'PROTECTING' THE PUBLIC FROM DRUGS

December is the season for giving, and no one gives more generous gifts
than the U.S. Congress. Of course, Congress has the advantage of doing its
last-minute holiday shopping at someone else's expense, namely yours and mine.

For example, on Dec. 8, the House of Representatives passed a bill that
gives the White House drug czar's office $145,000,000 of taxpayer money to
run anti-marijuana propaganda ads. My personal favorite in this genre is a
television ad in which police rough up a high school student when arresting
him in the school's marijuana-smoke-filled bathroom. This is followed by a
caption reading, ''Marijuana: Harmless? Think again.'' (And no, I did not
make that up).

Yet this bill contains something far more obnoxious than pots of money for
another round of clueless anti-marijuana propaganda. A section of the bill
prohibits any local transit system that receives federal funding from
running privately funded ads that call for marijuana policy reform.

In other words, at the same time that the federal government is forcing you
to spend your money to publicize its willingness to engage in storm trooper
tactics to persecute the tens of millions Americans who smoke or have
smoked marijuana, it is trying to prohibit you from having the freedom to
spend your money to protest these same tactics.

If this bill becomes law, it will be illegal to buy advertising space on a
city bus or in a subway station, advocating that doctors be given the right
to prescribe marijuana as a painkiller for their terminally ill patients.

Two words that are thrown around far too loosely in political debate are
''fascism'' and ''unconstitutional.'' Nevertheless, this sort of thing has
a distinctly fascist tinge. And if the First Amendment means anything, it
ought to mean that the government cannot take away the right of citizens to
engage in public political protest.

Anyone who has doubts that the drug war is wrong ought to consider what it
tells us when our federal government tries to make it illegal to protest
that war. Fence sitters might also want to view a the video from the
surveillance tape at a Goose Creek, S.C., high school, which on Nov. 5 was
raided by police looking for drugs. (A photo from the tape can be viewed at
www.mpp.org).

After a search, the police found no drugs, but they did terrorize more than
100 students (two-thirds of whom were black, even though less than 25
percent of the school's student body is black). With guns pointed at their
heads, students were handcuffed and forced to lie on the floor.

One student said he assumed the police ''were trying to protect us, that it
was like Columbine, that somebody got in the school that was crazy or
dangerous. But then a police officer pointed a gun at me. It was really
scary.''

What's really scary is that incidents such as this seem to stir so little
outrage. What level of government persecution will put a dent in public
apathy about the madness that is the war on drugs?

If the police at the Goose Creek high school had inadvertently shot a
student or two in their zealous search for marijuana cigarettes, would that
be enough to distract people from holiday shopping and channel surfing? Or
would such an incident be shrugged off as another regrettable accident of
the sort that is inevitable in wartime? Take a look at that photograph, and
consider: This is your government on drugs.