Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

the cycle generally does not end with one person. Children who grow up in houses where their parents are drug dealers, in housing projects, and on welfare generally are not primed to have the brightest futures. They grow up around these things, and this lifestyle becomes normalized and passed on. Whole generations of families grow up around this, and it is unhealthy, dangerous, and expensive. This cycle is detrimental, and the government’s holier-than-thou values have been unable to stop it.

Why We Fight

Yet, the drug war keeps going, and going, and going. Regardless of who is in power, Republican, Democrat, liberal, or conservative, the war on drugs has been happening for four decades. Why? Is the government so arrogant and stubborn that it can’t look at the statistical information and see that these policies simply do not work? Do politicians just like squandering our money? These questions are still open, but it seems likely that the government knows these policies do not work. It must. Yet, politicians lie to us and wax poetic about eliminating the use of drugs because it sounds like a good thing to say from a stump. Well, it’s about time they come back down to earth.

Politicians like to speak about the war on drugs because combating drugs sounds moral. The people from good families, with good morals, and good character that we want to represent us in the government feel the need to propagate this squeaky-clean image. Advocating for a drug-free society generally helps this image and is something the public wants to hear. Politicians are afraid to veer away from it. The mainstream public is afraid to disagree. Basically, we all waste $40 billion a year to keep up a useless, ineffective appearance.

Who’s fooled by this charade? Anyone who picks up a news paper, tabloid, watches TV, or goes on the Internet could tell you that politicians are far from angels. They have affairs, they steal money, they gamble, they drink to excess. Many have even used drugs that they themselves have voted to make illegal. And the truth is, many ordinary American people have used drugs as well; for this is the reason that the drug war is such a large enterprise.

At its heart, the war on drugs is about false morality and personal freedom. People do risky things every day. Sure, some people are more averse to risk than others and would never climb a mountain or go bungee jumping. Yet, some people love doing these death-defying stunts, and their quality of life would be damaged without doing them. Drugs are not much different. Once you take the government’s sense of morality out of the equation, and simply look at drugs as dangerous and addictive substances, drugs are really not much different than other risks. So, instead of spouting on and on about the morality of this issue, couldn’t politicians take on the cause of freedom?

This gets back to the heart of what this book argues: The government lies to us when it tells us the drug war is for our own good or when it tells us that the war on drugs is working. The government lies to us by covering up what the drug war is actually about— image, power, and usurping the rights of Americans.

Anthony Gregory, senior researcher at the Independent Institute, a free-market think tank in Oakland, California, eloquently wrote:

The ideology of the war on drugs is the ideology of totalitarianism, of communism, of fascism and of slavery. In practice, it has made an utter mockery of the rule of law and the often-spouted idea that America is the freest country on earth. The United States has one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world, second only to Rwanda, thanks largely to the drug war, all while its federal government imposes its drug policies on other countries by methods ranging from mere diplomatic bullying to spraying foreign crops with lethal poison, from bribing foreign heads of state to bankrolling and whitewashing acts of mass murder conducted by despots in the name of fighting drugs.7

Reported incidents reveal a gross abuse of police power during drug raids. In Philadelphia, a group of narcotics squad members entered Jose Duran’s tobacco shop with guns drawn and then smashed some of the store’s surveillance cameras with a metal rod before arresting the owners for selling tiny, empty ziplock bags which the officers claimed were drug paraphernalia. After breaking the remaining surveillance cameras, the police stole money from the cash register and handfuls of Zippo lighters.

Similar stories about abuse of police power were reported by seven other small shops in the Philadelphia area. All of these jackbooted raids were apparently led by narcotics officer Jeffrey Cujdik.8 At least three people who formerly acted as informants for Cujdik claimed that the officer would give them cartons of cigarettes that he stole from the stores he raided. In one raided store, officers opened up the refrigerators to drink and take the juice and energy drinks kept inside.

No matter who performs actions like this, they are against the law. But, people’s rights are often trampled, with the war on drugs used as a justification. These Philadelphia raids are just a few examples of the government-engineered assaults on our rights through the war on drugs. Several federal civil rights lawsuits were filed against Cujdik and his brother Richard, who is also an officer, other drug squad members, and the City of Philadelphia.9 As of this writing, the outcomes of the cases have yet to be determined.

The government uses the drug war to justify taking away our rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” and bars search warrants on anything but those based upon “probable cause” of criminal activity and issued by judges. Since the war on drugs began almost four decades ago, most searches and seizures reaching the United States Supreme Court have been approved. According to Yale Law School Professor Steven Duke, the Court