Bush's Drug Czar Must Be Smokin' Crack

The nation's top anti-drug official recently said that people need to overcome their "reefer blindness" and see that marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and safety, as well as to the environment.

John P. Walters, George Bush's drug czar, also claimed that people who plant and tend pot gardens are terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties.

In a July 12th press conference, Walters said that marijuana growers have been known to have weapons, including assault rifles. "These people are armed; they're dangerous," he said. He called them "violent criminal terrorists." Walters, whose official title is director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said too many people write off marijuana as harmless. "We have kind of a 'reefer blindness,' " he said.


Walters was also responsible for an expensive ad campaign that ran during the last Super Bowl, which also lamely attempted to make a connection between pot smoking and terrorism. Unforunately, none of the (scant) mainstream U.S. media coverage I've read on this topic in the last six months has even put forward the proposition that it is more likely that drug prohibition actually supports terrorism by driving up prices and profits.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman is one of many prominent citizens who have objected to the cruelty and destruction of freedom inherent in the U.S. "War on Drugs." In a letter he wrote in 1989 to William Bennett, then serving as Drug Czar under President George H. W. Bush, Friedman wrote:

"Every friend of freedom must be revolted at the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the visions of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."

How prophetic.