The DEA's Pathetic Extinction Burst

Ahem...

GIVE IT UP, DEA!!!  YOU HAVE LOST!!!! YOUR UNEARNED AND UNDESERVED GRAVY TRAIN IS DRYING UP AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, AND THESE TANTRUMS ARE NOT HELPING YOUR CASE!!!!  STOP ACTING OUT LIKE AN ENTITLED LITTLE FIVE YEAR OLD, DISMANTLE YOUR DISHONEST AUTHORITARIAN ORGANIZATION AND START DOING SOME REAL GOOD IN THE WORLD FOR ONCE!!!!

*cough*

I can't begin to describe how much contempt I have for the DEA right now.  Why is it that we only want to respect "majority rules" and "will of the people" when it involves removing or ignoring the rights of atheists or gay people, but when it involves restoring the rights and the bodily autonomy of citizens and is supported by a whopping solid majority of the voters, suddenly we don't care about the "will of the people" anymore?

I have news for you, DEA.  No one buys the Reefer Madness lies anymore.  No one is on your side anymore.  You aren't even losing this anymore--you have LOST.  And you are doing yourself no favors by trying to keep this going.  This just shows, as we have all said time and time again, that the War on Drugs is actually a War on Marijuana, because if it wasn't and if you genuinely concerned yourself with "protecting the people" from the "evils of drugs", you'd welcome the chance to not go on pointless wild goose chases against an entirely harmless weed because it would free up your time and your funds to go chasing after drug smugglers who are smuggling in things like heroine and cocaine.  Your insistence on focusing on marijuana just shows that you have no concern for actual public safety and are only interested in keeping your gravy train going at the expense of countless innocent lives and the expense of all of our civil liberties.  It also proves that the "hard" drugs are not as prevalent in this country as you like to claim, because the only reason you'd want to keep the whole marijuana thing going is because it's the only thing keeping your paychecks coming in, because without marijuana numbers padding your quota the facts about actual drug abuse are going to come out and you're going to lose funding--if you don't get completely shut down,that is.  You care only for your own unearned power and privilege, not to mention your undeserved profit, and your fruitless little tantrums are proving that fact over and over again.

You know what real heroes are like?  Well, look at the legal group that fought the death penalty in Illinois.  Once that death penalty was gone, everyone in that office was at that point out of work in the middle of a depression (I refuse to use the word "recession"--we got to the point where people not only couldn't find work but despaired of ever finding work and stopped even trying, and that is the point where it is a depression).  Did these people start backpedaling and saying "oh, my, well, maybe there is something to the death penalty after all and we shouldn't be so hasty in eliminating it..." to save their own paychecks?  NO!  They cheered!  Even as they were clearing out their desks!  Regardless of what any individual reader thinks of the death penalty, whether you support it or not, the fact is that when someone genuinely wants to fix a problem they are happy when the problem is fixed, even if it means some extra hardship for themselves since they tied their income to finding a solution.

You people are not heroes.  You are like Captain Amazing in "The Mystery Men", who ends up using his influence as both a superhero and alter-ego to release one of his worst enemies, even though he knew the guy would likely blow something up and kill a lot of people, just so he could keep his gravy train rolling and have everyone kiss his ass again like they did before.  You KNOW marijuana is harmless, but you want to forcibly keep it illegal because it's the only thing propping up your own self-aggrandizement and the money that rolls in behind it, and you don't care how many innocent people's lives are ruined by being incarcerated for using a harmless weed, nor do you care about how many other people's lives are ruined by the cocaine and heroine shipments that get through because you are too distracted chasing state-legal, people-supported marijuana sales.

You are selfish, power-hungry, greedy authoritarian bastards, and that's all you'll ever be.  As WJM51 so succinctly put it on Raw Story, "Drop dead, DEA. That's the ONE way you can actually HELP the country."  I couldn't agree more.

More Desperation from the Anti-Legalization Crew

Did you see this joke of a post by Donald Ramsell?  http://wheaton.patch.com/groups/summer/p/medical-marijuana-bill-dangerous-to-illinois-drivers

He is seriously suggesting that marijuana legalization is a danger to drivers.  There is another such illogical individual bleating this uninformed bull about Colorado, but I can’t seem to find the article anymore.  It was one of the big politicians though, and I wonder how much the Drug War profiteering companies such as drug testing companies are paying these guys to say this crap.

The politician is whinging on about the Colorado legalization law endangering drivers for somewhat vague and stupid reasons that seriously sound as if he genuinely believes that outlawing marijuana has prevented everyone from using marijuana, and that now that it’s legal it’s going to spread like wildfire and absolutely everyone will be stoned everywhere they go…even in their car!   Oh noes!

