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Posted on 09/07/2001 11:24:11 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen

Yes: Marijuana legalization is a conservative idea whose time indeed has come.

;By Deroy Murdock

American conservatism rests upon several key tenets. Among them: a limited government restrained by the U.S. Constitution, federalism, property rights and respect for the family. The War on Marijuana subverts these principles. In fact, government’s anti-reefer madness has fueled a wholesale expansion in state activity that only marijuana’s legalization can reverse.

;This war is a legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The 1937 Marihuana Tax Act federally prohibited pot. In typical New Deal fashion, government’s anti-cannabis crusade grows incessantly in cost, size and scope.

According to the FBI, 401,982 Americans were arrested nationwide for marijuana offenses in 1980. By 1999, a record 704,812 were nabbed, 88 percent of them for possession rather than trafficking. Since cannabis arrests constitute 44 percent of all drug apprehensions, the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) estimates that the government’s war on pot smokers costs taxpayers $9.2 billion annually.

Using U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data, MPP calculates that 37,500 federal, state and local inmates were incarcerated for marijuana violations in 1998, 15,400 of them for possession alone. At an average cost of $20,000 each, government spent $750 million to imprison these offenders.

This leviathan would be bad enough if it yielded to the Constitution. Alas, authorities execute this war as Godzilla would tiptoe through the tulips. One after another, the Founding Fathers’ restraints on government power have been trampled underfoot.

The Fourth Amendment’s bulwark “against unreasonable searches and seizures” has buckled beneath this pressure. Paul Weyrich and Lisa Dean of the Free Congress Foundation are among the 31 leading conservative activists who signed a Sept. 3 letter asking the Senate Judiciary Committee to raise “privacy and civil-liberties issues” with drug-czar nominee John Walters. The letter, in part, criticizes a now-disgraced program through which Amtrak shared passengers’ names, destinations and payment methods with Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents. In exchange, Amtrak received 10 percent of the property the DEA seized from its clientele.

This letter also denounces the “drug-courier profiles” that the U.S. Customs Service has employed at domestic airports. It reportedly has detained those who arrived late at night, early in the morning or in the afternoon. Some targets flew one-way and others round-trip. Those who traveled alone were scrutinized, as were those with companions. With such flexible profiles, it’s no wonder — as author James Bovard reports — a DEA spokesman once bragged that narcs “can spot a drug dealer the way a woman can spot a deal at the supermarket.”

The Fourth Amendment did not protect a male high-school student from a teacher who considered his crotch “too well-endowed.” (A strip search found no contraband.) Antidrug surveillance usually is more sophisticated. The Administrative Office of the U.S Courts reports that federal and state courts granted 978 drug-related wiretap applications in 1999 alone, 108 percent more than the 471 authorized in 1989. “Judges approved all applications,” the document states. Courts rarely check and balance prosecutors in drug cases. In fact, magistrates rejected only three of 11,415 wiretap requests between 1989 and 1999.

Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) noted that these bugging devices include “so-called roving wiretaps, which allow the [FBI] to tap any phone a criminal suspect might use, whether that phone is in their home, a nearby restaurant, a neighbor’s home or your office.” Not surprisingly, officials deem 80 percent of intercepted communications as innocent conversations.

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 11 that police needed a search warrant to point an infrared heat-sensing device at an Oregon home whose owner was growing more than 100 marijuana plants. “The Fourth Amendment draws a firm line at the entrance to the house,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. “That line, we think, must be not only firm but also bright.” He worried that warrantless external searches “would leave the homeowner at the mercy of advancing technology — including imaging technology that could discern all human activity in the home.”

The Fifth Amendment requires that private property not be taken “without due process of law.” That may surprise victims of civil-asset forfeiture who have lost property because authorities have claimed “probable cause” that it might be involved in drug offenses despite the owners’ innocence. A Scripps Oceanographic Institute research vessel, for instance, was seized in California after a marijuana-cigarette butt was found in a dismissed employee’s abandoned locker. Government agencies routinely keep such assets even though 80 percent of seizures involve no subsequent prosecutions. As Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) writes in the Cato Institute’s Forfeiting Our Property Rights, such “bizarre havoc” is “fueled by a dangerous and emotional vigilante mentality that sanctions shredding the U.S. Constitution into meaningless confetti.”

