Public Enemy No.1
Public Enemy No. 1
The U.S. drug police, the Drug Enforcement Agency, have taken it upon themselves to raid medical marijuana dispensaries Tuesday in six Washington cities – Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Puyallup, Lacey and Rochester.
The DEA should pick on somebody its own size and leave the sick and dying alone.
The people of the state of Washington had the good sense to approve medical marijuana years ago, in 1998, by voter initiative passed by 59% of voters there. The people of Washington, and 15 other states and D.C., have more sense than the elected representatives and presidents who occupy Washington D.C. The people, and state legislators in some of these states, legalized medical marijuana despite a federal law classifying marijuana as a “Schedule I” drug, supposedly meaning one that had “no medicinal value.” Pooh on federal intransigency, ignorance and intolerance.
How can I register my disgust and disrespect for the actions of the DEA, U.S. Atty. General Eric Holder, and the U.S. attorneys and local law-enforcement personnel who had a hand in these Washington and California drug raids? These actions are pathetic, more reflective of a totalitarian state where civil rights and liberty give way to prisons, cameras in the public way, and corruption. I am infuriated beyond words.
President Obama you have about irretrievably lost my vote.
Just so you understand, I am opposed to the use of drugs and I was once a Chicago drug prosecutor. But I am more opposed to the thuggery, oppression, intolerance, and counter-productive stupidity of the drug war, especially with regard to marijuana, a substance that truly is a lifesaver for so many people, and a recreational lift for so many others, though not me.
The idiotic war on drugs has so transformed my country that some days I hardly recognize her. Yesterday, with the DEA unchained and on the loose, was one of them. The police busting down doors in surprise attacks to seize a green leaf or powdered drugs before the toilet flushes, super max concentration camps, the prison and jail sprawls, the unbalanced priorities, the transformation of the law into a instrument of harm and evil, and the erasure of the thin blue line than once demarcated the criminals from the “good guys” in blue.
Mr. President. End this bloody, intolerant, freedom-destroying, value-crushing, marijuana-raiding abomination of a prohibition policy or resign. Forget re-election, quit now, if you don’t recognize that the drug war is a greater threat to America than nuclear bombs, a sick economy with too few jobs, or any other threat domestic or foreign.
The war on drugs is Public Enemy No. 1.
James E. Gierach
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, Board Member
www.leap.cc
11.16.11
