Lies the government told you (27 page)

Politicians like to speak about the war on drugs because combating drugs sounds moral. The people from good families, with good morals, and good character that we want to represent us in the government feel the need to propagate
this squeaky-clean image. Advocating for a drug-free society generally helps this image and is something the public wants to hear. Politicians are afraid to veer away from it. The mainstream public is afraid to disagree. Basically, we all waste $40 billion a year to keep up a useless, ineffective appearance.

Who’s fooled by this charade? Anyone who picks up a news paper, tabloid, watches TV, or goes on the Internet could tell you that politicians are far from angels. They have affairs, they steal money, they gamble, they drink to excess. Many have even used drugs that they themselves have voted to make illegal. And the truth is, many ordinary American people have used drugs as well; for this is the reason that the drug war is such a large enterprise.

At its heart, the war on drugs is about false morality and personal freedom. People do risky things every day. Sure, some people are more averse to risk than others and would never climb a mountain or go bungee jumping. Yet, some people love doing these death-defying stunts, and their quality of life would be damaged without doing them. Drugs are not much different. Once you take the government’s sense of morality out of the equation, and simply look at drugs as dangerous and addictive substances, drugs are really not much different than other risks. So, instead of spouting on and on about the morality of this issue, couldn’t politicians take on the cause of freedom?

This gets back to the heart of what this book argues: The government lies to us when it tells us the drug war is for our own good or when it tells us that the war on drugs is working. The government lies to us by covering up what the drug war is actually about— image, power, and usurping the rights of Americans.

Anthony Gregory, senior researcher at the Independent Institute, a free-market think tank in Oakland, California, eloquently wrote:

The ideology of the war on drugs is the ideology of totalitarianism, of communism, of fascism and of slavery. In practice, it has made an utter mockery of the rule of law and the often-spouted idea that America is the freest country on earth. The United States has one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world, second only to Rwanda, thanks largely to the drug war, all while its federal government imposes its drug policies on other countries by methods ranging from mere diplomatic bullying to spraying foreign crops with lethal poison, from bribing foreign heads of state to bankrolling and whitewashing acts of mass murder conducted by despots in the name of fighting drugs.
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Reported incidents reveal a gross abuse of police power during drug raids. In Philadelphia, a group of narcotics squad members entered Jose Duran’s tobacco shop with guns drawn and then smashed some of the store’s surveillance cameras with a metal rod before arresting the owners for selling tiny,
empty
ziplock bags which the officers claimed were drug paraphernalia. After breaking the remaining surveillance cameras, the police stole money from the cash register and handfuls of Zippo lighters.

Similar stories about abuse of police power were reported by seven other small shops in the Philadelphia area. All of these jackbooted raids were apparently led by narcotics officer Jeffrey Cujdik.
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At least three people who formerly acted as informants for Cujdik claimed that the officer would give them cartons of cigarettes that he stole from the stores he raided. In one raided store, officers opened up the refrigerators to drink and take the juice and energy drinks kept inside.

No matter who performs actions like this, they are against the law. But, people’s rights are often trampled, with the war on drugs used as a justification. These Philadelphia raids are just a few examples of the government-engineered assaults on our rights through the war on drugs. Several federal civil rights lawsuits were filed against Cujdik and his brother Richard, who is also an officer, other drug squad members, and the City of Philadelphia.
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As of this writing, the outcomes of the cases have yet to be determined.

The government uses the drug war to justify taking away our rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” and bars search warrants on anything but those based upon “probable cause” of criminal activity and issued by judges. Since the war on drugs began almost four decades ago, most searches and seizures reaching the United States Supreme Court have been approved. According to Yale Law School Professor Steven Duke, the Court has held that a search based on an invalid warrant does not require any remedy so long as the police acted in “good faith.”

So people can be stopped in their cars or in airports, trains, or buses, and then submitted to questioning or held to be sniffed by dogs. Police may search an open field without warrant or cause, even if trespassing on it would otherwise be a criminal offense. Police may use helicopters to look into our homes and backyards, private property they could not lawfully or constitutionally enter without a search warrant. They can search our garbage cans without giving a reason. And if they have “reasonable suspicion,” the police may search our bodies.
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The erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights caused by the war on drugs has not been confined to cases involving drugs, either. Duke explains:

The pressure to uphold police activities in drug cases generates new “principles” that thereafter apply to everyone, whether or not drugs are involved. If the police are authorized to search for drugs on suspicion, they can also search for evidence of tax evasion, gambling, mail fraud, pornography, bribery and any other offense. The putative object of a police search does not limit what can be confiscated. If police conduct is a lawful search, they can take and use any evidence they see, however unrelated it may be to what got them into the home—or the body—in the first place.
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So, even people who have never touched a drug in their lives are subject to the loss of Fourth Amendment rights brought about by the war on drugs, because a supine judiciary, cowed by the need to appear antidrugs, has lowered the bar for what police conduct is lawful and constitutional.