It’s like he doesn’t seem to realize that millions of people are already smoking marijuana and anti-marijuana legislation has been an enormous failure.  It’s as if he doesn’t seem to know a damn thing about history.  I would swear this moron really thinks that Prohibition I actually worked, and for a glorious fourteen years or so the country was blissfully booze-free until the degenerates managed to force through a repealing of the Volstead Act.  And does he realize that even though alcohol is legal, it doesn’t mean people go around drunk day in and day out regardless of the circumstance or environment.  If this idiot really thinks that making an intoxicant legal is going to somehow magically compel all people to start using it at all times, why is he not fighting to restore the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment, since alcohol abuse actually dwarfs the influence of all illicit drugs combined in both workplace issues and traffic accidents?  Oh, I know—because he probably likes alcohol, and even if he doesn’t I’ll bet the majority of voters do, and for sure some of his corporate payouts are undoubtedly coming straight from alcohol companies, who are prevalent in funding efforts to defeat attempts to legalize marijuana.  The more you know, right?

Then there’s this Donald Ramsell.  He starts off saying that marijuana legalization is popular and supported by a majority of people, and maybe it’s wrong to keep it illegal.  Then he veers off into Bizarro-world as he states that there are no effective tools or measures to determine marijuana intoxication for the purposes of enforcing DUI laws and no real way to create any, so we ought to reconsider legalization for the sake of traffic safety.

WHAT?

You do realize, Donald, that we already have none of those things despite marijuana being illegal and used by millions of citizens who may or may not be driving under the influence?  You do realize that people are no more likely to be driving under the influence of marijuana now than they were before?  You do realize that even if we can’t develop marijuana-specific sobriety tests that we are still no less safe than we were before (especially since people on marijuana tend to be more relaxed and slower, whereas drunk people tend to drive like maniacs and get much angrier—ever hear of someone going on a “marijuana-fueled” rage or killing spree?  Me neither.), and that such an argument is still not a reason to outlaw the use of an essentially harmless plant and, by extension, jettison our civil rights?  You do realize that your argument is a non-argument, intended only as a desperate move to try and recapture the glory days when you could just scare people with illogical boogey-man sound bytes and have the vast majority of ignorant citizens ready to join you in battle and give you whatever you want to fight your precious Drug War, including their own civil liberties?  Do you work for a drug testing company, or are you paid by one in any way to spout this drivel?  Because I don’t believe you when you say you are happy for medical marijuana patients.  You just realize that there is a solid majority in favor of medical marijuana and that at this point arguing against it makes you look like a picture of Ebenezer Scrooge wearing a coat made out of Bambi’s skin and masturbating while eating a live puppy and that tends to turn people off whatever you’re going to say.  Your words are the marijuana legalization version of the notorious “I’m not racist, but…”

Nice try, people.  I’d tell you to try harder, but no one believes the lies in “Reefer Madness” anymore and I don’t know that you could try hard enough to bring those days back at this point.

If drug testing was accurate and reliable….

…then why do they not turn in all pre-employment positives to law enforcement?  Seriously.  Now I have been told, “Well, they can’t do that, because they have to give those people rehab.”  Well, that only applies to already-employed workers who are being either randomly tested or are tested due to suspicion or accident, and even then it is unenforced and commonly ignored and the positive-testing person (whether a legitimate positive or a false positive) is tossed out on the street with few recourses to justice.  Actual enforcement of laws aside however, there are few, if any, protections for job applicants and potential hires, which makes them fair game for the Drug Warriors, doesn’t it?

I think we all know why they don’t arrest people who test positive on pre-employment drug tests, however.  If they did that, the actual rates of false positives would start becoming visible even to the most sheltered American stooge and they’d have a unbelievable amount of lawsuits as well as calls to change the drug-war influenced laws and start regulating, limiting, or eliminating workplace drug testing.  Think about it.  All other methods (random, with-suspicion, and accident testing) have the benefit of singling out individuals as users in such a way that each person is alone, desperate, and without any idea how to protect themselves.  Better yet, since every worker is considered an a priori convicted addict simply by way of having been singled out for being tested, you can have every single person in the company and outside it ganging up on that individual as the tribe’s outsider and make them feel even more powerless—made more-so by the fact that the rest of the employees will not want to single themselves out by defending the outcast.  It’s Witch Hunt 101 techniques—single out the person in such a way that isolates them and make sure that anyone who even associates with the accused witch, much less defends them or questions the witch-hunters’ methods, will find themselves on the rack right next to the witch.  It guarantees that at the very least the accused witch or drug addict will have no friends, as the fear of also being accused will keep them silent even if they don’t join the 9am stoning parade.

But if you’re drug testing mass amounts of people, as pre-employment tends to do, you start to lose both the opportunity to single that person out of a community as well as the opportunity to silence them or their potential supporters out of fear.  There is no atmosphere of accusation to fluff up the tribal “us against them” Drug War rhetoric, and no cohesive community of workers who are under your control and can be silenced by fear of losing their jobs.  And since so many are tested as a general rule without the “singled out in the community” element there will be a larger false-positive number as a percentage of people as well as a much larger number of people who know someone who got a false positive.  They are all at much greater liberty to speak to one another--since you do not have the ability to deprive them or their co-workers of their jobs at a moment's notice--so they can raise more awareness. And if you start arresting people who test positive, all those false-positives are going to get pretty damned noticeable, since it’s one thing to be denied a job when you’re clean or to have your loved one denied a job despite being clean—and that’s going to raise a big enough stink—but when your mother or sister or daughter or brother or husband is in jail because of a false positive that is going to spark one hell of an outcry, and you can't keep sweeping that kind of outcry under the rug forever.  Heads will roll.

