Don't Defund the Police, Defund the - - -
June 12, 2021
Did you know that Coca-Cola, first sold in 1885 in Atlanta Georgia as a stimulant and mood elevator, was named after it’s two main ingredients, Cola nuts containing caffeine, and an extract of coca leaves called “cocaine?”
And did you know that Coca-Cola continued to contain cocaine for the next 44 years until the last third of the Rules Mentality‘s anti-vice mania, and that many other common products also contained cocaine?
Did you know that coffee was outlawed in at least five venues throughout history because it contained caffeine?
For example, in 1623 Constantinople, you were beaten the first time you were caught with coffee. It’s unlikely you were caught a third time because the second time you were sewn into a leather bag and tossed into the ocean.
In mid-18th Century Sweden, coffee was outlawed and the Swedish cops confiscated “paraphernalia” such as coffee cups and saucers.
Did you know that just like caffeine, cocaine from coca leaves is quite useful as a stimulant and mood elevator and has been used for centuries by Peruvian folks, especially to help them survive in high-altitude low-oxygen environments?
The Rules Mentality also attempted to stop we Americans — the freest people in the world — from using other medicinal substances that were in common use — opium and it’s derivatives for example — by declaring them “illegal” with predictably disastrous results.
You probably already know of the disastrous results but may not think of them that way. Yet.
They even tried to stamp out marijuana use, which by now almost everyone knows was at least as stupid as trying to stamp out coffee.
This was the period, beginning particularly in 1910, when John D. Rockefeller, at his zenith, began getting control of medicine. Rockefeller’s plans included getting Uncle Sam to backstop monopolies for him by “regulating” the natural and traditional medicinal chemicals folks were using and he couldn’t control — opium, cocaine, etc.
In fact, as Rockefeller knew, most so-called “regulation” isn’t to help folks, it’s to create, protect and/or secure market-share or monopoly.
This was also the period when the elected minions began seriously using the economy to overcome the limitations The Constitution imposed to prevent them from messing with our freedoms. Particularly noteworthy was passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, clarifying the CORPORATE Income Tax — and it birthed the IRS.
That was gradually connived into the so-called PERSONAL Income Tax and we were gradually bamboozled into taxing ourselves as if we were corporations. But that’s a another story.
Just one year later, in 1914, the minions passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, imposing new taxes and regulations on opiates and cocaine, using the IRS as the enforcement apparatus.
As the Act’s namesake confessed, “The purpose of this Bill can hardly be said to raise revenue, because it prohibits the importation of something upon which we have hitherto collected revenue.” “We are not attempting to collect revenue, but regulate commerce.”
Was John D. Rockefeller whispering in his ear?
You might note that the minions’ nomenclature was already thoroughly screwed up: Opiates, since they deaden pain and tend to put folks to sleep, are indeed narcotics. Cocaine on the other hand, does just the opposite.
As a result of the Harrison Act, by 1924 — just 10-years-on — according to the NYC police, over 94% of those in NYC jails were there on drug charges. The minions might have taken a lesson from this but they didn’t. And mostly still don’t.
While some folks misusing common medicinal chemicals may be disturbing, general interference by government with a free peoples’ preferences, even when you call them vices, always turns out badly.
How well has the last 100 or so years of the War on Drug Users gone? In case you’re in doubt, drug czar General Barry McCaffrey explained the situation over 30 years ago: “War’s over, drugs won.”
And that’s the tip of the “disastrous results” iceberg.
It’s mostly the economics. In 1976, the average daily dose of heroin, worth less than a penny-and-a-half wholesale, went for $57.50 — $269.67 in 2021 dollars — on the street. That’s a $269 profit in today’s dollars for the “black market” supply chain and that’s protected from established free-market competition — you know, from RITE-AID, Walgreens, etc. — which would otherwise keep prices reasonable.
Maybe you’re thinking, “But we have to protect the kids!” Well if that matters to you, you want to immediately decriminalize drugs. It’s that $269 profit motive.
As history and the record shows, one of the safest, easiest, most vulnerable and most profitable demographics to push criminalized substances on is, well, the kids, especially the ones handicapped by today’s government-form schools.
