Beyond the Bounds of Reason: sipping coffee

IT IS widely known that in america young black men are rounded up and put in prisons, usually for drug and weapons related convictions. Upper middle class white guys get probation, black kids get jail time.

What, something like one third of all black men between the ages of eighteen and thirty are in prison right now? whatever the number, its shocking.

only when a small group of white men with shaved heads and full body tatoos are caught collecting automatic weapons and planing to kill minorities, which happens with some degree of regularity here, are we reminded that racism still tries to regrow its severed snake tail.

marijuana and cheap cocaine substitutes are the particular substances the possession and sale of which we have arbitrarily chosen to call  "crime"; expedient if the goal happens to be incarcerating poor male minorities.

meanwhile, millions of us arise each morning, and become human about the time we finish our first cup of coffee. I drank coffee for the first time at the ripe old age of thirty seven, and never looked back. Soon after taking up the habit I was "hooked', and I understood why its so popular.

any powerful mind altering drug that makes you feel good is bound to be popular, and caffeine fills the bill. You'd be hard pressed to find a more powerful, mind altering, and pleasant, drug than caffeine. Coffee should be illegal, by our own twisted standards, and would be, were it discovered suddenly today.

Somehow, miraculously, we get by with legalized coffee, no one goes to jail on account of it, and everybody, drinkers and non, is happy. Kids almost always hate the smell of it, but that's no problem; kids have little political power, and can be easily bribed.

Abraham Lincoln said:  "prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason, in that it attempts to control a man's appetites by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. Prohibition strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our nation was founded."

By "prohibition", Lincoln meant the prevention of hedonistic (fun) sin, such as alcohol, other recreational drugs like tobacco, gambling, sex, and, um...am I leaving anything out?

Lincoln, as usual, was right. The insanity of cherry picking a few drugs  for criminalization while embracing others as integral features of culture is sheer lunacy, and the price we pay is a police state which puts a greater part of its citizens in prison than any other nation.

Civilized countries shouldn't behave like this, but of course common sense never stopped us before.

Bb

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