The 10th amendment enshrines the notion of federalism. Since the Constitution does not delegate to Washington the power to control marijuana or other drugs, such restrictions “are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Despite such clear constitutional language, the feds spurn the voters of seven states and the District of Columbia who expanded individual freedom by adopting medical-marijuana initiatives. Arrogant as a Russian autocrat, former drug czar Barry McCaffrey said California and Arizona voters were “asleep at the switch” when they approved these “hoax referendums” [sic] by 56 and 65 percent, respectively, in 1996.

McCaffrey’s office announced on Feb. 11, 1997, that it would prosecute patients who use such legalized medical marijuana. Also, doctors who recommended cannabis would lose Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements along with their licenses to prescribe federally controlled, but legal, substances, including cocaine and morphine.

U.S. District Judge Fern Smith temporarily blocked those regulations April 30, 1997, ruling that the “First Amendment allows physicians to discuss and advocate medical marijuana.” On Sept. 8, 2000, District Judge William Alsup permanently barred the Justice Department from punishing doctors for suggesting marijuana to their patients.

The 14th Amendment’s “equal-protection” guarantees seem suspended for some drug offenders. The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall typified this problem when he said in 1987: “I ain’t giving no break to no dope dealer.” Mandatory minimum sentences have trashed judicial discretion and forced judges to sentence first-time, nonviolent offenders to five years in federal prison, as befalls anyone who grows 100 marijuana plants, including even saplings and diseased specimens.

Rolling and smoking the Constitution isn’t cheap. The National Drug Control Budget has swelled from $1.65 billion in fiscal 1982 to $11.56 billion in fiscal 1992 to $19.17 billion requested for fiscal 2002. States and cities spend even more. Predictably, this budget inspires a fiscal feeding frenzy. “Virtually every federal agency gets a piece of the drug-war pie,” says the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation’s Chad Thevenot. “One reason it keeps expanding is that bureaucracies that get a piece of that pie want more.”

The drug czar lavishly funds agencies that conservatives love to hate. For instance, the IRS received $73.5 million last year to pay 817 employees to process, among other things, Foreign Bank Account Reports, Casino Currency Transaction Reports and Suspicious Activity Reports. For budget purposes, this activity “is scored as 100 percent drug-related.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spent $1 million to uproot marijuana plants and eliminate drug use among hunters. AmeriCorps, Bill Clinton’s brainchild, forecasts that in fiscal 2001 its $5.2 million in grants will “have an impact on drug-prevention efforts.” So far, though, the budget’s “Program Accomplishments” section says: “No new program accomplishments are reported.”

Taxpayers are forced to fund the militarization of domestic law enforcement. National Guardsmen in helicopters conduct marijuana-eradication missions. Active-duty armed forces have trained 46 percent of America’s police departments. SWAT units routinely serve drug-related search warrants, sometimes calamitously. For instance, Mario Paz, a 64-year-old grandfather, was shot twice in the back by an El Monte, Calif., SWAT team in August 1999, yet police found no drugs, nor did they prosecute any of Paz’s relatives. Paz’s fatal mistake was that he sometimes received mail for a former neighbor suspected of drug dealing.

The War on Marijuana also weakens families in two ways. The constant proselytizing by politicians and police officials teaches children to look to the state for moral leadership rather than dare to ask their parents for ethical guidance.

The incarceration of drug offenders is even more antifamily. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated in December 1999 that each of 1,941,796 American children has at least one parent in local, state or federal custody on a drug violation.

“I found that mandatory drug sentences do not lessen drug use, but they do destroy families and neighborhoods,” Hoover Institution scholar and former Kansas City police chief Joseph McNamara wrote in the Aug. 25 Economist magazine.

Despite this monumental expense and exertion, the number of 12th-graders who have told University of Michigan researchers that marijuana is “fairly easy” or “very easy” to obtain has gone from 84.3 percent in 1989 to 90.4 percent in 1999. In the private sector, such abject failure would prompt tumbling stock prices and resignations rather than ever-swelling budgets.

Uncle Sam should depart this demolition derby to which he never was invited. Instead, let 50 flowers bloom. Some states may keep fighting marijuana. Others may decriminalize it. Some may make pot — like alcohol — legal for adults, provided they neither drive nor operate heavy machinery while intoxicated.

Drug warriors may respond that legalization could present its own problems. Perhaps. The perfect public policy that satisfies everyone has yet to be proposed. However, the War on Marijuana assaults individual liberty, weakens families and militarizes cops while burning taxpayer dollars and the Constitution as if in a bong.

