WOD: Fabricating Criminals for Power and Profit

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 01 Oct 2001 13:06:02 GMT
We watched Thirteen Days last night, a telling of the Cuban Missile Crisis (October, 1962). Well worth its 152 minutes. Portrays Jack and Robert Kennedy and Kenny O'Donnell (Jack's Special Assistant, played by Kevin Costner) as saving the world from the nuclear war that their top military men would almost certainly have caused had they been allowed to bomb and invade Cuba as they wanted. I don't know much about what really happened then, and I have no memory of it (I was 6), so I can't say how accurate the movie was, but I enjoyed it.

Bill St. Clair at the Daily Gazette (Schenectady, NY) - Time to scrap failed U.S. drug laws - they printed my letter. The link contents will change tomorrow, and the Gazette doesn't provide archives, so I've copied the text below. They changed my title, reworded the opening a little, fixed spelling, and added some paragraph breaks, but left the rest exactly as I wrote. I called it No Reevaluation Needed when I submitted it on August 29.

Letter to the Editor

Time to scrap failed U.S. drug laws

The Aug. 26 issue contained a column by David Broder, "Time to re-evaluate war on drugs." Nope. We've had plenty of time to evaluate it.

The war on some drugs is an unmitigated disaster, a complete and utter failure. It has ruined the lives of millions of peaceful Americans while shredding our Bill of Rights. It pours hundreds of billions of dollars annually into the pockets of organized criminals. Since black market substances are subject to no regulations on purity or labeling, bad drugs kill thousands every year.

It's time to end this insanity, free all the prisoners of war, offer realistic information to prevent people from taking drugs in the first place, and provide voluntary treatment to help them when they decide to stop.

Asa Hutchinson should be directed to administer the complete shutdown of the Drug Enforcement Agency. The Office of National Drug Policy should be eradicated. Adults own their bodies. What they choose to ingest is nobody's business. Personal responsibility works. Give it a try.

BILL St. CLAIR
New Lebanon

Good commentary today from Will Cate in the context of Steve Kubby's wish-you-were-here letter from British Colombia. [will]

Remember, brothers and sisters, the only reason cannabis is illegal is to make criminals out of people who otherwise would not be criminals.

Making as many people criminals as possible is big business for the government on a couple of different levels: the first is power. Making more people into criminals increases, overall, the power that government is able to exert over the citizenry. There are currently 1.8 million individuals incarcertated or on probation in the U.S. The per-capita prison population has increased 72% between 1990 and 2000. (DOJ statistics)

Second is the business of prison-building. Small, poor towns compete with one-another for privelege of building new prisons. It provides a stimulus to the local economy by way of providing jobs to low-IQ individuals who might otherwise be unemployed.

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