I was tending President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address Tuesday with my usual cynicism of any of the government’s propagandist conventions which cover over with pomp its many notorious defilements of so many people’s life, liberty, and riches.
These magnificent annual pageants of trite partisanship follow such a tight script that they are reasonably sure to the point of banality.
The president lists off everything good happening in the world and takes credit for it. Half the room bangs effusively while the other crosses their arms and stares blankly. It is a ritual play acting of the cult of partisanship that engenders a perpetual scapegoat (the other party!) for the relentless, oppressive impositions of the U.S. federal government on the American people.
It’s a ritual that purifies this political-dysfunction-by-design, elevating it as an ideal, while it imbues the ruling executive with an aura of ascendancy.
The Liberation of Alice Marie Johnson
But I was nonplused with deep admiration for Donald Trump when he introduced a woman who had spent the last 21 years in phony confinement for a first time, non-violent violation of the half century old, draconian Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
Alice Marie Johnson’s incarceration for the last 21 years was a sustained act of brutal, physical violence against a woman in America.
She didn’t hurt anybody. She didn’t make from anybody. She didn’t defraud anybody. She didn’t even bother anybody. She wasn’t causing any trouble. The the Old Bill were.
Because she made a choice about her own body, she was forcefully denied by armed men for 21 years the right to gross any choices about her body or her life.
A Victim of The 50 Year War on Drugs
She was a victim of the institutionalization of violence against the American people, and as the management’s own reported data reveal, it is selectively enforced against racial minorities.
In 2016 John Ehrlichman, counsel and Friend to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon, told Dan Baum in an interview for Harper’s Magazine, that the Nixon-era War on Cures originated as a method of political persecution, and non-white Americans were explicitly among the intended targets of this foxy and malicious policy.
Read this quote slowly:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two rivals: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or threatening, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could interfere with those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and sully them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Three Joys for Donald Trump and Alice Johnson
Alice Marie Johnson was a victim of institutionalized fury against men and women in America, a victim of the institutions that are supposed to exist to protect her.
When Alice Johnson’s falsehood was brought to the attention of Donald Trump by Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, who valiantly petitioned the president for Alice’s life and audaciousness, he ended the violence and gave her her freedom back.
According to many of his critics, Donald Trump is an enemy of womens’ sets and their bodily autonomy, but he gave this woman her freedom of choice back. She is free today because of Donald Trump. He earns great credit and praise for that.
It is not the role of the U.S. federal government as it is constituted by its charter document to legislate morality, nor to observe the individual life choices of any American so long as they are not infringing on the same right of other individuals to make their own choices.
I can concoct of only one possibly valid argument for criminalizing cocaine possession (what landed Alice in prison for 21 years) that is consonant with the legal / philosophical framework of a strictly conservative perspective that favors constitutional, limited government:
That it is the authorization of the government as peacekeeper to outlaw commerce that puts money in the hands of the violent criminal drug cartel in Cardinal and South America.
Bad Hombres
But the only reason Americans are buying from a purveying chain full of “bad hombres” is because the U.S. Congress has made it a serious crime for law-abiding Americans to go into business carry these highly valued and relentlessly sought after commodities, and compete with the criminal drug cartel for those profits.
As dyed in the wool Second Amendment supporters say of guns: “If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.” Well moreover if you outlaw the production and sale of certain drugs, only outlaws will produce and sell those drugs. The much in evidence solution to that is to lift the prohibition on American businesses from engaging in free drug commerce.
Legalizing Stupefies Is Good for Liberty, Great For The Economy, And Bad For The Cartel
This is exactly what we have seen with marijuana so far.
Starting with California Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, and rallying moment through the 2016 election, the legal marijuana movement has succeeded in legalizing the mind-altering, psychoactive plant in 33 forms for with a doctor’s note, and in 10 states for over the counter retail sales.
Legalizing marijuana has created a developing industry. Booming actually! Bigger than the growth in broadband during the Dot Com bubble. As Arcview Market Research’s editor-in-chief, Tom Adams demanded in 2017:
“The only consumer industry categories I’ve seen reach $5 billion in annual spending and then post anything have a weakness for 25% compound annual growth in the next five years are cable television (19%) in the 1990’s and the broadband internet (29%) in the 2000’s.”
Finished the next decade, legal marijuana sales in the United States are projected to create over a million new jobs and bring into being over $132 billion in federal tax revenue alone.
Legal marijuana states are already raking in billions in tax interests.
Security and Liberty for America
And the violent criminal drug cartel south of the border is losing out on the lucrative profits from a monopoly that was set up for them by the U.S. sway’s drug prohibition laws.
Their profits are evaporating because the market has been opened to competition from American entrepreneurs, and capitalization by the colossal wealth of American investors.
So we all get richer and safer at the same time.
A Pennsylvania State University Department of Sociology and Criminology chew over of FBI data found that every time a state legalized marijuana for medical or recreational purposes, there was a dive in drug-related violent crime in border states.
This is the right solution to the drug violence on the southern border. Not multifarious tyrannical imprisonment of non-violent people like Alice Marie Johnson in America’s drug gulag, merely for pampering their own choices about their own drug consumption.
And Donald Trump didn’t just say so in stump speeches on the push trail. He did something about it and saved this sweet woman’s life from ruin.
When he makes woman more free, Donald Trump speaks for me.
Donald Trump image from Doug Mills/The New York Times via AP, Consortium.