Tue, 25 Feb 2003

Baking pans and Prescriptions.....

This is all over the place, here:

U.S. Says It Has Cut Off Supplies of Drug Paraphernalia. Federal officials said today that they had shut down the major suppliers in the U.S. in a series of nationwide raids. By Eric Lichtblau. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

and here:

Feds weed out drug paraphernalia sites. Operation Pipe Dreams represents the federal government's boldest attempt yet to shutter Web sites that sell drug paraphernalia. [CNET News.com]

I thought this was mighty strange - I mean, what are the Feds gonna do? Bust everybody who sells brownie pans? Raid the kitchen department at Nordstroms?

In case they haven't figured it out, if you want to ingest illegal drugs, you'll probably find a way. To borrow a phrase from the NRA, these stores cause drug abuse like flies cause garbage.

But then, just when I thought the nuttiness had reached a peak, along comes this gem:

'It's medicinal' vies against 'It's illegal'. California has become the epicenter of a states vs. feds battle over marijuana use. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]

Note that the jury in this poor schmucks Federal trial were not allowed to hear why he sold pot - and when they found out after returning a conviction they came out swinging, feeling duped. Well duh!

Unless and until we adapt the rather common sense notion that adults can make sensible decisions about their own live, what to ingest, what to smoke, whom to sleep with, we'll witness this constantly cascading crescendo of craziness .....

/Politics | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time