By Alan Gore
My generation has always tended to take a dim view of fighting overpriced wars that have no purpose, are fought on behalf of people who have no desire to be freed from tyranny, and are specially designed not to be winnable. For over a decade we have been waist deep in the Big Muddy, have stayed totally stuck, and the old fools still say to push on. On innumerable occasions, we have been promised that victory was just around the corner - just burn one more page of the Constitution, and we can whip this thing. Now the voters of Arizona and California, by walloping majorities in both states, have officially decided to burn their draft cards instead. So will the last person out of the drug dealers’ tunnel please turn out that light?
Although opiates are known to relieve the suffering of a few terminally ill patients in severe pain, I hardly think that the vote in this conservative state signifies any sudden new respect for the memory of Timothy Leary. The problem around here is the war itself. According to Lyndon - oops, I mean Bill - we had to destroy our freedoms in order to save them. Men may be from Mars and women from Venus, but our Congressional representatives from Uranus thought that all we needed to do to win the War On Drugs was give governments just a little more power. As we found out, that was like giving Genghis Khan just a little more land. It started with wiretapping and no-knock searches. Now when the DEA breaks into some little old lady’s home and rips it to shreds, only to find that Mr. Medellin Cartel was actually the address next door, she can’t even sue - if they’re the feds, they have immunity unless they volunteer to relinquish it.
When the dopocrats found that the drug problem got worse anyway, they decided to - well, just as Lyndon did during his war, escalate. They invented pretrial forfeiture, giving themselves the power to seize property anytime, anywhere, on "probable cause" that the property may have been "involved" in a drug transaction. "Probable cause" is the same I-think-something’s-fishy-here standard by which a cop can make an arrest in the field. The difference is that when a suspect is arrested, Constitutional rights come into play: you have to be charged and brought to trial in a speedy manner, evidence is subject to stringent rules, jury handpicked by your lawyer, and so on. But since property is not people, under the War On Drugs doctrine it has no rights. If a drug officer at the airport sees you paying cash for your plane ticket, he can legally steal it without so much as giving you a receipt. Paying cash is an activity he can deem suspicious, so he can take your car and house too if he can find them. If he doesn’t charge you with anything, the case is closed - no arrest means no suspect rights. You’re back on the street without your stuff.
Power like this may have started with federal enforcement agencies, but as soon as state and local governments saw what a wonderful thing this was, they convened their various local equivalents of the Secret Midnight Stadium Tax Committee to give themselves the same set of powers. For jerkwater constituencies with no industrial base and no more bond borrowing power, this has been the greatest thing since sliced sex. No more sticky tax referendums, no more bonds - just plunder cash and Caddies from people driving through Hazzard County on the Interstate.
As the new year begins the [President] and his band of lawyers is wondering why we here in Arizona were so "stupid" as to vote against the War On Drugs. After the election Donna Shalala and Janet Reno met in so hasty an emergency session they left their broomsticks double-parked. By the end of December Gen. Barry McCaffrey, drug czar, had drawn a line in the Sonoran sand: if any of our Arizona/California doctors prescribe formerly-illegal drugs, he intends to pull their licenses and have them investigated by the DEA. Well, General, we’ll see your jack-booted thugs and raise you a few Vipers.