Further, as a result of that $269 price tag, Las Vegas Metro’s Information Officer Carter told me, in addition to direct drug “crimes,” “We consider it a rule of thumb that 50% or better of crimes against property are drug related. By drug related we mean that as many as 75% of robberies, muggings, and burglaries are addicts stealing to support their habit.”
Add the small contribution from the Oldest Profession, and you find about 2/3rds of what’s classified as “crime” here in the freest country in the world — including as much as 75% of your chance of getting robbed, burgled, or mugged — is caused by attempting to outlaw so-called “vices.”
It doesn’t take an active imagination to see why indulging the Rules Mentality this way invariably makes things orders of magnitude worse than the original problem. If there really was one. What do you suppose would happen if they tried to outlaw cigarettes and coffee? Criminalising vices is what causes those disastrous results.
Here’s THE classic example – – –
Just five years after trying to use taxes and the IRS to interfere with some of our ancestors’ so-called “vices” via. the Harrison Act, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) collected enough like-minded folks — not only women BTW — to successfully agitate the elected minions of the day to go thru the extreme difficulty of amending The U.S. Constitution. They passed the 18th Amendment, certified on Jan. 16, 1919, outlawing alcoholic beverages in the U.S.A., thus officially adding them to the growing list of “vices.”
It was a complete disaster, exactly as you’d expect if you went to the trouble of looking at the 94% drug-related guest-list in the NYC jails after passage of the Harrison Act.
As compared to the free-lance bootleggers who merely avoided the taxes on alcohol, this created huge well-financed gangs — Al Capone, etc. Unlike the bootleggers, they now had their humongous profits automatically protected from almost all market competition. By the cops.
But staying in business nearly always required bribes, usually irresistible to poorly paid cops. This seriously corrupted the whole law and order industry and poisoned the culture. It’s where speak-easies, criminal gangs and Eliot Ness with his hopefully monikered “Untouchables” — meaning they couldn’t be bribed — came from.
This landmark mistake created so much chaos, turbulence, disruption, disorder and mayhem, that our ancestors got the message. Once again braving the difficulty of a constitutional amendment — and thus doing it the old-fashioned legal Constitutional way — they repealed that ill-conceived interference with our personal preferences with the 21st Amendment which went into effect on Dec. 5, 1933, just one month shy of fourteen years after making that landmark mistake.
With that viewpoint, it’s worth noting that we have apparently developed a lot more tolerance for chaos, turbulence, disruption, disorder and mayhem, than our ancestors had. The St. Valentine’s Day so-called “Massacre,” Feb. 14, 1929, shocked the whole nation when seven competing bootleggers were gunned down. Sounds like a light-crime day these days doesn’t it?
Note that a U.S. Constitutional amendment was required to attempt alcohol prohibition. Stupid or not, that’s the only way such monumental interferences in our freedoms, liberties, and personal preferences can be done without violating The Constitution.
So, where are the Constitutional amendments outlawing cocaine, etc.?
The minions and elected liars — who now fancy themselves “lawmakers” instead of caretakers of The Constitution — imagine they have the right to manipulate us any which way they want. They now ignore The Constitution, except when it sounds good for re-election propaganda.
So now, rather than proper Constitutional law, we have instead the mostly unconstitutional bloviations and self-serving pseudo-legal — and often illegal — emissions of minions and elected liars and those who can afford to buy them.
That’s called “Positive Law” and now, with the passage of about 40,000 new Positive Law bloviations every year, Positive Law has almost completely drowned The Constitution with its Natural and Common Law — and perhaps you’ve noticed, common sense as well.
As the quip goes, “Ten Commandments were enough for God, what the Hell are we doing?”
Positive Law slipped it’s final Constitutional moorings during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reign. In particular, here in the country with the freest farmers in the world, Roosevelt and his minions illegitimately used the interstate part of The Constitution’s Commerce Clause to make it illegal for our free farmers to grow more than a certain limited amount of grain.
Sounds downright unAmerican doesn’t it?
Even worse — after FDR threatened to “pack” the Supreme Court — in Wickard vs. Filburn, The Court ruled that it was illegal for free farmer Filburn to grow a separate plot of grain to feed his animals because then he wouldn’t be buying the feed-grain in the open market, thus affecting interstate commerce.