The American Right should stand athwart this wreckage and yell, “Stop!” Marijuana legalization is a conservative idea whose time indeed has come.

Murdock is a broadcast commentator, a syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which is based in Fairfax, Va.

No: The freedom to take drugs leads to behavior that is anathema to a free society.

By Don Feder

Besides being bad social policy, legalization of marijuana is antithetical to true conservatism. The conservative philosophy as it has evolved since the 18th century (one might say, from Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk) adds up to more than “do your own thing.”

Pot legalization is a libertarian position. Allowing individuals to use narcotics is consistent with the laissez-faire worldview, which holds that people should be free to choose their own path to perdition, so long as they don’t drag others down with them. But while conservatism has an individualistic element and is wary of state action, it does not hold personal autonomy to be the highest value. It weighs individual rights against the needs of society.

Unfortunately, several on the right — including William F. Buckley Jr., economist Milton Friedman, National Review Editor Richard Lowry, columnist Arianna Huffington — are beating the drums for this fraud masquerading as reform.

Some are libertarians who labor under the illusion that their creed is synonymous with conservatism. Others are hungry for the establishment’s approval. Legalization is popular with alumni of the sixties, who’ve come to dominate our culture.

Authentic conservatives understand that liberty must be ordered and rights balanced with responsibilities. The exercise of certain rights is fatal to both the social order and the long-term survival of self-government. The freedom to take drugs is foremost among these.

If “to each his own” is the essence of conservatism, then conservatives should also support legalization of prostitution, hard-core pornography and homosexual marriage — the first two reputed to be victimless crimes.

But the expression is a misnomer. Prostitutes spread disease. Pornography provokes sex crimes. Same-sex marriage undermines the institution.

Addicts commit crimes to get drugs. Addiction affects everyone — from family members to victims of auto accidents to the public that’s forced to pay for drug-related medical costs.

Some conservatives are comfortable with a pro-pot position because the culture encourages us to think of cannabis as a harmless recreational substance — the stuff of dorm-room parties and yuppie socializing. “It’s far less harmful than alcohol, and that’s legal,” proponents argue. Of course, drinking alcohol is roughly 20 times more common than marijuana use, so you’d expect the harm to be proportionally greater.

In a recent issue of National Review, Lowry pronounced the weed “widely used, and for the vast majority of its users nearly harmless and represents a temporary experiment or enthusiasm.” I’m not sure what planet he inhabits, but here on Earth marijuana isn’t quite the equivalent of a few beers.

In 1997, I attended the annual pot rally on the Boston Common, where 40,000 juveniles congregated to get high and hear harangues from rock-station personalities on marijuana’s manifold blessings. Most of the revelers were long-term users. Conservatives such as Lowry should attend one of these bashes to see just how “nearly harmless” and what a passing fad marijuana use can be.

One young lady, who had enough metal in her face to set off an airport alarm, claimed a physician suggested she use pot to slow down her “multifaceted (by which I assume she meant hyperactive) brain.” If that was the objective, it was working admirably. Her brain was barely functioning.

Another, Michelle, assured me: “Everybody’s doing it [getting high]. Eighty percent of doctors and lawyers — and cops, too.” Who says marijuana distorts the user’s perception of reality?

Symptomatic of habitual users was George, age 21, who was selling “End the Drug War” buttons. “It helps clear up the eye weakness. It helps you see a little better if you’re blind,” George informed me. This is hard to dispute. While his eyes were glazed, George definitely wasn’t blind. He wasn’t educated or motivated, either. A user since he was 15, George dropped out of school and was living alone and barely supporting himself by delivering flowers. He hadn’t spoken to his parents in six years (“They treated me wrong, man”), which, not by chance, coincided with his initiation into the drug culture.

The above is anecdotal. But evidence — mounds of it — exists, for those whose vision isn’t impaired. Roughly 100,000 people are in rehab programs for marijuana use. The drug lobby claims most of them were arrested for possession and given the alternative of treatment or imprisonment.

That almost sounds plausible, until one looks at marijuana mentions in emergency-room visits. In 1999, more ER visits were related to marijuana than heroin (38,976 versus 38,237), though less than half that for cocaine, according to the University of Maryland Center for Substance Abuse Research. Of the marijuana cases, 27 percent had unexpected reactions, 18 percent had overdosed (something proponents assure us is impossible) and 14 percent sought detox.

