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Racheting Up the Drug War

By Jeralyn, Section Crime Policy
Posted on Tue Feb 01, 2005 at 10:56:57 AM EST
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Drug War warriors are running rampant across the land. Check out these billboards at DrugWar Rant. Grits for Breakfast exposes the overhyping of the new meth law craze as evidenced by a rush by states to ban psueduoephedrine.

Newspaper editorials like this one show mainstream media is going along.

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    Racheting Up the Drug War | 18 comments (18 topical)
    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#1)
    by Adept Havelock on Tue Feb 01, 2005 at 11:15:44 AM EST
    And the war on drugs will continue. After all, prohibition worked so well in the 1920's and 1930's!

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#2)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Tue Feb 01, 2005 at 11:29:15 AM EST
    All this will do is create a black market in component chemicals in meth-making. The horse has been dead and stinking for a long time, but the prohibs just can't stop whipping it.

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#3)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Tue Feb 01, 2005 at 01:21:04 PM EST
    So how many more in prison? Freedom, social justice and free love! and hell soon we can have Beheading here the bush way. After all we are just one big human family, right? Bin Laden for president, that is were Bush is going, but maybe after Fox mexican presidential thing is over he can make some drug laws here and make a-lot of money doing it right here in our Great ideas of freedom! and fox can run for President right here in the new lands of mexico. Good god. we got no laws only the deal.

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#4)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Tue Feb 01, 2005 at 02:31:40 PM EST
    Good lord, I think you have overstated the "banning" of psueduoephedrine. In NC you can't buy more than two packages at a time from a particular retail location without signing a "drug sheet" - just like many other handy-dandy kid medication items. In fact the pharm industry, it turns out, already has alternatives that work just as well, cost less to produce, and have fewer side effects - they were just to hard to market into an existing base. Hey, that's the *real* conspiracy theory here! -C

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#5)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Tue Feb 01, 2005 at 02:48:46 PM EST
    How pathetic, Cliff. The government is telling you how much cold medicine you can buy without signing a "drug sheet"???? And you're a "Conservative" who theoretically won't let the government tell you how many guns you can buy???? ... and you're fine with this??? The article states:
    In Colorado, no law restricts the amount of cold medicine a person can buy. However, a law enacted in July 2004, makes it illegal to sell a precursor to make methamphetamines, such as iodine tincture, or iodine crystals, to anyone who is using it to make methamphetamine. Pseudoephedrine, which is found in some over-the-counter cold medicine such as Sudafed, is considered to be a precursor, according to Greeley police Lt. Steve Nelson. Some businesses already restrict the amount of pseudoephedrine products one person can purchase or have moved those products off the shelves to behind the pharmacy counter.
    I would find this absolutely hilarious except for the accompanying editorial comment that:
    That's why we need to crack down on the problem at its source: the people who are producing methamphetamine in makeshift labs set up in cars, trailers, homes and hotel rooms.
    Does this remind anyone of mobile WMD labs, aluminum tubes and mysterious "yellowcake" deals in Niger?? Great. Coming soon - A War on Phlegm???

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#6)
    by kdog on Tue Feb 01, 2005 at 06:53:18 PM EST
    Frankly, I'm surprised whoever manufactures Sudafed hasn't paid off some politicians yet. Soon come.

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#7)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Tue Feb 01, 2005 at 07:07:39 PM EST
    Well, mfox, if you can find the section of the US constitution, bill or rights, or NC constitution that recognizes, in uneqivocal terms, my right to bear precursors to illegal drugs, then I'm with you. I have to sign out morphine-related cold medicines for my kids - and so did my mom - and that works fine, so it seems. I guess indignation is a little more thin on the ground after the stirring and historic victory of the Iraqi people over the terrorists. (Ok, that was a troll.) (True, but a troll.) -C

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#8)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Tue Feb 01, 2005 at 08:03:59 PM EST
    Uh-oh. The next "gateway drug": Sudafed! OMG!!!

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#9)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Wed Feb 02, 2005 at 04:07:05 AM EST
    Cliff, are you aware that prior to 1914 you could go into any 'drug store' (how do you think they got the name?) and buy any bloody thing you wanted? And that children were often sent there on errands to pick up those medicines and not face a phalanx of gatekeepers seeking to restrict their access to them? It needs to be asked: at what point does the government's efforts to 'protect' you begin to harm you? I submit we're already at that point. As Thomas Jefferson put it: Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#10)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Wed Feb 02, 2005 at 05:02:21 AM EST
    Cliff... Riddle me this: Why did alcohol prohibitionists amend the Constitution twice, once in 1919 to ban alcohol and again in 1933 to invalidate the first amendment? Isn't the Constitition supposedly a instrument assigning LIMITED EMUMERATED powers to the federal government, with the powers not so enumerated reserved to the states or the people (9th, 10th Amendments). Where in the Constitution does it mention the fed's power to ban and criminize narcotics, marijuana or other drugs? (Clue, it doesn't). They get there through the power to "regulate" "interstate commerce". How does banning a drug and making it illegal affect "interstate commerce".? How does medical marijuana grown and consumed non-commercially within California affect "interstate commerce" (and don't tell me about Wickard's wheat farm and new deal era economic regulation)?

