Where Is The Constitutional Amendment?

To Justify The "War on Drugs"?

For some reason, mainly religious I suppose an amendment was proposed and passed outlawing alcohol back in 1919. The 18th Amendment was passed outlawing the sale and use of alcohol for human consumption. Because a LOT of people like to drink the stuff a underground system came into existence to fill the wants of the people who simply wanted to drink. It cost the lives of many police officers as well as many “gangsters” who engaged in smuggling the product that the public wanted.

It went on with gang warfare over turf, and there is even a song about the Night Chicago Died that is probably based on some fact. So in 1933 after all the death and destruction caused by passing an amendment that too many people didn’t want passed the 21st amendment nullified the 18th.

And here is my question. Since I am of the belief that no crime should exist unless there is a victim involved, when was the Amendment passed to the US Constitution that did away with “recreational” drugs? I can’t seem to find one. Can you? I guess by declaring a “war” on drugs, an amendment wasn’t necessary? Or did someone just decide to do what they are doing which is almost exactly what was going on with prohibition to us today? The only difference being that prohibition lasted from 1919 to 1933. The “war on drugs” has been going on now for over FIFTY YEARS! That’s right, for FIFTY TWO years to be exact. I’m sure glad that WW I or WWII didn’t go on for over fifty years.

And think of it…has it been WON? Well I guess in one respect it has which is shown in the post “The Law Enforcement Growth Industry.” It sure has WON for the ENFORECERS of this insanity. The amount of lives lost and ruined over the war on drugs in astronomical. Think about it, prohibition was for about 14 years from 1919 to 1933. And yet this so called war on drugs has been going on since 1971 when in June 1971, Nixon officially declared a "War on Drugs," stating that drug abuse was "public enemy number one." Well this is 2023 and minus 1971 IS FIFTY TWO YEARS PEOPLE! FIFTY TWO! And the majority of the folks in cages are there for drug related crimes. Some are legitimate like robbing someone to get money for the drugs. But robbery is illegal and wrong no matter what reason the perpetrator claims he is doing it for. And if drugs were legal where you could buy cocaine at Wal-mart the price would most likely be a lot less and you would get a better product. Just don’t put it on the same isle as powdered sugar.

One thing I want to make sure everyone knows here…I PERSONALLY do not participate in drugs at all. I hardly ever take an aspirin let along any kind of drugs. I think my body is too important to destroy it with drugs. I rarely drink a beer or wine cooler. Plus I don’t like what I can see are side effects from seeing how some people I know react to them. Just like how people react to alcohol when they are drinking. So, I don’t RECOMMEND anyone doing them or using them because I think it would be a bad idea. Even IF they were “legalized”.

The profit motive is what keeps the war going just as the profit motive was the reason the gangsters did what they did to make alcohol available to people who wanted to pay for it.

So let us examine the practical side of the war on drugs. For over 52 years the law enforcement community of the United States, has, at the federal, state and local levels, waged the so-called "War on Drugs." Thank you Tricky Dick. They’ve arrested thousands of people, from Manuel Noriega to the local high school’s entrepreneurial pot-pusher. Farmer’s fields in Columbia and other countries in South America have been contaminated by bio-engineered fungi, engineered in American labs, given a bare minimal amount of testing (after all, they’re for use over there, in some other country, not here) and then dropped via airplane. As often as not, the planes miss their target and a field of bananas or other crops are decimated by the rapidly mutating fungus, which was designed to only attack coca plants. Since it is still a living organism that will adapt and annihilate whatever grows in the vicinity, be it coca, bananas or coffee beans.

At home, doors have burst inward under jack-booted feet as machine gun toting drug warriors turn a home and a life upside down because the occupant was suspected of selling drugs. Sometimes they get the right address, and sometimes octogenarians die of heart attacks because the last thing they expected to interrupt their morning oatmeal was the local SWAT team blowing the hinges off of their front door with a shotgun. The local county Drug Task Force likes to send self-congratulatory faxes to the bureau office here, boasting of "successful raids" in which less than half a pound of marijuana was recovered by a team of high-paid cops who are getting overtime for raiding a young couple’s home and ruining their weekend. The question ever remains, however. Is this all worth it? Well I guess if they can confiscate the home and most of the property of the “perp”, it must be worth it. I call it LEGALIZED thievery.