In a later similar case, the Supreme Court clarifies, no hype, the complete end of America-as-we-knew-it. Justice Clarence Thomas, unfortunately in the minority, wrote the epitaph – – –
“Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use [medicinal] marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything — and the federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.” — Clarence Thomas, Gonzales v. Raich
Before F.D. Roosevelt and his “New Deal” minions threatened to “pack” it, the Supreme Court struck down all such unconstitutional Federal assaults on liberty and so Congress rarely used the Commerce Clause at all and only as intended by the founders — specifically to prevent State interference with cross-border trade.
However, since The Supreme Court capitulated to FDR in Wickard vs. Filburn etc., Positive Law has become the illegitimate super-highway for bulldozing our freedoms and liberty under the bus – – – and sending us the bill. Something like 80% of Congressional bloviations now rely on the illegitimate use of the interstate part of the Commerce Clause.
It’s illegitimate and unconstitutional Positive Law — and sweeping the Tenth Amendment under the rug — which has enabled our minions and elected liars to improperly outlaw our vices, preferences, freedoms, and liberty without Constitutional Amendments.
But it’s the vice bloviations which are doing the most visible damage.
With all those vice infractions, cops no longer have time to be peace officers and so have morphed into LEOs — Law Enforcement Officers — instead. Those personnel predisposed towards maintaining peace drift away or get nudged or forced out and replaced by folks with more thuggish tendencies. That’s the subtext of Clarence Thomas’s well-written epitaph.
So rather than Mayberry’s sheriff Andy Taylor, we end up with Derek Cauvin, Daniel Pantaleo, Lon Horiuchi ( the FBI sniper who shot Vicki Weaver through the head with her babe-in-arms,) and SWAT Teams, etc.
Predictably, the folks and entities that profit from this insanity have managed to keep us in the dark and feed us so much B.S. that some of us still believe marijuana is so dangerous it should still be unconstitutionally outlawed just like those other scary “vices.”
So we hire and pay for approximately two-thirds of the cops, judges, courts, jails, prisons, prison guards and last but not least, lawyers, pandering to this 100-year-old vice-establishment Chinese fire drill.
As a result, we get the usual turbulence, disruption, disorder, chaos, mayhem, rampant police violence — more often against black citizens than population size warrants — and by far the world’s record incarceration rate. In addition, 70% of our chances of being crime victims all depend on us spending about $51 billion tax-dollars a year just to maintain this disastrous trouble-making farce.
Worse yet, with those 40,000 new laws accumulating every year, anyone can be targeted at any time by a government or anyone with money and/or power enough to influence one. As a result, we have what’s shaping up to be the most invasive, repressive police state in history. Look what the deep-state machine is doing to rich-guy and former U.S. President Trump for example.
Here’s the next vice-related disaster galloping into view – – –
Drug cartels attack enemies and spread terror with weaponized drones in US, Mexico
And remember, “War’s over, drugs won.” And that was 30 years ago.
But the real cost and tragedy of all this illicit Positive Law is the nearly complete destruction of the American Dream. The dismantling of a mostly peaceful, bucolic culture with positive expectations, stable families, and relatively little violence. Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, Leave it to Beaver and The Waltons versus the modern analogs – – – Robocop, Married With Children, and Modern Family for example — where younger generations’ expectations are almost non-existent but include a worse life than their parents had.
A huge chunk of this mess could be eliminated almost over-night by taking the profit out of the black-market by decriminalizing all so-called vices.
So, have you figured out what I left out in the title to this piece? If we want at least a shot at resurrecting America, “Don’t Defund the Police, Defund the Vice Squad.”
If you’re really optimistic, ambitious, and maybe patriotic, you might want to go even further. You might want to consider how we can defund government in general and begin freeing ourselves from the illicit bloviations foisted on us by those elected liars and minions who fancy themselves “law makers” instead of caretakers of The Constitution.
In particular, you might consider joining with others repealing and/or ignoring the approximately 80% of those bloviations illegitimately using the interstate part of The Constitution’s Commerce Clause. And encourage and pressure the Supreme Court to overturn them for us, since that is their job, and until F.D. Roosevelt, they did it pretty well – – –
No one said it would be easy.
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