Questing for Atlantis

This past weekend I attended the Maryland GOP Spring Convention in Ocean City, primarily to hear one speaker, Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico and honorary chairman of the Our America Initiative.

He gave a fantastic speech and cemented my already firm conviction that he will be the candidate I support if he runs for president in 2012. However, during his speech he got a cold reception from the assembled party members on two points:

1. The case for legalizing or at the very least decriminalizing marijuana and abandoning the War on Drugs in favor of a harm reduction approach.
2. The argument that our continued military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan does nothing to advance our national security interests.

I want to focus on the first item. Every single person in the room who scoffed at Johnson’s call for a sensible policy on drugs needs to read this post by Radley Balko and then watch the embedded video (I’ve embedded it here, but go and read Radley’s post first) and then explain how they can possibly justify continuing the War on Drugs when this kind of abuse happens hundreds of times every day in America.

In February, I wrote the following about a drug raid in Missouri:

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.

They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.

Just so we’re clear.

Now there’s video, which you can watch below. It’s horrifying, but I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.

But Jonathan Whitworth won’t be smoking that pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.

I happen to be a libertarian whose sympathies are more with the Right than the Left. But when I see things like this I fully agree with Mark Thompson:

When the government has the right to bust into tens of thousands of homes in the middle of the night, unannounced, with guns drawn and in full military armor, to take the life of beloved family members, and to menace 6-year old children, all because the homeowner is believed to possess a few grams of a plant or a non-explosive substance, tyranny cannot be said to be on the way. It’s already here. And President Obama wasn’t the one who created it, either.

I will believe that conservatives and the American Right view the words “liberty” and “tyranny” as something other than politically effective platitudes when they make putting an end to 40,000 raids like this a year a higher priority than whether they are taxed to provide someone else with health care or the unrealized hypothetical consequences of cap and trade.

Maryland GOP members, or rather, those of you who scoffed at Gov. Johnson – this is what you are supporting. Remember that the next time you hear someone speak out against the Drug War. Remember the paramilitary police that barged into a family’s home and shot their dogs right in front of their seven-year-old child.