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#11)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Wed Feb 02, 2005 at 05:09:12 AM EST
    TL - The MSM may be "going along" with the latest meth scare, but a growing number of good papers are rejecting the Drug War bandwagon and ONDCP "party line" as many aspects of the WoD go over the top. Case in point: the Supreme Court Cabellas case has drawn more criticism than support from editorialists. See the papers cited in our recent focus alert #300 (2/1/05) at the Media Awareness Project.

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#12)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Wed Feb 02, 2005 at 06:41:20 AM EST
    Thanks Jackl for saving me the trouble of responding. I just wanted to remind Cliff how Coca-Cola got it's name too.

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#13)
    by pigwiggle on Wed Feb 02, 2005 at 09:46:47 AM EST
    “if you can find the section of the US constitution, bill or rights, or NC constitution that recognizes, in uneqivocal terms, my right to bear precursors to illegal drugs, then I'm with you.” The debate over including the bill of rights centered about the potential of government to form this same asinine attitude. The argument went that if the BOR was included the government would use it to restrict all other rights derived from our basic inalienable rights; hence the ninth and tenth. But Cliff, better you explain where the feds in their enumerated powers derive the mandate to regulate intoxicants. If the authors of the constitution meant for the feds to derive such vast powers through the mandate to regulate interstate commerce and provide for the common good, why on earth did they bother to enumerate any other powers at all?

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#14)
    by kdog on Wed Feb 02, 2005 at 11:56:17 AM EST
    Unfortunately, I am starting to think 9 out of 10 parents would be willing ask the govt's permission to leave the house if some politician told them it would keep their kids off drugs. All the while, kids keep getting high. I just wish parenting was left up to parents, and not big brother. I'm sick and tired of being treated like a child. I yearn to be free to buy any substance I see fit without a gov't sponsored hassle. But, it seems everybody is scared of true freedom.

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#15)
    by Patrick on Wed Feb 02, 2005 at 02:31:52 PM EST
    Nemo, Do you realize it's not 1914 any longer? Jackl, You ask for an answer then try to deny the argument the Supreme Court of the U.S. used in giving that answer. Why? Because you don't like it?

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#16)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Feb 03, 2005 at 04:42:17 AM EST
    Patrick, you are missing the point. The point being that a grown, free, sovereign human being didn't need a bureaucrat to tell him or her how to live, what to eat, what medicines he or she may not take, etc. The most common term for this state is 'adulthood'. Did you know there almost was an Medical Amendment to the Bill of Rights? Formulated by one of the Founders? Here's what Dr. Benjamin Rush had to say: "Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship... All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a republic... The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom." The original drug laws of this country only pretended to have a medical basis (when their history is actually grounded in racial bigotry). In that respect, they are just as damaging to our liberties as Dr. Rush warned us they would be. Oh, and I am well aware as to what year we are living in. But chronology has little to do with preserving freedoms.

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#17)
    by Patrick on Thu Feb 03, 2005 at 09:47:31 AM EST
    Wait let me take use some of my medicinal crack and re read your post....

    Re: Racheting Up the Drug War (none / 0) (#18)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Feb 03, 2005 at 10:55:49 AM EST
    Patrick, by all means, have at it. It's just as destructive as alcohol, which I am sure you are acquainted with. I prefer my intoxicants to be more natural, and far less deleterious. Given that I have attempted to hold a rational conversation, and you riposte with jibes suitable for an elementary school playground, it's evident that you feel incapable of supporting your positions with anything other than the propaganda which has been inserted into your brainpan...which you vainly hope to use to justify your position. But you are also forgetting something, and that something is a common failing amongst law enforcement: you forget that you are addressing your paymasters. I didn't ask you to become a police officer, and I daresay no one here did, either. Nor did those in your community. You took that burden - and the pay that comes from taxes extorted from us at threat of prison for withholding those funds - upon yourself. Now you find yourself in the position of trying to justify laws that are proving to be unworkable. And sneering at those who make your salary possible. Too many people on the public payroll forget that they are civil servants, not masters. It never hurts to occasionally remind them of their true status.

    Racheting Up the Drug War | 18 comments (18 topical)