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

Since January 2007, there have been an estimated 9,903 drug-war-related deaths in Mexico, more than the U.S. fatalities thus far in the Iraq War.18 Many children have also been exposed to the brutal war. In Tijuana, schoolchildren have seen bodies hung from overpasses and stuffed into refrigerators.19 Furthermore, twelve corpses, with their tongues cut out, were dumped into a vacant lot across from an elementary school.20 The stories are downright tragic.

The War on Big Government

The war on drugs has been a disaster for America. Using drugs, killing babies in our wombs, and taking our own lives are all actions committed against our bodies. Yet, while the government permits us to have abortions and commit suicide, and lets us get high on one chemical, alcohol, it prohibits us from getting high on other chemicals, which it calls “drugs.” Does that make any sense? Everyone should have the right to make choices about his or her own body, period.

While on a larger scale the war on drugs is about wasteful government expenditure and an infringement on our Fourth Amendment rights, on a more personal level it is about the choices individuals make concerning their own bodies. We should be allowed to control what enters our bodies. If someone very badly wants to ingest a chemical substance into his body, he should be able to do so regardless of any government law; and thousands do so, every day. According to Professor Murray Rothbard:

Propagandize against cigarettes as much as you want, but leave the individual free to run his own life. Otherwise, we may as well outlaw all sorts of possible carcinogenic agents—including tight shoes, improperly fitting false teeth, excessive exposure to the sun, as well as excessive intake of ice cream, eggs, and butter which might lead to heart disease. And, if such prohibitions prove unenforceable, again the logic is to place people in cages so that they will receive the proper amount of sun, the correct diet, properly fitting shoes, and so on.21 (emphases added)

Furthermore, we know from the utter ineffectiveness of Prohibition that drug laws will never serve as a deterrent to drug use. Will Rogers opined that “[i]nstead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth!”22 Rogers was being facetious, but he certainly has a point.

Generally, someone who seeks to disobey laws that punish victimless crimes does not look up the jail sentence for the crime he is about to commit, so why criminalize drug use, and give drug users and sellers long stints in prison? Do these laws really change people’s mind-sets? Hardly. There is no logic here, and billions of dollars per year are wasted because of this lack of foresight. On this issue, Milton Friedman wrote, “Every friend of freedom . . . must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty [and property] of citizens on slight evidence.”23

Finally, America’s children have also often fallen victim to the drug war. Getting in trouble with the law at a young age follows many youngsters into adulthood. These children are plagued with emotional baggage and possibly a criminal record, simply for trying to satisfy their curiosities. If we really want to raise healthy, happy children, it is up to families, peer groups, and communities to restrict harmful behavior—not the government. Close-knit relationships and good examples reach much further than the government ever could, and they do not cost taxpayers a dime.

We must stop this foolish war, and stop letting the government talk us into it year after year, election after election. As we have learned throughout this book, the government does two things very well: it scares us to death, and it spends our money. The war on drugs is no different than any other government scam employed to steal our money. When will there be a “War on Big Government,” in which the taxpayers get money from Washington to keep the federal government from spiraling further out of control?

Lie #12

“Everyone Is Innocent Until Proven

Guilty”

One beautiful day in Washington, D.C., a twelve-year-old girl named Ansche Hedgepeth was arrested by an undercover transit officer on her way home from school. She was handcuffed, taken to a juvenile processing center, fingerprinted, photographed, and detained for three hours. Ansche was not arrested for murder, or assault, or theft; rather, she had the audacity to eat a French fry on the subway. And the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sanctioned her three-hour incarceration.1 (This case, which would have normally been brought in a District of Columbia city court, was filed in federal court in Washington because the girl’s mother claimed that the Washington transit authority had violated her daughter’s right to equal protection under the law.)

If children on the subway are subjected to such unconstitutional conduct, imagine what adults face when police officers have the right to lock them up and treat them as guilty before even the semblance of a trial is held. And then imagine a court system that denies the presumption of innocence until the jury is impaneled. And then imagine judges who permit it; and a government that denies it.

Probably the least questioned and most believed government lie is also the most famous maxim of the American judicial system: that all persons are presumed “innocent until proven guilty” beyond a reasonable doubt. This presumption of innocence is a standard taught to the youngest of school children and which the government hails as a founding principle of justice because it presumes that, like the oft-repeated Lord Justice William Blackstone ratio, “Better that