Self-professed traitor Donald Trump has now called for the execution of drug dealers, which should come as no surprise from a president who has openly collaborated with authoritarian Russia to destroy basic democratic institutions in America. But if one’s fearing for the lives of cigarette and alcohol producers (whose products kill tens of thousands a year), you can relax. Nor need we lose sleep over the wellbeing of our local psychiatrists, who, even as I type, are running socially-sanctioned pill mills across the country (by means of which 1 in 10 Americans are addicted to the daily use of Big Pharma “meds”).
No, as usual, the drug warrior animus is not directed at the substances that cause the most harm to Americans, but merely those substances that the drug warriors have decided to criminalize for political and religious reasons, though many of these “drugs” are found to be growing unbidden across the planet
Thus they override the hitherto unalienable natural law which gives Americans the right to the use of what John Locke calls “the earth and all therein,” replacing it with a capricious common law based on the propaganda-induced fears of 21st-century Americans, in this case a kind of Christian Science “Sharia,” every bit as intolerant as any legislation that was ever enacted in that name.
This Constitution-based objection to Trump’s authoritarian gambit cannot be overstressed, because the mainstream media these days is dangerously missing the point. The left and libertarian response to such totalitarian proposals as Trump’s is to point out that such a draconian strategy would not work to reduce “drug” use, typically by adducing the failure of similar approaches in other countries.
But to argue in this way is to yield crucial ground to the enemy of freedom, since this “argument from efficacy” implies that executing drug dealers would be just fine if it only served to decrease the use of naturally occurring substances in America. And to argue thus is to demonstrate one’s limited grasp of the subject at hand, by implicitly granting that government has a right, in the first place, to prevent Americans from reaching out and using the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet, a proposition which Jefferson would have found absurd and even conducive to tyranny if not rejected at once on constitutional grounds.
And that tyranny that Jefferson would have predicted has come to pass. It started in 1914, when bigoted politicians decided that too many undesirables were using the opium plant. Their answer: make a natural substance illegal, thus setting the precedent that some plants were no longer the birthright of a free citizenry to use as they saw fit.
In a rush to penalize the lower class and the ethnic Chinese, few American politicians of that era noticed the contravention of natural law that was implicit in this government intrusion into personal decisions about health and happiness. If they had really cared about the health of these minority populations, they would have educated them about the wise use of psychoactive substances rather than criminalizing a plant.
@ AP/Reuters
Fast-forward 50-plus years, when President Richard Nixon takes advantage of that anti-Constitutional precedent to punish his enemies, with so-called anti-drug laws that were designed, not to protect the health of Americans, but to land his political prisoners in jail and, if possible, remove them from the voting rolls by charging them with felonies.
Trump is now ready to pick up where Nixon left off
Fast-forward another half a century, and Traitor Trump is now ready to pick up where Nixon left off, harnessing America’s unconstitutional drug law for the purposes of becoming a dictator with the power of life and death over his vassals. It is not enough for Trump’s power lust to merely incarcerate millions of mainly minority “drug dealers,” (those who dare sell the plants and fungi for which drug law itself has created the black market), he wants to get rid of them entirely, which I suppose is useful, since it allows him to limit the number of minority offspring which might otherwise grow up to eliminate the drug war entirely, along with totally amoral politicians like Trump himself who strategically parlay those laws into populist victories.
So let me get this straight: a doctor can legally addict my anxious 92-year-old mother to the most powerful synthetic drugs on the planet, and with Trump’s blessing, but should I arrange for her to get miraculous, non-addictive relief from a mere plant – a mere plant, mind you – the source of that godsend can be strung up at high noon? When policy’s such as the drug war yield such absurd results, they must be fundamentally wrong, at least for a freedom-loving people.
But we can’t stand up to drug war tyrants on the basis of statistical charts that “prove” that tyranny doesn’t work. We must deny those tyrants the right to outlaw Mother Nature in the first place – and the power for that pushback is waiting there in the US Constitution, whose very genius lies in its elevation of natural law over common law, and if natural law tells us anything, it tells us that human beings have the right to “the earth and all therein,” and that no law can justifiably supplant that right – ever.
