So, I was visiting a friend in a real swanky part of town last week. When I say swanky, I mean a part of town where the houses start for sale at US$ 3,000,000. The way my friend's house is situated on his street is so that when we are sitting around his patio table, we have a view of the entire front yard of one of his neighbors, who happens to be a very elderly man who requires a walker to get around.
While we were on the patio, sipping our mimosas, a late model Camaro with a slightly too loud exhaust system pulled up in front of the elderly man's home and tooted its horn. The driver was a young black fellow that I would estimate to be in his early 20s.
The elderly man came out the front door and doddered down to the street on his walker. He had a short conversation with the driver of the Camaro, handed a few bills to him, and received, from the driver, what appeared to be a half-quart clear plastic bag of something resembling marijuana. The elderly man turned around and headed back to his front door while the Camaro pulled away from the curb and left the vicinity.
This scenario typifies the retail drug trade today in America. Illicit drugs are no longer only sold in the seedy parts of downtown by seedy looking characters to seedy looking customers. Access to recreational drugs had become ubiquitous. The only way to get caught is to be wasted or to be really, really stupid.
While I am against the killing of unborn children, if recreational drug users could get organized, they should adopt the abortion slogan, "My body, my choice." By doing so, they would conflate recreational drug use with an already court-sanctified legal activity and bring some positive momentum to fighting the government suppression of recreational drug use.
I am not advocating recreational drug use. I don't use recreational drugs myself, and I find incredible the number of people who do. However, it is my considered opinion that the illegality of drugs causes way more problems than the drugs themselves. Governments in America at all levels have invested way too many taxpayer dollars in militarizing police forces in the so-called "war on drugs". Civil liberties have been thrown under the bus in this unnecessary "war", with non-knock warrants, invasive searches, and civil asset forfeiture. Innocent people, including babies, have been maimed or killed in the name of keeping us safe from those bad drugs. The SJW practice of swatting would not be possible were it not for the government infrastructure related to the war on drugs. And the number of raids gone bad due to the lack of corroboration by police where innocents have been killed is heartbreaking. And because the drugs are illegal, in many cases, it drives the consumers of the drug to crime because they have no other avenue to feed the addiction.
It's time to end the war, or at least call a truce. It would be much cheaper to give the people who want help the help they need, and for those that don't want help, well, at the risk of sounding callous, that is a self-correcting problem.
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