POT GROWERS ARE NEW TARGET IN "WAR ON TERROR"

Last time we checked in on the bizarro nexus between cannabis and
terrorism, it was none other than actor/director Tommy Chong who was
feeling the Bush administration's post-9/11 wrath. In fact, the
stoner icon, whose fabled act was concurrently resuscitated for Fox's
drugged and confused comedy hit That 70s Show, was being slapped by
John Ashcroft with a nine-month prison bid, a $20,000 fine and over
$100,000 in seized assets for selling bongs. The terrorism
connection? He was sentenced on Sept. 11, 2003. And if you think
that's a specious connection, it's only gotten worse since. In fact,
over the last few years, "terrorist" has become an epithet for all seasons.

In 2003, Iraq occupation architect Richard Perle slapped
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh with the term, saying, "Look,
Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist,
frankly." As if filing a story about the doomed occupation of a
sovereign state in the pages of the New Yorker was the same thing as
flying a 747 into the World Trade Center.

In 2004, Secretary of Education Rod Paige called the National
Education Association, the country's largest teachers union, "a
terrorist organization" because of what Paige defined as the
"obstructionist scare tactics" used by its lobbyists. Because we all
know it's every educator's dream to buck the systemby blowing
themselves up in front of their students.

And just this month, the Bush administration decided to employ the
term to legally target the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a
sovereign nation's standing army numbering in the hundreds of
thousands. When you want a war that badly, you'll pretty much do or
say anything to get it.

So how does the Bush administration get away with crying terrorist at
every opportunity? Say hello to the Military Commissions Act. Thanks
to this 2006 piece of legislation, terrorism has become the basis of
American foreign and domestic policy. Yes, the term has become
equivalent to everything from ideologically driven violence to petty
theft, and can be used to incarcerate, exterminate or character
assassinate anything in sight.

It's no wonder then that federal officials are now revisiting their
previously failed effort to link terrorism to cannabis, the only real
cash cow in the government's so-called War on Drugs. Only difference
is, this time, they don't have Tommy Chong as a scapegoat.

Unable or unwilling to solve the nation's crippling meth addiction or
its hypocritical dependency on prescribed narcotics like oxycontin,
the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) recently rang the
terrorism alarm to nail pot growers in Redding's Shasta-Trinity
National Forest in California. Along the way, ONDCP "czar" John
Walters showed off not only the Bush administration's love of twisted
terminology but also its subcultural savvy by coining a memorable
phrase of his own.

"We have kind of a reefer blindness," Walters explained during a
Redding press conference on the ONDCP's Operation Alesia, a
cannabis-eradication program coordinated by the California National
Guard's Counterdrug Taskforce and the Shasta County Sheriff's Office.
Walters followed that clever turn of phrase with the reliable
terrorist designation to describe the armed growers cultivating
cannabis in Shasta County. "These people are armed; they're
dangerous. [They're] violent criminal terrorists." He even went so
far to argue that the "terrorists" growing weed in Shasta County, as
the Redding Record Searchlight reported, "wouldn't hesitate to help
other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties."

Except there seem to be a couple major problems with Walters'
characterizations. For one, Walters declined to explain during the
press conference what Operation Alesia's specific goals were. More
importantly, he didn't offer up any concrete names of the terrorists
or their ideological objectives. What legalization advocates and law
enforcement authorities alike were left with was yet another hazy
strategy based on loose terminology whose only purpose it seems is to
confiscate as much pot as possible from Shasta County's public lands.

A noble pursuit to be sure, but counterterrorism? Hardly.

Especially when rural Shasta County's biggest problem is meth, not
marijuana, addiction. Further, Walters' coded terminology, when
unmasked, is not employed to raise awareness of al Qaeda's grand
cannabis cultivation strategy to destabilize the American government,
but rather to inflame regional biases against, you guessed it,
Mexicans. Especially the undocumented variety, who are "the other
terrorists" Walters mentioned looking to get into the country and,
what again? I asked Mike Odle, public affairs and communications
officer for Shasta-Trinity National Forest's Northern California
Coordination Center to elaborate on what was behind the increase in
cultivated cannabis on Shasta's public lands.

"Most of the increase can be attributed to the proliferation of
foreign Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs), mostly Mexican in
origin, which operate in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest and
throughout California and much of the United States," Odle explained
to me by email. "Frequently using illegal aliens residing outside the
United States, or recently smuggled across the [sic] boarder, these
Mexican criminal groups establish, maintain and protect an increasing
number of clandestine operations."

Yet, predictably, Odle couldn't explain what made them terrorists.

"Some DTOs have been linked by law enforcement and investigations to
terrorist organizations and pose a substantial and increasing threat
to national security," he added in a subsequent email. "Our primary
concern here on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest is the safety of
our forest visitors and agency employees and the negative impacts
marijuana has on the environment and natural resources, no matter
what name is given to the DTOs that are illegally growing marijuana
on America's public lands."

No matter what name is given? Easy enough if you're the one doing the
naming. If you're the one being flippantly tagged a terrorist? Not so much.

