The Inalienable Right to Get High

SOLO-International Press Release: The Inalienable Right to Get High

May 11, 2009

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's call for a "great debate" about legalizing cannabis should be the catalyst for a great debate about ending the disastrous War on Drugs altogether, says SOLO Principal Lindsay Perigo.

"The infamous President Nixon instigated this unwinnable war in 1971," Perigo recalls. "As with the equally misbegotten alcohol prohibition of 1919-1933, the only actual winner has been organized crime. The big loser has been the founding tenet of America: freedom. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness implies ownership of one's own body, which subsumes the right to ingest any substance of one's choosing, regardless of the moral status of such an action.

"Currently in the United States, 775,000 people have been deprived of their liberty and languish in jail for a cannabis offence. That's more than the total in jail for all types of violent crime— real crime—combined," Perigo notes.

"On and below America's southern border a hideous battle is being played out among drug cartels, each other and American authorities trying in vain to curb the flow of drugs to the cartels' biggest market. Thousands have died and thousands more will die yet, unless this authoritarian catastrophe is halted. More people are now being murdered in Tijuana by the cartels than by Islamofascist filth in Baghdad. And the police cannot be relied upon to provide protection in a culture whose leitmotif is, 'Take a bribe, or take a bullet.'

"In an echo of this madness in the Antipodes, a New Zealand policeman has recently been shot dead in what was described as a 'low-risk cannabis operation.'

"It's no surprise that even a statist like the onetime pro-freedom Traitornator is coming to his senses at a time when government revenues—California’s most notably—are shrinking with the economy. A 2008 study by Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron estimated that legalizing drugs would inject $76.8 billion a year into the U.S. economy—$44.1 billion from law enforcement savings, and at least $32.7 billion in tax revenue ($6.7 billion from marijuana, $22.5 billion from cocaine and heroin, the remainder from other drugs).

"The behaviour of government SWAT teams in waging the War on Drugs has often been indistinguishable from that of organised crime itself, except that the latter has been more efficient in confining itself to the elimination of fellow-scumbags, while SWAT teams have on several occasions burst into the wrong homes and summarily executed entirely innocent people.

"Congress itself, abounding as it does in crooked Democrats and sanctimonious Christian Republicans, all high on a tax-funded power-trip, has been persecuting athletes for taking steroids, when this matter is the business of the relevant private sports disciplines and their voluntary contractees alone.

"The War on Drugs is a disgrace, and subverts the credibility of America's claim to be the land of the free as seriously as any of President Chavez-Obama's economic policies," Perigo concludes.

SOLO (Sense of Life Objectivists: SOLOPassion.com)

ENDS

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