Police idol worship. Even Nazis had their followers. This is like the TV series "Cops" where a bunch of cameramen-groupies follow cops around snooping on people and arresting them on the flimiest of excuses to ruin their lives. The first arrest is for running a stop sign in rural LoserTown, USA. Of course, they're all making overtime, and not sweating their lives trying to take down a major gang leader who can shoot back. In the first arrest, almost a dozen cops converge on a poor addict-mother and threaten to take her children away if she doesn't show them where the $20 smudge of heroin is hidden. She shows them, and they arrest her anyway. Easy-peasy. This is how a police state works.
As the Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman said, "prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse -- for both the addict and the rest of us." He thought it "absolutely disgraceful" for the state (supposedly our "democratic" government) to be in the position of "converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail" (and, I might add, destroying their future prospects for work with a permanent prison record which limits future job prospects, which puts a 2-3% damper on our country's GDP, and creates the biggest prison population in the world.
"Repealing drug prohibition is part of a broader problem of cutting down the scope and power of government and restoring power to the people," Friedman said. It would also lower the cost of health care, denying doctors the "monopoly power to prescribe" which has historically been the purview of its citizenry.
Our western frontiers were conquered by ancestors who self-medicated. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin grew poppy in their gardens. Heroin was over-the-counter until the 1920s, barbituates into the 1950s, codeine until the 1960s. The Afghan opium farmer has more freedom than the average American boomer, dying in agony from bone cancer because he can't reach his doctor to refill his pain medication, or because he can't afford the skyrocketing costs of health care.
The War on Drugs is destroying third world countries with corruption and destroying American freedom with bureaucracy. It must end. That's the inadvertent message of this series.
As the Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman said, "prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse -- for both the addict and the rest of us." He thought it "absolutely disgraceful" for the state (supposedly our "democratic" government) to be in the position of "converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail" (and, I might add, destroying their future prospects for work with a permanent prison record which limits future job prospects, which puts a 2-3% damper on our country's GDP, and creates the biggest prison population in the world.
"Repealing drug prohibition is part of a broader problem of cutting down the scope and power of government and restoring power to the people," Friedman said. It would also lower the cost of health care, denying doctors the "monopoly power to prescribe" which has historically been the purview of its citizenry.
Our western frontiers were conquered by ancestors who self-medicated. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin grew poppy in their gardens. Heroin was over-the-counter until the 1920s, barbituates into the 1950s, codeine until the 1960s. The Afghan opium farmer has more freedom than the average American boomer, dying in agony from bone cancer because he can't reach his doctor to refill his pain medication, or because he can't afford the skyrocketing costs of health care.
The War on Drugs is destroying third world countries with corruption and destroying American freedom with bureaucracy. It must end. That's the inadvertent message of this series.