According to the University of Michigan which conducts studies every year of high school seniors about drug use, the rate of use of various drugs has fluctuated as specific types fall in and out of fashion. The only constant being marijuana, which enjoys more and more use year after year. Despite constant funding increases for the Federal; Drug Enforcement Administration ( D.E.A.), and increasingly larger portions of the budgets of local police departments going towards fighting the drug war, no appreciable impact on drug use has been made. Countless billions of dollars, thousands of dead police officers, countless corrupted officials, thousands of gunned down gangsters, millions of arrests, jam-packed prisons, hundreds of D.A.R.E. programs and more than five decades later, find more kids are smoking pot, dropping acid, taking ecstasy and munching on ‘shrooms than ever before. At what point does anyone bother to stop and ask: Is it all worth it? At what price must the "problem" of drug use be fought? Should we just keep shooting kids who panic from a sting and try to get away in the back?

It’s not as though the drug warriors have come up with new or better ideas during all that time, they’ve just spent more money on the same ineffective approaches. It’s almost as though they’re trying to brew a cup of coffee using the ingredients to lemonade. When they wonder why their coffee tastes like lemonade, instead of looking at the possibility that using those ingredients will never make a cup of coffee, they simply add more lemons, more sugar, more ice and more water to the mix and hope to eventually get a cup of coffee out of it. At some point a rational person has to come along and point out that kicking doors, searching cars, arresting dealers, arresting users, dusting peoples crops, etc. are never going to solve what they perceive as the "problem" of drug use. It hasn’t so far, and it won’t in the future.

If police departments hadn’t gotten addicted to asset forfeiture money, more of them would be willing to focus on real crimes, those that leave victims, than on fighting the uphill battle against drug use. The drug war, with its resultant erosion of the Fourth Amendment, has become too profitable for too many police departments. As addictive as heroin is to the user, the guys fighting it have become equally addicted to auctioning off the user’s car, house, computer, etc. And if they can get their hands on the stuff belonging to the guy who sold the user his heroin? Well, Christmas comes early that year. Human beings have a propensity to utilize the least effort they have to get through life. Non violent drug users make easy targets because most will not shoot an officer.

As with anything, the bottom line is money. Drug dealers make money because of the most basic laws of economics. Any economics 101 student knows that given a constant demand for a product, if the supply is artificially reduced, prices skyrocket. While it’s easy for drug dealers to go around the minor obstacle law enforcement poses to their operation, doing so is time consuming and somewhat risky. The dealer/distributor’s costs in paying for carriers, for bribes to government officials and for other expenses get passed on to the user. This is why a plant that grows wild on six continents retails for $10 to $20 a gram. Do the math. There are 453 grams in a pound. Since a gram will get a user two small joints, he/she would have to pay about $4500 for a pound at $10 a gram or $9000 a pound at $20 a gram. See why some people might be willing to violate the “law”? If the drug war were to be stopped from causing the artificial restriction on supply, the resulting excess of marijuana on the market would lower prices to the product’s true market value, which is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/1,000 of its black-market value. With there being no shortage of people willing to pay the black market’s vastly inflated prices for drugs, drug dealers make an enormous amount of money. Just like it was with alcohol prohibition. With asset forfeiture laws, there’s no shortage of police departments that want new, expensive toys and military hardware that are best paid for by auctioning off the aforementioned drug dealer’s yacht, Mercedes, mansion, or anything else they can “legally” steal. With there being no shortage of people willing to pay black-market prices for drugs, there will always be another drug dealer to step up and take over the recently arrested drug dealer’s clientele, usually before the cops are even done filling out all the paperwork on the yacht they’ve just captured. And so on it goes.

