Throwing Away the Key

THE YEAR NINETEEN SEVENTY THREE began with a big bang. Pablo Picasso died, and George Steinbrenner purchased the new york yankees from CBS. A peace treaty was finally signed formally ending the viet nam war, and the united states supreme court issued its infamous roe v wade decision.

The governor of new york state, nelson rockefeller, changed his mind about crimes involving drugs. Rockefeller had previously regarded drug abuse as a social and health issue, requiring rehabilitation and education.

Having studied the zero tolerance policies of other nations, including japan, rockefeller, almost overnight, became a hard liner. No more coddling criminals. Anyone violating drug laws, everyone from big time drug dealers to street corner marijuana sales persons would go to jail, and stay there. New York state passed tough drug laws, including long, mandatory sentences for minor offenders, and the great round up was underway.

The anti drug get tough movement swept across the country. Between nineteen seventy three and twenty thirteen hundreds of new sate and federalprisons were built, at a cost of billions of dollars, and america's prison population increased from about three hundred thousand in nineteen seventy three, to the two and a half million it is today.

Nearly half of all fedearl inmates are non violent drug offenders. There are prisons all over the country devoted only to locking up drug offenders. The cost is stagggering. Nearly a hundred billion a year tomaintain the prison system.The one benefit seems to be job creation: nearly half a million americans have jobs as prison guards.

It has not escaped the attention of observant people that the "criminals" are overwhelmingly black and hispanic, and poor. Middle and upper middle class white americans use the most drugs, because drugs are expensive, and white collar careers are stressful.

President Nixon's "war on drugs", which coincided with the rockefeller transformation, was a response to nixon's hatred of the young hippies of the nineteen sixties, the woodstock generation, who hated him in return. The "moral majority", a term we recall fondly, silently acceded to the new police state.

We should have listened to abraham lincoln: "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."

The united states has become a nation in which guns in the hands of the masses are glorified as the solution to crime, and we the people are subject to government searches inside our bodies for illegal substances.

Drug testing, inside your body, by your government, with the approval of the people. But of course, adolf hitler was elected to office, wasn't he.  Keep your guns concealed, folks, and flush your marijuana down the toilet. Come have a cold beer.