GETTING THE DRUG WAR YOU PAID FOR

There was a predictable amount of hand-wringing when a hunter-killer
pack of Peruvian Air Force jets -- guided to their target by a U.S.
"civilian" Drug War crew under contract to the CIA, who now
righteously whine "We told them to check their photo ID" -- shot down
a civilian seaplane near the Colombian border in late April, murdering
American missionary Veronica Bowers of Michigan and her 7-month-old
daughter, Charity.

But why all this fake horror? Do the vast majority of you folks out
there support the Drug War -- even while admitting it can't be won,
clinging to the feeble excuse that legalizing stuff less damaging than
alcohol and less addictive than tobacco will somehow "send the wrong
message to the children" -- or don't you?

Unless you're in favor of legalizing all drugs, right now, then
watching Roni Bowers and her baby choke and scream and bleed and drown
in some distant muddy jungle river is exactly what you asked for, what
you pay your taxes for, and what you ought to have to watch on
videotape every night before you go to sleep.

Those who favor locking up hundreds of thousands of our young men for
committing victimless crimes disingenuously insist: "Drug use does too
have victims; every user is a victim."

Yeah, yeah, and everyone who's ever patronized a tattoo parlor will be
victimized for the rest of his or her life by the social prejudice
that assumes people with tattoos are low-income losers. What are you
going to do about it -- break down their doors and shoot all the
tattoo artists on sight?

Like people who get tattooed -- like folks who choose to kill
themselves slowly with alcohol and tobacco -- drug users do it on purpose.

The significance of turning such behaviors into "victimless crimes" is
that unlike legitimate police work -- we know how many armed robberies
occur because the victims can generally be relied upon to call police
right quick -- few drug users ever dial 9-1-1 and report "Hey, some
guy just sold me drugs, and I think it may be illegal!"

So police are reduced to going undercover, reading our e-mail, bribing
bank tellers to snitch on us if we deposit or withdraw large sums of
money, training kids to turn in their parents like good little Hitler
Jugend, dragging our half-naked neighbors out of their homes at 4 in
the morning, and generally coarsening our once free and polite society
by getting us all accustomed to standing there like nervous sheep,
avoiding eye contact and hoping we won't be next as we watch folks
strip-searched and hauled away for "observed bowel movements" at the
airport in an escalating (albeit fruitless) series of affronts to
human decency not seen since the days of Dr. Joseph Mengele or,
possibly, the heyday of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

Our Fearless Drug Warriors have murdered thousands of innocent
bystanders and carelessly misidentified "suspects" in recent years,
and it's a rare cop who's suffered the indignity of so much as a
single night in jail, providing they could claim by the furthest
stretch of the imagination to have been operating "in the line of duty."

Has everyone forgotten millionaire recluse Donald Scott, 61, whose
200-acre ranch in the hills above Malibu was coveted by the
bureaucrats who operated adjoining state and national recreational
areas?

Meeting at Scott's front gate early on the morning of Oct. 2, 1992, 30
plainclothes officers with dogs reviewed maps of the land they'd be
able to seize if they could catch Scott or his wife in possession of
so much as a single joint of marijuana. These eager land thieves then
proceeded to cut the gate chain with bolt cutters and storm the Scott
kitchen, where an unsuspecting Mrs. Scott was preparing her morning
coffee.

Mrs. Scott screamed that strange, unidentified men were attacking her.
Awakened, Donald Scott ran down the stairs with his handgun, and was
shot and killed. No marijuana was ever found. Later, when a mysterious
fire burned down the house, these same park police refused to let fire
engines cross their territory, preferring to see the widow Scott
burned out of house and home.

Has everyone forgotten the Rev. Accelyne Williams, the 75-year-old
Methodist minister who was chased around his Boston apartment by
police conducting a no-knock raid looking for drugs and guns in 1994?
He collapsed and died of a heart attack. No guns or drugs were ever
found, since police had raided an apartment on a different floor from
that specified by their "snitch." In that case, the Boston police
chief did, at least, apologize.

Has everyone forgotten Esequiel Hernandez, the Texas teen-ager shot
and killed by U.S. Marines in May of 1997 for the crime of plinking
tin cans while out herding his family's goats near the Mexican border
at a location which had been (unbeknownst to him) -- staked out by our
military -- operating on U.S. soil -- as a likely smugglers' point of
entry?

How about 64-year-old John Adams -- shot and killed in front of his
wife after police broke into his Tennessee home last fall while
serving a drug warrant -- which actually named the house next door?

Annie Rae Dixon -- the bedridden 84-year-old killed by police in a
1992 East Texas drug raid based on testimony from a bogus informant?
No drugs were found in the home; an officer said his automatic pistol
accidentally discharged as he kicked open Mrs. Dixon's bedroom door.

Need we go on? The Media Awareness Project's "Drugnews Archive" lists
57,250 such Drug War-related news clippings at www.mapinc.org/drugnews
[ Editor's note: Since Vin penned this article, the toll has risen to
57,413 clippings. By the time you read this, it will no doubt be a
little higher still.] (see also www.injusticeline.com/victims.html )
... without even mentioning, so far as I can determine, the
inconvenient fact that the only way our proud BATF "Gun Police" could
get around restrictions on the use of military equipment on U.S. soil
in order to hit the Mount Carmel Church in Waco, Texas in 1993 with
National Guard helicopters and tanks ... pardon me, "armored personnel
carriers" ... was to swear out a brazenly perjurious affidavit
claiming they thought David Koresh was operating a methamphetamine lab
in a Christian church community full of children, senior citizens, and
men with Harvard law degrees.

It's your War on Drugs, folks. You can't vote for it, fund it, endorse
it, slap on bumperstickers bragging that your kids have wasted their
time in absurd programs founded on the notion that uniformed cops are
best qualified to teach comparative pharmacology, and then say, "No,
we never meant for them to end up murdering some Michigan missionary
and her baby in some stinking jungle somewhere."

Legalize it. Either that, or stop complaining, and start looking over
your shoulder. Because it's your Drug War ... and you could be next.