-Caveat Lector- The War on Drugs Is a War on Liberty by Scott Wilkerson William S. Burroughs, the visionary novelist and social critic, warned that the United States government’s war on drugs was nothing more than the pretext for establishing in our culture a vast police apparatus that would forever supercede all our claims to privacy and property. Nowhere is this nightmarish scenario more visibly prescient than in the case of actor Robert Downey Jr. We all remember the details. The ghastly spectacle of Al Gore’s Thanksgiving voting piracy was briefly punctuated by news of how the police stormed into Downey’s Palm Springs hotel room on an anonymous tip that he was inside with illegal narcotics and a gun, two things the government would love to keep from all citizens. Indeed, they found him with cocaine, his drug of choice, and some other neuro-morphic delights. His mug shot was, of course, splayed endlessly across the entertainment news, but quickly coopted by the "important" news segments as evidence of the increasing dissolution of Hollywood and further proof that white males are, after all, the real problem in America. The prosecutor from the District Attorney’s office in his case now reports that it is very likely a deal between the "authorities" and Downey’s defense will result in another engagement with a rehabilitation center instead of prison. Even the system recognizes that it is absurd to pursue non-violent drug offenders as though they were rapists or murderers or secessionists. Strangely, the same Hollywood Left that loves Downey’s oblique sexuality and his campy wit, that has given him a splendid guest starring spot on Ally McBoring, that has recognized his comic genius with a Golden Globe nomination, and has rightly ignored the "authorities’" hysterical demands for his head did not publicly condemn the gratuitous invasion of his civil liberties when he was arrested because someone made a phone call! What in the world is going on here? Just more confusion because of loose equivocation on the meaning of words like "laws" and "rights." The government does seem intuitively to understand that Downey is more useful to society than some wacked out crack-fiend robber gangsta from South Central and, therefore, extends to him a modicum of indulgence. But rather than re-examine the entire construction of its narcotics policies, the government merely renegotiates, every ninety days, the terms of Downey’s case. And the same Hollywood, that threatens to relocate to Europe every time a conservative dares to utter a discouraging word about some group’s victimological drivel, remains silent when one of its own becomes the poster boy for Federal Usurpation of Individual Liberty because it cannot discern whether Downey’s "right" to privacy is more or less fundamental than the state’s "laws" against doing to your own body whatever you like Let us celebrate Robert Downey Jr.’s drug habit and his heroic serial returns to the front lines of this central debate. Burroughs correctly perceived that the government secretly resents those liberties it presumes to protect. We are complicit in the delusion that we are safe as long as we play it straight. But the war on drugs is a war on the individual. And each of us is a soldier in that battle. December 30, 2000 Scott Wilkerson is curator of the Ward Library at the Mises Institute. -- ...a strict observance of the written laws is doubtless ONE of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not THE HIGHEST. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means. - Thomas Jefferson <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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