PHARMACRACY

Gov. Bill Owens has discovered that moralizing with the coercive force of
the state is very expensive. Too bad the idea that drug users might just be
sinners rather than criminals or victims is never presented.

"Pharmacracy" would be a better word to describe what passes for government
in America today. The marriage of medicine and government delivers the
therapeutic state, which evolved from the theologic state Thomas Jefferson
freed mankind from. Sadly, Americans have learned how to do their
moralizing in medical terms.

Persecuting drug users with incarceration or treatment is a perversion of
justice. Eventually, the error of that madness will see the therapeutic
state destroy itself. In Jefferson's time, lust and gluttony explained
addiction.

As Jefferson wrote: "Were the government to prescribe to us our medicine
and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in
France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potato as an
article of food.

"Government is just as infallible (sic), too, when it fixes systems in
physics. Galileo was sent to the Inquisition for affirming that the earth
was a sphere. ... It is error alone which needs the support of government.
Truth can stand by itself."

CHRIS BUORS

Winnipeg, Canada