Think about it:  if drug testing was actually accurate and reliable, why not arrest people who test positive pre-employment?  The whole purpose of drug testing was never actually to create a safer workplace but to ensure that people who use drugs won’t be able to find work and that will somehow magically force someone with a chemical dependence that requires medical attention to overcome (which is NOT marijuana, BTW) to just suddenly go cold-turkey so they can get that coveted job at WalMart.  And we’ve seen how well that turned out, right?  *cough*  Well, how much more effective could it be if we used pre-employment drug testing as a sting operation to root out all those nasty addicts once and for all, by making it a huge chance to even apply for work?  I mean, we already have private employers conducting criminal investigations on employees and potential hires, so why not go all the way with this?  The government started with “people in safety-sensitive positions” as being fair game and used the wedge strategy to move that along until everyone is submissively urinating for the chance to say “do you want fries with that?”, and though it is highly unconstitutional as well as illegal as hell (seriously, isn’t it vigilantism for non-law enforcement to be acting as law enforcement, conducting criminal investigations on innocent citizens, and isn’t it also supposed to be illegal for law enforcement to conduct search and seizure on the general public without reasonable cause for suspicion?), they just waved their hands and declared it legal for the purposes of “fighting the Drug War” by rooting out drug users and making sure they can’t find work.  Why not just hand-wave a little further and make sure they can’t even risk the chance that their evil specimen-adulterating efforts will fail and they will end up in prison?

I think we all know the answer to that.  Because it is unreliable and inaccurate, and arresting all the pre-employment positives will make that plainly visible to even the most pro-Drug War blinded idiots, in the same way that knowing a gay person or persons tends to reduce people’s opposition to gay rights, including gay marriage.  Facts are poisonous to liars.

For that matter, why do you think it’s so incredibly hard to get your pre-employment results?  You just don’t get the job, and then no one talks about it and you get a run-around.  Because if all those non-using people who are losing opportunities to work due to false positives knew about it, they’d be ready to wring the necks of every drug-testing proponent in the vicinity—not to mention how much confidence would be lost in the pseudo-scientific practice, which mostly relies on people having no idea how it works and assuming it’s some kind of scientific magical uromancy wherein the science wizards divine the answers from the piss gods.  If you keep people ignorant of the facts, however, you can keep your shady money-train tooting along for some time.

That said, I would like to read more on this thing I have discovered about naturally occurring cannabinoids in the human body.  I wonder if some outliers actually produce considerably more of these than others, as is so often the case with such situations, and can’t seem to find work because, unbeknownst to them, they can’t pass a drug test and have no idea why they have so many promising interviews that go to pot all of a sudden.  This would be a good thing to look into, and I intend to do just that.  You should too.

Short post about the Fourth

Hello!  This will be a rather quick post.  I would just like to say Happy Fourth of July, and point out that the Fourth is one of those days wherein we celebrate all the people who have fought, bled and died for our freedoms--and that means civil rights.  This day has become a real joke in modern America, where a nation of frightened crybabies have given up every last one of their rights, rights hard-won with the blood of freedom-loving martyrs, in the hopes that their government and corporate lords can keep them safe.  A nation where a majority of stupid putrid cowards submit to strip searches and groping in the airports and piss in a cup, not just for the "privilege" of eating but the "privilege" of slaving like an animal for a wage not even sufficient for basic survival, all because they think that such submission to the established powers will keep them safe from "the bad guys".  A nation that has turned it's back on our Founding Fathers' actual visions for this country, great men who knew the fact that those who are willing to sacrifice liberty for security deserve and will have neither.  A nation of cowards and right-wing authoritarians who would rather suckle at a security theater blanket than face reality head on.

What I'm saying is that if you still support the Failed Drug War and the drug testing culture, if you are one of those useful idiots who cheers a system wherein every person must either drop their pants and submissively urinate for their boss and/or government or starve to death, if you are one of those stupid putrid cowards who thinks that our country needs more authoritarianism and more people being strip searched in airports and everywhere else....

Well, if you are one of those uninformed and benighted individuals, you have no right to celebrate the Fourth of July because you have taken the wonderful gift our Founders and many others fought and died to obtain for you and spit it straight in their face.  You have taken the freedoms that others have faced danger and death to give you and have given them right back to the oppressors like a coward, because those oppressors have given you an empty and undeliverable promise to keep you safe.  You are what is wrong with this country, and for you to celebrate any holiday that honors people who have died for our freedoms is the rankest hypocrisy.  You should be ashamed of yourself for selling out such important freedoms, and doubly ashamed of pretending to honor the people throughout history who sacrificed their lives for those freedoms.

Let me tell you a little something about facing reality head-on:  To paraphrase Westley, no one can ever guarantee your safety, no matter how many civil rights or crucial freedoms you cast aside like garbage.  Anyone who tells you different is selling something.