Dope, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #228

June 20, 2011 Mike Gold 0 Comments

Last Friday we celebrated the 40^th Anniversary of the greatest failure of the 20^th Century, the War on Drugs. This is a war that we lost in 1906 when the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed. We lost it again in 1920 when the Volstead Act went into effect (over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto), and we lost it still again in 1933 when the Blaine Act was passed. The Blaine Act repealed the Volstead Act.

We lost the War still once more in 1937 when the Marijuana Tax Act was passed. And we lost the War again in 1982 when First Lady Nancy Reagan started her “Just Say No” campaign. This prompted personal freedoms pioneer Dr. Timothy Leary to respond, “Be polite. Just say no thank you.”

To be fair, this war wasn’t actually declared until June 17, 1971 when President Richard Nixon took to the airwaves to call it such. The response was overwhelmingly underwhelming, and anybody who has seen the War on Drugs as successful on any level must have been dipping into the sample case.

We know that trillions of dollars have been wasted in this ridiculously conceived effort to control our nation’s personal morality. We know about the thousands of lives that have been ruined by incarceration; since 1937 marijuana possession has been a felony in this country and, therefore, those convicted of its possession are felons and are subject to all the sanctions we impose against felons.

The Marijuana Tax Act was initiated as a means of clamping down on Mexicans who came across the border hopped up on weed to steal our jobs and rape our white women. Today, these laws are used to keep a ludicrous number of people of color in prison… unless you can think of a better reason why, until very recently, the sanctions against crack cocaine were tenfold greater than the more expensive powdered cocaine preferred by stockbrokers and bankers.

Fifty years ago, the prophet Lenny Bruce – who did not smoke dope – said marijuana would be legal in a few years because all the lawyers he knew smoked it. This time, Lenny was premature. In recent years, possession has been decriminalized in Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and starting a week from next Friday, Connecticut. Fines and amounts vary wildly, but roughly speaking if you’re found with an ounce or less you’ll get a fine of between $100.00 and $350.00. This means a lot of folks around the Yale University campus will be taking greater care to clean their stash once it somehow enters their possession.

Selling the stuff is still illegal, and the Federal government, under direct orders from the hypocrite President Barack Obama, will continue to “enforce” the Marijuana Tax Act. However, the Feds do not give this as high a priority as their War on Terrorism.

I’m certain the reason for all this has little to do an acknowledgement that the government has no place regulating private behavior unless it negatively impacts an unwilling person. I’m certain it has a lot more to do with meeting horribly reduced state budgets by cutting the number of people serving time for possession of weed. After all, this is a nation that has banned caffeinated alcohol instead of simply prosecuting those dealers who sell the stuff to kids.

As President Jimmy Carter is fond of saying, the punishment should not be greater than the crime itself. Simply decriminalizing one drug, marijuana, doesn’t meet that standard. But it’s a step in the right direction.

 

When he stops writhing in agony, anarcho-syndicalist Mike Gold should return to performing the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.