I recently posted a video news story (see here) about a slightly built man with Down’s Syndrome who had his colostomy bag ripped from his body (and suffered a beat-down by police) because they believed the bulge that was his colostomy bag contained “illegal drugs.” A couple weeks ago, a man in New Mexico was subjected to multiple forced anal probes, enemas and a colonoscopy (see here) because cops believed he was harboring “illegal drugs” in his clenched butt cheeks.
Such atrocities could perhaps be dismissed if they were aberrations – the actions of isolated, crazed cops in some cracker backwater. But they are terrifying because they’re becoming routine – because crazed – and unrestrained – policing is now the norm.
The origins of the American Police State can be traced back not to Nahhnnnlevvven – which merely threw gasoline on an already burning fire – but to the odious “drug war.”
The war on some drugs is actually a war on reason as well as ethics – with the inevitable casualties being human beings, not the “drugs” allegedly being warred upon.
It is based on the twisted notion that some people (government people, whether they are politicians or bureaucrats or their paid enforcers) are entitled to arbitrarily decree that some “drugs” (but not others, the ones they happen to approve of) are – presto! – “illegal” and that mere possession/use/sale/manufacturer (all peaceful activities as such that entail no victim, hence no crime) is sufficient warrant to eviscerate not merely the Bill of Rights but human rights. This demented crusade justifies random rousting of anyone, at almost any time, anywhere, if a cop (or a got-damned dog) believes that person might have the arbitrarily illegal item in his possession.
The other day I was reading about a despicable but all-too-predictable case here in my area. A dirt poor dude who lived in a run-down single wide (until the SWAT team “took him down”) was sent to prison for two years – no parole. His “crime”? Manufacturing meth. That is, he had an old 2 liter soda bottle and some cold pills he’d tried to transmute into the proscribed substance.
The judge lectured the poor hillbilly about the “harm he has caused the community” – though as usual, no evidence was presented that the hillbilly had harmed anyone (except perhaps himself – which ought to be his business and can only be regarded as a “crime” by a society that believes people own other people).
But let’s say the prosecutor had found a person who was hurt in a car accident caused by one of the hillbilly’s customers. This is more or less what the judge meant by his use of the blanket indictment, “harm to the community.”
Let’s try to parse this logic. What if the winery down the road sells a case of its “drug” to someone, and that person subsequently gets loaded and then plows his car into a van full of children, killing them all? Should a SWAT team be sent to the winery? Will the wine maker be arrested and caged and sent to prison for two years on account of what someone else did with the “drugs” he merely manufactured and sold?
