Conspiracy Theories

READER REACTIONS TO DRUG POLICY ENLIGHTEN

It's going to be hard to follow the brilliant and incisive work of
Larry Gabriel ("When science goes to pot") in last week's Higher
Ground, but one thing I've noticed over the years is that when the
government commissions a study into the adverse effects of marijuana
and the answer comes back "none," the report is simply ignored and the
government goes right on with its program for the harassment and
eradication of recreational drug users.

My memory isn't that great anymore, but I can't remember a single
study that concluded marijuana is bad for human beings or has any
negative effect on the workings of our society. As far as I've read,
no deaths have resulted from marijuana use. It's not toxic, it's not
addictive, it doesn't lead to violent or abusive behavior, and, in
fact, marijuana offers great medicinal and healing benefits not found
elsewhere -- with the added attraction of blessed mental relief from
the incessant poundings of daily life.

None of this fits with the orthodox mythology, however, so findings
are routinely ignored, alcohol continues as the authorized social drug
of choice, the pharmaceutical industry continues to boom as the
nation's official drug supply, and the political underwriters of the
established policy keep up their barrage of gibberish while voting
billions for the relentless enforcement of their endless laws against
recreational drug use.

Nixon got one of these reports just before firing the opening salvos
of the War on Drugs that's raged almost 40 years and torn apart the
lives of millions of American citizens who chose to reject the
government's phony science and to smoke marijuana or get high in other
prohibited ways in informed defiance of the law.

We've paid dearly for these choices; some think that's the point.
Robert Carpenter writes, "It is, of course, true that the drug war has
failed, insofar as its stated goals are concerned. The question,
however, is whether the stated goals made in support of policy by the
political class are necessarily the actual goals. ...

"On the Watergate tape recordings, President Nixon left no doubt as to
his deep hatred of hippies, the counterculture, every minority group
one can name, gays, and of course blacks. On the tapes Nixon
demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of racial slurs and says words
to the effect that the problem with the country now is the blacks. And
H.R. Haldeman famously remarks that what's needed is a program which
can deal with the blacks while not appearing to do so.

"What he means of course is that, in the wake of the civil rights
legislation, a new means of containing blacks must be devised, now
that the Jim Crow laws have been dismantled. That new means was the
War on Drugs in which Nixon deployed his DEA and militarized civilian
police forces with his SWAT programs, tanks, armored carriers and the
like.

"With the War on Drugs, I believe Nixon -- perhaps the most cynical and
diabolically ingenious president of all time -- understood that with
the DEA interdictions he could drive up the street price of drugs,
entice the poor, black urban underclass into dealing in them, and use
the newly militarized civilian police forces as the front lines of a
massive plan to begin turning blacks into felons and creating a ruling
class in poor black ghettos where, as W.F. Buckley put it, the drug
dealers would become the overlords.

"In brief, I think Nixon's War on Drugs can best be described as a
strategy for producing delinquents. ... His problem was how to reverse
the integrative processes under way, to delinquintize black
populations so as to quell integration and instill in whites a great
fear of a dangerous, delinquent black class.

"On that score," citizen Carpenter concludes, "the War on Drugs has
been a resounding success, and, as many point out, nearly one out of
three young black males in urban areas are under the administration of
the Justice Department -- in jail awaiting trial, as convicted felons,
incarcerated or as parolees.

"There are, of course, many other goals and interests one could name
in the War on Drugs -- from asset forfeiture, which turns law
enforcement into third-party beneficiaries, to the prison guard
unions, the treatment centers and so on. But I believe Nixon, the
president who federalized on a massive scale the War on Drugs, had in
mind the delinquintization of newly emancipated blacks as his primary
goal for the program."

Here's another reader, Justin Kline: "I recently had a friend serve up
the idea that 'prohibition' was due to Henry Ford manufacturing cars
with newer engines that ran on corn liquor (ethanol). Prohibition was
contrived to force the farmers to keep using the output of the fledgling
oil industry. i.e., protecting a special-interest group [that] was an
entire industry.

"Next, my friend claimed that marijuana was declared illegal nearly to
the day that nylon was invented. The grand obfuscation was to word the
law with the name 'hemp' as the general scheme of the scam, which is a
general category that merely includes marijuana. Almost nobody knows,
even now, that the law reads 'hemp.'

"Thus, the true mission was cloaked right from the beginning, i.e.,
protecting a special-interest group -- nowhere close to the claims of
health or morals. ... Let me know if this starts to look like
something worthy of your time and not just another rant from the
'conspiracy theory squad.'"

It's good to think of all these potential causes in our search for
truth, because we know the official anti-drug gobbledygook is false.
It's sad to keep beating this same dead horse, but they've got to drag
it off the track and let real life return for our nation's
recreational users.

Asset forfeiture: I was tipped off by Eapen Thampy of Americans for
Forfeiture Reform, a nonprofit group based in Kansas City, to the
chilling article "Stealing Camp Zoe: The Forfeiture Gang Strikes," where
William Norman Grigg of the Pro Libertate blog and radio program details
the massive raid on a rural Arkansas music venue by federal, state and
local law enforcement authorities "dispatched to clean out the personal
and business accounts of Jimmy Tebeau, the musician and entrepreneur who
owns and operates the campground."

Camp Zoe was opened in 2004, by Tebeau, bassist in a popular band
called the Schwag, and "by some accounts, the 330-acre Camp Zoe is
Shannon County's largest employer. ... Tebeau himself is not accused
of a crime. Yet Camp Zoe has been seized and Tebeau's personal
financial assets have been confiscated by a motley assortment of 'law
enforcement' groups [who] ... will be permitted to keep [the assets]
and divide [them] among themselves unless Tebeau can prove a negative
- -- namely, that he did not knowingly permit the sale and use of
proscribed substances by others."

This will take some readers back to the vicious felony prosecution of
the promoter of the Goose Lake Pop Festival in 1970. Then they just
wanted revenge: Now they want the land itself.

I'm out of space now so I'll try to explore asset forfeiture more
fully in future columns. Let me close with the words of reader
Kimberly Miller, who points out that "Americans have been consuming,
growing and distributing pot from the time settlers set foot on this
land, with or without the approval or guidance of anyone else but
themselves. ... And those who don't understand or care about the
remedies marijuana has to offer, guess what? "You don't have to use
it."