Marijuana use alters personality in unpleasant ways. Based on data collected from 1994 to 1996, the center found a direct correlation between frequency of marijuana use and “delinquent/depressive behaviors.” Among those ages 12 to 17 who had been placed on probation in the last year, 1 percent never used the drug, 7 percent used it one to 11 times during the year and 20 percent used it at least weekly.

Of those who had committed an assault in the last six months, 7 percent never smoked pot, 18 percent used it one to four days a month and 26 percent used it one to seven days a week. A child who smoked a joint weekly or more often was three times as likely to have thought about suicide in the last six months, and six times more likely to have run away from home, than nonusers.

In 1999, about 60 percent of juveniles arrested in Washington tested positive for marijuana, according to the District of Columbia’s Pretrial Services Agency. None of this is coincidental. Pot makes many long-term users sullen, antisocial, muddled and not inclined to apply themselves productively.

Removing legal sanctions from marijuana will result in an upsurge of juvenile experimentation. A May 9 Wall Street Journal editorial noted that, following liberalization of its drug laws in the 1980s, the Netherlands saw a 250 percent increase in adolescent marijuana use.

The drug lobby sneers at the gateway theory — that pot leads to harder drugs. While many never graduate to more potent substances, research by the Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University showed that 12- to 17-year-olds who smoke marijuana are 85 times more likely to try cocaine.

Legalizers maintain that this is no more relevant than the fact that 100 percent of coke heads drank milk as children. But milk doesn’t get you high. Drinking milk does not create a desire for more-intense experiences (“This was fun. I wonder what that would do”). Even with a dollop of chocolate syrup, milk doesn’t alter thinking and impair the ability to make rational decisions.

The individual-liberty argument used for marijuana can be applied to every other drug. If X snorts cocaine or mainlines heroin, who is directly harmed other than X? Every narcotic has its enthusiasts who argue that, besides opening up new psychic horizons, the drug is relatively benign.

Legalization of marijuana will provide a powerful impetus for ending the prohibition on drugs across the board. “Look at the money we’ve saved on enforcement and the individuals whose lives weren’t ruined by a drug bust,” those who would extend legalization will argue.

Lowry calls this reasonable concern a drug-war Brezhnev doctrine “under which no drug-war excess can ever be turned back — once a harsh drug law is on the books for marijuana possession, there it must remain lest the ‘wrong signal’ be sent.” But signals are sent, often with unintended consequences. Look how far we’ve come toward normalization of fornication (with its attendant social pathologies) since removing the stigma on cohabitation.

Finally, conservative legalizers argue the marijuana prohibition is futile. The laws largely are ineffective, except for the unlucky few who are caught. Still, users are said to crowd our jails — taking space which should accommodate real criminals.

But when we fought a real drug war in the 1980s and early 1990s, drug use dropped dramatically. In 1979, current users of illicit substances constituted 14 percent of the population. By 1992, the figure was 4 percent. During the Clinton years of benign neglect, it rebounded to 7 percent.

Those arrested for possession of small quantities of pot constitute an insignificant percentage of state-prison inmates — not that a zero-tolerance policy of locking up small-time users for, say, 90 days might not have a salutary effect. In 1998, only 3.3 percent of state-prison inmates in Florida were doing time for drug possession (any drug) alone.

Drug statutes give police leverage to get career criminals off the streets. Often a defendant who’s indicted for a string of offenses on which the evidence might not convict him is allowed to plead down to a possession charge. Records may show they were sent to prison for marijuana or cocaine possession, but police and prosecutors could tell a different story.

Like physicians bound by the Hippocratic oath, the motto of conservatives should be: “First, do no harm.” Thoughtful conservatives — those who don’t float on the cultural currents — have seen the ravages of 50 years of social experimentation, where restraints were loosened and passions unleashed to the detriment of both the individual and society.

There are freedoms the individual must have — among them the right to earn a livelihood and dispose of the greater portion of his income, to raise a family, to defend himself and those he loves. And there is power too potent to be vested in the state — to direct the national economy, to indoctrinate the impressionable, to screen political speech.

The freedom to get high is neither necessary for a meaningful existence nor conducive to a society where genuine rights are respected. Indeed, it’s easier to fit a slave collar on a nation of addicts.

;Feder writes for the Boston Herald. He is a syndicated columnist and author of Who’s Afraid of the Religious Right? and A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America.

Well, I gotta stop laughing at this ridiculous question so I can give you a serious answer. Ok, laughing stopped and thinking cap on. Of course dopers, liberals and morons want to see dope of any kind legalized.

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