Friends in high places

Blogger is still making me crazy this morning. It still takes three tries to get the pages to load and there's no telling if this will actually get posted. Nonetheless, Cannabis Culture has an interesting article I missed last week on politician's children who get busted for getting for using intoxicants so we'll try to pass it on.

Unsurprisingly the offspring, not unlike every other young person in the US on the planet, have experimented with mind altering substances and some of them have been caught. Al Gore's son, the Bush twins, and big brother Jeb Bush's little girl Nicole have all been arrested for marijuana and underage drinking violations. Nicole had bigger problems of course with prescription pills and crack cocaine. Chelsea Clinton passed out regularly on booze binges.

Then there's the less heralded but bigger busts like Republican Representative Dan Burton's son Dan II who was charged with trafficking, was let off and then several months later was again caught with 30 marijuana plants and a gun. Is he languishing in jail under the mandatory minimums his father promoted? Of course not. Mr. Zero Tolerance's kid was let off again. The charges were dropped.

The same goes for Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham's son Randy who was convicted of possessing 400 pounds of pot. Hardly personal stash even by a toker's standards. He received half the usual sentence.

Both of these Congressman support the death penalty when the dealer is your kid. When it's their kid, they just say, "Oh never mind," and plead for mercy. It's time they started showing the same kind of reason-based sympathy for all cannabis consumers. Be it the war in Iraq or the war on some drugs, politicians won't stop sacrificing your children to their political ambitions and ill-conceived laws, until their own kids have to pay the same price.