Electric Monkey Pants

[digg] America’s drug tsar raised the stakes on drug testing in schools yesterday, suggesting that it could come to be seen as normal required and “responsible behaviour” in the same way that some US schools routinely test all pupils for tuberculosis.

read more | digg story [/digg]

Yes, but they don’t arrest the students who test positive for tuberculosis. What an idiotic thing to say. There’s more idiocy:

Mr Walters said cannabis use was not just a matter of personal choice and the expression of freedom in the same way as a preference for clothes and hairstyles. “We’re still living as if substance abuse is a fashion statement,” he said.

Taking a strong line against marijuana was “not being judgmental but showing that we care”.

In other news: down is up, freedom is slavery and war is peace.

So by “care” he means “ruin the student’s life”, right?

Caring for him seems to involve random, unconstitutional, invasive searches of bodily fluids, a draconian, fear-based atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust, combined with a desire to put people in jail for as long as murderers because they may have used a plant that grows freely across the world. Am I getting this correctly?

Man, I would hate to be Walter’s kid.

His string of sheer stupidity continues into the land of awful analogies:

The US policies were based on scientific evidence – some of it from the UK – that cannabis was linked to psychosis and schizophrenia. “We have a particular problem of our attitudes towards cannabis which hinders policy and hinders people going into treatment,” he said.

“The attitude is that it’s only marijuana. It doesn’t help if your kids are playing Russian roulette that they are using a smaller calibre weapon.”

This is some grade A bullshit, folks. As the Drug Czar he (probably) knows that cannabis is entirely non-fatal. It can’t kill you. When you overdose on it, you fall asleep and wake up with a headache. Aspirin, meanwhile, can kill you. Alcohol kills you. Cigs kill you. Cannabis does not. In fact, the only way to die from cannabis is to get several hundred pounds of it, pack it up tight, suspend it from a height, and drop it on your head. In other words: blunt force.

Before I move on, notice where he talks about treatment in the quote above. Now, let’s proceed to his next quote wherein he reveals even more hypocrisy:

Permitting such harm reduction measures gave the impression that “society allows a stance of it’s OK to be an addict”, he said.

Oh, I get it. Being an addict is bad and you should be arrested!! But what about treatment? Oh, maybe Walter’s idea of treatment is spending 10 years in jail. How compassionate. Most sane, non-hateful people are gravitating to the idea of addiction as disease/disorder. The D.C. Establishment is the only group of people I know of pushing the idea of addict as criminal.

Quite frankly, Walters doesn’t really have to make sense. Nobody really listens to him and it’s not his job to make logical, coherent arguments. He’s just an ideological attack dog. His job is to viciously defend the position staked out by his masters, much like how a junkyard dog guards his turf. The dog doesn’t ask why and neither does Walters.

Of course, if you’ve been reading this blog, you know why: The CIA. If drugs aren’t illegal the CIA won’t be able to make the obscene profits necessary to fund its black ops. Drugs smuggling is only worth your time if drugs are a valuable commodity. If drugs are legal, they monetary value will drop by 90%, easy.

So we can thank the CIA for making it necessary to have a Drug Czar, who has turned around and endorsed mandatory drug testing for every single student. This guy might’ve heard of the “presumption of innocence” but obviously he didn’t like the idea much. I also suspect that he’s not a big fan of the 4th amendment. It’s so much easier to rule people when everyone’s treated like a potential criminal.

Goddamn Fascist.