We’ve got drug “law” enforcement cops decorating their department with the money seized from drug dealers that were created by the absurd laws the cops are trying to enforce. At this point, law enforcement is making almost as much money on the drug war as the drug dealers are. The only difference lies in the fact that drug dealers pay their own start-up costs. Taxpayers on the state level, subsidize law enforcement’s efforts to legally rob the drug dealers and for their efforts they get the prisons they paid for packed to the rafters with non-violent drug offenders, necessitating the early parole of rapists, child molesters, robbers, muggers and other violent people better left jailed.

So tell me for whose benefit is the drug war being waged today? Minr? Yours? Please, don’t do us any favors.

So much for the practical downside of the War on Drugs. But in addition to these very real disadvantages, the Drug War also lacks any kind of a philosophical justification. Drug use, drug distribution and drug production are textbook examples of victimless crimes. A bully walks up to a person on the street and punches them on the chin with a right cross. According to the law, a crime has just been committed. In this case, it’s pretty obvious who the victim is, the guy on the receiving end of the right hand.

A drug user seeks out a drug dealer and buys drugs from him. According to the law, a crime was just committed. Since the incident was a simple business transaction where two parties decided to exchange their own personal property for their perceived mutual gain, there’s technically no victim. The drugs were worth more to the drug user than was the money paid for them, and the money is worth more to the dealer than the drugs he traded for it. Both parties walk away without victimizing the other. In a just and rational society, this would not be a crime. In our drug war society, the state somehow becomes the "victim" and both the drug user and the drug dealer have somehow "victimized" it. The whole meaning and philosophy of law has to be corrupted and distorted in order to prosecute drug crimes. In essence, a victim had to be created out of nothingness to fill the role of complainant against the two halves of the above described business transaction. The reason why our code of laws has to be distorted so much for drug “crimes” to be prosecuted is because the authors of our philosophy of law, derived from English Common Law, has no provisions for prosecuting "victimless crimes." The reason being, the sane and rational people from whom the tradition of common law came as well as the authors of our constitution saw no justifiable reason for punishing someone for a crime that leaves no victim. Indeed, there is no justification for it. The war on drugs represents an utter perversion of law. The original concept of a state was that it was created for the single purpose of protecting its citizens and their property. Today, in most states, one out of every eight prisoners is in prison for a drug offense and will serve, on average, 4.1 years. By way of contrast, a conviction for larceny in a building carries a maximum sentence of four years. A few millennia after humankind invents government, its purpose is turned exactly inside out. Instead of protecting the rights and property of the citizenry first and foremost, more emphasis is being placed on protecting the citizenry from the imaginary "problem" of drug use; an end the state has no business working toward. Remember what Richard Nixon said? He stated that drug abuse was "public enemy number one.

In the state’s continuing effort to justify the drug war, an overbroad definition of "harm" has been applied to those close to a drug addict. Prohibitionists argue that drug use "harms" the addict’s family, and "harms" society in general. The former is of no concern to the law and the latter is only true to the extent that it is because of other unjust actions of the state. While those close to an addict may be disappointed in him, or distraught at his addiction, there’s no harm so long as the addict doesn’t assault or rob them. Since the harm is neither financial nor physical , it’s not really harm in any form the law should have any business dealing with. Because of the various redistributionist schemes forced upon taxpayers (that’s another story), an addict who manages to get state-provided care is indeed harming the rest of the taxpayers, at least on the state level. Simply ending public funding for rehabilitation services could eliminate that harm. It’s not the state’s job to make sure all the rope lying around out there is too short for people to hang themselves with. Nor is it the state’s job to offer to cut those people down once they’ve decided to hang themselves. The fact the state has, in recent decades, taken it upon itself to do those things does nothing to justify their doing so. Instead, the drug war and redistributionism are just two examples of ways in which “our” government has slipped the leash of the U.S. Constitution.

