I visited to all the rest, it looks like the criminal
element in the country is but a fraction of those who are officially
deemed to be criminals.

I do wish Willie Nelson could generate a revolution from his own
perfectly unjust and vile arrest on the charge of indulging in the
use of marijuana. We need this war on drugs ended, immediately. Maybe
that would not only improve our reputation abroad but could divert
the misused monies funding it to something worthwhile -- for example,
tax reduction.