A NEW REEFER MADNESS

December is the season for giving, and no one gives more generously 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 million 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 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 for the average American
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 about what the drug war is all about ought to
consider what it tells us that our federal government is trying to
make it illegal to effectively protest that war. Fence sitters might
also want to view 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 an extensive 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
African-American). With guns pointed at their heads, students were
handcuffed and forced to lie on the floor, or to kneel with their
faces to the wall.

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.