The function of this web site is to create a context to demonstrate the workings of both marijuana prohibition and the prohibitionist ideology which sustains it. Separate news stories -- that would not ordinarily appear together -- illuminate this when they can be seen in the same context. This is possible only on the Internet.

Today offers another embarrassment of riches of embarrassments.

It is the policy of the United States government and of established state-licensed medicine to persecute even the sick, dying and disabled – in contravention of even the most basic tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition and Western rational thought – in order to maintain the suppression of a plant, especially its medical use.

If this seems improbable – and it should, because it is so utterly bizarre – we need only remind ourselves that the government of the most powerful country on earth is tied in knots over the prospect of impeaching the President for lying and obstruction of justice on a matter that is microscopically trivial by comparison. "It is not the crime. It’s the cover-up."

Whatever the original motives may have been, however barbarous the ongoing crimes, they have all become hopelessly and inextricably a part of the cover-up. It is the nature of lies that they spin out of control. Ask the ghost of Richard Nixon, who also did so much to get us deeper into the mess of marijuana prohibition, but got caught in one of his many other lies.

Sometimes it is possible to demonstrate that someone knows that he (or she, Secretary Shalala)  is lying. But it is the function of ideology to tell people how to think – or rather how to avoid thinking, and thus avoid telling the truth. This does not excuse anyone, especially not those with the pretension to being smart enough to know better. After all, the 9^th Commandment does not say "Thou shall not knowingly lie." It says, "Thou shall not give false witness against thy neighbor."

In other words, take care not to lie. Be sure that you are telling the truth. There are several reasons for this. First, the truth is transcendently important. Second, innocent people are hurt when you lie about them. Third, -- and here is where it becomes political -- the community is hurt when it is lied to. If they believe and act on the lies, they become complicit in a crime. In this regard, organized medicine is especially guilty. They claim to be smart enough to know better.

It is the job of medicine to take care of the sick, dying and disabled, not to turn them over to the police for using a medicine that the doctors don’t understand – or that threatens the paradigm on which they base their prestige. One of the great ironies of the tragedy of American marijuana prohibition is that it began over the objections of the American Medical Association. And now, after their original opposition has been proved disastrously correct – organized medicine helps sustain the disaster that they tried to prevent.

Of course, law enforcement at it worst was directly responsible for the beginnings of marijuana prohibition. While the racism that was the basis of the original laws has faded a bit, they have actually managed to find an even more vulnerable category of victims, the medical marijuana users.

Do we as a society delegate our worst vices to those who are supposed suppress them?

It is the job of law enforcement to protect those who cannot help themselves, not to attack the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.

And it is certainly not the function of law enforcement to use public funds to lie to the people to get more power to persecute the sick and dying. Every society needs honest laws and law enforcement. The alternative is anarchy, or worse, anarchy with corrupt police feeding the disorder. We have seen this in America’s inner cities. Mexico is in the midst of a social crisis in which this is endemic. But no society is immune to it.

As the articles about Amnesty International and police corruption in Mexico and the UK illustrate, law enforcement is in deep trouble. It is tragic that the prohibitionist ideology is so powerful that it prevents even Amnesty from saying what should be obvious – that prohibition – and especially marijuana prohibition – is a key part of the problem of police brutality in the United States, and by extension, in much of the rest of the world that is under our influence.

Western society has never had a monopoly on civic virtue, but if western civilization becomes blinded by an authoritarian ideology based on the suppression of a plant, and betrays its most basic values in pursuit of this idiocy, then the prospects for the spread of freedom around the world will be greatly diminished.

The blindness of Amnesty to this problem is partly a function of the same ideology that holds so much of western journalism prisoner. They are not permitted to see it, much less to say it.

It is the job of journalism to help us find the truth and to live in peace with our neighbors – not to spread lies and hatred and to mock the truth. But that is often just what journalism does. Boston is one of America’s greatest cities. Its history is a part of the history of American freedom. It is tragic that one of its newspapers offers the perfect example of everything that is wrong with journalism in the age of marijuana prohibition.

In spite of all this -- indeed, in some ways because of it --  we are going to win.

Marijuana prohibition is going to end, just as racial segregation had to end, because it is built on a violation of all of the basic values of our society. We are not seeking to overthrow, but to restore. All of the moral force of our traditions and values are on our side.

The greatest lesson of the 20^th century is not just that freedom works, but also that nothing else does.