There are many examples of “wrong door” raids where the police bust into the homes of individuals only to find that they entered the wrong house and found no drugs. For example, New York City police accidentally entered into the wrong house during a predawn raid. They handcuffed Mini Matos, a deaf, asthmatic Coney Island woman, while her children cried. Ms. Matos begged the police to permit her to use her asthma pump, but she was ignored until the officers realized they had entered the wrong apartment.
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In 2003, the NYPD mistakenly raided the home of a fifty-seven-year-old woman. The violent manner in which they entered the apartment literally scared her to death and she died of a heart attack on the scene.
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And it is far from surprising that one of these raids could scare someone to death. These types of raids are “typically carried out by masked, heavily armed SWAT teams using paramilitary tactics more appropriate for the battlefield than the living room. In fact, the rise in no-knock warrants over the last twenty-five years neatly corresponds with the rise in the number and frequency of use of SWAT teams.”
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One very tragic story involved state law-enforcement agents who raided the home of Cheye Calvo (the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland) after the agents had tracked a package containing marijuana that was left on the front porch of Calvo’s house. Calvo brought the package into his house, and the drug agents “burst into the house without warning, shot and killed Calvo’s two dogs, and bound Calvo and his mother-in-law.”
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Sadly, this was all a mistake made by the agents. Neither Calvo nor anyone in his home had anything to do with the drugs.

In November 2006, a ninety-two-year-old woman was shot and killed in her Atlanta home when three officers raided it on a drug bust. Katherine Johnston, the elderly woman who was killed, did not have any drugs. The police had the wrong house. The officers had obtained a search warrant after an undercover officer had allegedly purchased drugs at Johnston’s home earlier on the day in question. The warrant was also a “no knock” warrant, meaning that they could come into the home without asking the occupant to let them in.

The officers announced themselves as police, and broke down the front door. Out of fear, Johnston used
a gun her niece bought her for protection and shot at the officers, wounding them. In retaliation, they shot back and murdered her. Johnston had lived in her home on 933 Neal Street in northwest Atlanta for seventeen years. Johnston’s distraught niece, Sarah Dozier, was “mad as hell,” and stated that the police had “shot her down like a dog.”
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By the end of 2008, all three officers had pled guilty to various felonies in connection with the massacre. They began serving substantial prison sentences in early 2009.

Drug Money Supports Terror

The Office of National Drug Control Policy has begun running ads that say, “Drug money supports terror.” The ads ask, “Where do terrorists get their money? . . . If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you.” This is another lie. Here is a kernel of truth the government fails to comprehend: It is not the demand for drugs that is responsible for nurturing and harboring terrorists, it is the prohibition of the drugs that wreaks the most global havoc. Drugs are profitable because there is a ban on them. And items found on the black market generally are not cheap.
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So while the government goes and blames
terrorism
on people who buy drugs, it is
the government itself
that is actually perpetuating terrorism through its nonsensical drug policies. Apart from that, plenty of your tax money was used to fund these fruitless ads.

In fact, the war on drugs is responsible for a great deal of violence around the world. Recently there have been many brutal killings and much horrific violence related to drug cartels in Mexico, who have been warring with Mexican and U.S. officials. All of this was in the name of the drug war. Drug lords are engaging in a violent competition to export illegal drugs into the U.S. and reap the great rewards of the black market. As a result of these gang “drug wars” caused by the government “war on drugs,” many innocent people have lost their lives.

Since January 2007, there have been an estimated 9,903 drug-war-related deaths in Mexico, more than the U.S. fatalities thus far in the Iraq War.
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Many children have also been exposed to the brutal war. In Tijuana, schoolchildren have seen bodies hung from overpasses and stuffed into refrigerators.
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Furthermore, twelve corpses, with their tongues cut out, were dumped into a vacant lot across from an elementary school.
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The stories are downright tragic.

The War on Big Government

The war on drugs has been a disaster for America. Using drugs, killing babies in our wombs, and taking our own lives are all actions committed against our bodies. Yet, while the government permits us to have abortions and commit suicide, and lets us get high on one chemical, alcohol, it prohibits us from getting high on other chemicals, which it calls “drugs.” Does that make any sense? Everyone should have the right to make choices about his or her own body, period.

While on a larger scale the war on drugs is about wasteful government expenditure and an infringement on our Fourth Amendment rights, on a more personal level it is about the choices individuals make concerning their own bodies. We should be allowed to control what enters our bodies. If someone very badly wants to ingest a chemical substance into his body, he should be able to do so regardless of any government law; and thousands do so, every day. According to Professor Murray Rothbard:

Propagandize against cigarettes as much as you want, but leave the
individual free to run his own life
. Otherwise, we may as well outlaw all sorts of possible carcinogenic agents—including tight shoes, improperly fitting false teeth, excessive exposure to the sun, as well as excessive intake of ice cream, eggs, and butter which might lead to heart disease. And, if such prohibitions prove unenforceable, again the logic is to place people in cages so that they will receive the proper amount of sun, the correct diet, properly fitting shoes, and so on.
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(emphases added)

Furthermore, we know from the utter ineffectiveness of Prohibition that drug laws will never serve as a deterrent to drug use. Will Rogers opined that “[i]nstead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth!”
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Rogers was being facetious, but he certainly has a point.

Generally, someone who seeks to disobey laws that punish victimless crimes does not look up the jail sentence for the crime he is about to commit, so why criminalize drug use, and give drug users and sellers long stints in prison? Do these laws really change people’s mind-sets? Hardly. There is no logic here, and billions of dollars per year are wasted because of this lack of foresight. On this issue, Milton Friedman wrote, “Every friend of freedom . . . must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty [and property] of citizens on slight evidence.”
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Finally, America’s children have also often fallen victim to the drug war. Getting in trouble with the law at a young age follows many youngsters into adulthood. These children are plagued with emotional baggage and possibly a criminal record, simply for trying to satisfy their curiosities. If we really want to raise healthy, happy children, it is up to families, peer groups, and communities to restrict harmful behavior—not the government. Close-knit relationships and good examples reach much further than the government ever could, and they do not cost taxpayers a dime.