As human beings, we own our bodies. We own the labor that we use our bodies for too. We have exclusive rights to any compensation given us for that labor and we may do with that compensation whatever we like so long as we don’t cause another human physical or financial harm. If a human decides to spend some of that compensation on substances that temporarily alter how the brain that human owns functions that is his right as a human. Any effort undertaken by anyone to interfere with that is done so in strict violation of that human’s rights. Those rights are as natural a part of that human as is his arms, or eyes or feet. They were given him by virtue of his being a sentient life form, and were enumerated by the founders of this nation in the Bill of Rights. Nobody, be it the federal DEA, the Fill in the Blank _______ State Police, the fill in the blank____ City Police Department, or the choir at the Living Waters church has a right to abridge or interfere with the peaceable exercise of those rights by any individual.

The war on drugs simply must be abandoned. Not only can it not be won by the tactics and methods currently being used to fight it, but it should not be "won" in the first place. Its very goals are inconsistent with the functioning of a just, free and peaceable society. The inherently arbitrary nature of the drug war further illustrates its unjustness. While the state forcefully and violently abridges a person’s right to smoke marijuana, snort cocaine, and shoot heroin, they condone a person’s right to drink alcohol, a substance every bit as psychoactive as and far more addictive than marijuana. And marihuana users don’t seem to want to fight like alcohol users do.

So, when ANYONE says we cannot tolerate recreational drug use in our society, I must respectfully disagree. People have used psychoactive substances from the very moment those substances’ psychoactive properties were discovered. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of that use is and has been responsible. If beer companies can tell us to "Drink responsibly," then it must be reasonably assumed other psychoactive and addictive substances can too be used responsibly. And yes, something terrible may occur, one of which was a boy I knew in Junior High that took LSD and then tried to fly off the roof of Miami University. Those types of actions need to be understood the same way you need to understand how a firearm works so you don’t shoot yourself or someone else “accidentally.” Once I wouldn’t let a friend have the keys to his car at a party because he was drunk and I didn’t want to see him get arrested or worse, be in a car wreck that killed him or someone else.

Sure, some of us believe our society could be improved if we simply convinced everyone to do something more productive with his or her time and energy than smoking dope or snorting coke. There are also those who believe the emotional and spiritual health of our entire society would be upgraded if everyone chose to listen to gospel music rather than some rap artist. Similarly, there are those who believe our society would be better served if more people watched operas and plays rather than football or basketball. The difference is, our society for some reason tolerates the state kicking in people’s doors and arresting them for using drugs. They would not, however, tolerate the local church choir stopping by, smashing their Tom McDonald CDs and then busting into "Amazing Grace." Neither would we tolerate the local community theatre troupe dropping in any day to turn off something they disagree with musically and then present "Children of Eden"

Further, we must be wary of any call for society to be intolerant of any non-violent behavior. It wasn’t long ago when popular opinion stated that sex with someone of the same sex must not be tolerated in our society. It wasn’t long before that having blacks eating at the lunch counter wasn’t tolerated in our society. Over the years our society has grown and evolved beyond those unjust prejudices. I listen to Glenn Greenwald quite often and figure his lifestyle is his. It isn’t harming me and he seems to be quite a researcher when it comes to his posts.

Hopefully, someday soon, our society will evolve beyond needlessly wasting law enforcement resources and pointlessly persecuting non-violent individuals in the name of the "War on Drugs."

What really got me going on this? It was the line in the 4473 form that you have to fill out if you purchase a firearm from an FFL dealer. The line that says this…

How can you be an “unlawful user of” if the state you reside in has LEGALIZED it?

The Feds “think” federal law trumps state law, but there is a couple of issues here. One is the 10th amendment. Which states: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So help me out…since WHERE is the power to regulate drug use found in the Constitution. The other issue is the ignored part of the “supremacy clause” that the Feds conveniently ignore.

Here is a short video on the subject of that clause. The Supremacy Clause is explicit with the statement that all laws must be made in PURSUANCE to the Constitution.

Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers #78 stated the OBVIOUS…

“No legislative act therefore contrary to the constitution can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorise, but what they forbid.”

So can someone show me the Drug Prohibition amendment? Are we being ruled by CRIMINALS that violate their oaths of office every day? All the way down to the local “law” enforcement officer? The answer is becoming more obvious by the day…