Plus, there are enough holes in the argument to plant your own
cannabis seeds. To start with, cannabis may be many things, but it is
far from an environmental negative. It has been used for medicinal
purposes for thousands of years, can grow in almost any climate, and
is a naturally occurring dioecious perennial. (In other words, it's
not fossil fuel.) Further, Odle's claim that safety is Shasta's first
concern is understandable, but he offered no examples of violent
activity by any of the area growers to legitimize the ONDCP's
inflammatory language. Sure, the fact that "some" DTOs have been
linked to terrorist organizations is educational, but as with
everything the ONDCP touches, specifics are elusive and
generalizations are everywhere.

I pressed Odle for further clarification on the terrorism question.
But instead of al Qaeda, all I got was more obfuscation. And more Mexicans.

"Do [sic] to ongoing investigations, I am limited in what I can
share," Odle explained in another email. "When we do the
investigations we try to get up as far as we can into the food chain.
We work closely with the DEA, FBI, ICE and other law enforcement
agencies that have the capabilities to identify who these folks are
and what links they may or may not have."

Fair enough. It's out of his hands. Any concrete local examples?

"I can [sic] site an example in a case we are now finished
investigating. The Forest Service was heavily involved with the
eradication of marijuana gardens associated with the Magana drug
cartel. The Magana drug cartel operation and investigation occurred
throughout National Forests in California, Utah and Arkansas, with
direct ties to Mexico. Investigators in the Magana case said cartel
leaders brought in illegal workers from the Mexican states of
Michoacan and Jalisco."

In short, terrorism isn't the real problem here, it's illegal
immigration. Not convinced? When you get a chance, search Google for
"Magana drug cartel" and let me know if you can find anything. Even
better, try the ONDCP, and let me know if anything unrelated to
cocaine shows up. Even if you give Walters, Odle and other so-called
counterterrorism experts their due on the Magana drug cartel or other
so-called terrorist organizations who the ONDCP cannot actually name
(making sure to look up the definition of "cartel" in the process, if
you want to be exhaustive about it), what you end up with are
cannabis traffickers and cultivators operating illegally on public
lands using undocumented immigrants.

Illegal activity? Fine. Terrorism? Are you high?

The Bush administration's hypocritical bait-and-switch between
terrorism and immigration is clumsy for certain, but it is especially
glaring in light of a recent Washington Times article criticizing
none other than President Bush himself. According to the piece, a
"2006 audit showed federal, state and local governments are among the
biggest employers of the half-million persons in the U.S. illegally
using 'non-work' Social Security numbers -- numbers issued legally,
but with specific instructions that the holders are not authorized to
work in the U.S." And that charge was leveled by Iowa Republican and
ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee's immigration
subcommittee Rep. Steve King, in a politically conservative
publication founded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, cult leader of the
Unification Church.

Even the Moonies think that Bush needs to start throwing what the
president's own drug czar would call terrorists out of his own White
House, before he starts worrying about anyone else. After all,
according to the audit, his own government is a much worse offender
than the ragged Magana cartel growing cannabis in the forests of Redding.

By the time the ONDCP's talking points touched on other byproducts of
commercially cultivated cannabis terrorism -- "fire violations,
unsanitary conditions, littering, smoking, building unauthorized
structures, unauthorized camping and cutting trees without a permit
to name a few," in Odle's words -- I began to more fully understand
the power of language. By capitalizing on a nationally manufactured
fear and simply merging words into each other, the Bush
administration has created from its hyperreal imagination a living
policy that can have real-world ramifications for those trampled
beneath its fluid terminology.

The good news is that the Democrats in Congress are at least trying
to make up for their heinous complicity in the Military Commissions
Act, whose passage helped enable this linguistic nightmare in the
first place. As recently as July 2007, Committee on Oversight and
Government Reform chairman Rep. Henry Waxman wrote Walters asking why
American taxpayers have been footing the bill for ONDCP officials to
travel around the country with Republican candidates stumping for
election at the behest of Karl Rove. Striking hard at Bush
administration politicization of the ONDCP is a good start, but
stopping their ability to label anyone anything they want would go
much farther to restoring sensible policy, on drugs and everything
else, for the rest of our new millennium.

We're going to need help soon, if the recent white papers on drug
abuse from the ONDCP are any indication. Because they've enlisted God
for help in beating back the devil weed, as their fact sheet
"Marijuana and Kids: Faith" explains: "Religion and religiosity
repeatedly correlate with lower teen and adult marijuana and
substance use rates and buffer the impact of life stress which can
lead to marijuana and substance use. ... Other studies show that
teens who don't view faith as important are up to four times more
likely to use marijuana."

In other words, smoke up, heretical terrorist! You're not only
fueling al Qaeda's mass murder by purchasing weed cultivated by
illegal Mexicans in the rural public lands of the world, but you're
also turning your back on God in the process. As well as replacing
the Bush administration's real world with your selfish virtual
reality in which cannabis is a relatively harmless, naturally
occurring plant that can chill you out as much as it can fill you
out. A massive, multiplayer simulation where pot is a viable
medicinal alternative to synthesized painkillers like oxycontin,
which ease your agony by killing you off altogether.

According to the Bush administration and its politicized ONDCP, you
need to unplug from that moonbat matrix and start praying. Fast. Or else.