Save the children

Kid's issues have been crossing my radar screen this week and the news is not good. To begin with, Sheldon Richman draws the parallels between the war on some drugs and social engineering designed to ensure our children grow up to be compliant exploitable workers. The U.S. Bureau of Education admitted as far back as 1914, "The public schools exist primarily for the benefit of the State rather than for the benefit of the individual."

What does this have to do with the war on some drugs? As Richman puts it,

... the "war on drugs" is an exercise in authoritarianism that has nothing to do with the welfare of the American people. Its purpose is to persuade people that only the government stands between them and mayhem. The key to the state's objective is making us believe that addiction chooses us and not the other way around. This is a lie exposed by the many responsible people who enjoy drugs in moderation the way others enjoy cocktails.

A lie that even former drug czar Bill (gambling is not an addiction) Bennett exposed in his 1989 introduction to National Drug Control Strategy, published by the ONDCP.

Non-addicted drug users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug involved population. The non-addicted casual or regular user . . . is likely to have a still-intact family, social, and work life. He is likely still to "enjoy" his drug for the pleasure it offers.

The government excuses its fascist tactics in the name of protecting our young people. Sheldon makes a good case for why it's far more dangerous to allow the prohibition profiteers to frighten you into allowing dangerous and unnecessary raids like Goose Creek to be perpetrated on your children in the name of safety than it would to simply allow them to experiment with drugs. Most kids will try them once or twice and not like them. The ones that abuse them have psychological issues that have little to do with the substances themselves.

The irony of this is the Bush administration's current proposal to test the mental health of every school kid in America would end up dispensing Ritalin, (already mandated as a behavior modifier for many "problem" students), or even worse legal pharmaceutical drugs at unprecedented levels. And by the way, this is just a beginning. Bush would like to extend mandatory mental health testing to encompass every single person in the United States!

As bad as all this sounds, for children in South America the situation is even worse. Your tax dollars are being used, directly or indirectly, to finance the wholesale murder of innocent children under the auspices of fighting the war on some drugs, whose only crime is to live in poverty in the slums of every country on that continent. These children can't help being born into a place where the drug culture is not only inescapable but often the only means of support and they have been executed by local police for as little as being in possession of one marijuana cigarette. I dare you to read the whole thing and still find any aspect of the war on some drugs supportable.