One of the worst libels that prohibitionists hurl at their critics is that those who oppose marijuana prohibition don’t care if children "abuse drugs." Anyone who contradicts any claim about the purported dangers of marijuana is "pro-drug." As marijuana use among children goes up, the prohibitionists blame anti-prohibitionists, even medical marijuana advocates.

William Bennett, the former drug addicted Drug Czar, now millionaire hypocrisy entrepreneur, said that one of the purposes of marijuana prohibition is "to create consequences" for marijuana use.

The prohibitionists claim that using marijuana will ruin your life. For the overwhelming majority of marijuana users this is complete non-sense. In fact, for many, this is the opposite of the truth. Marijuana use can be a life-enhancing, or even life-saving experience, if for no other reason than that marijuana so much less dangerous than alcohol and other commonly used drugs, especially including widely prescribed pharmaceuticals.

For prohibitionists like Bennett this fact presents an easily solved problem. All that is necessary is to extend the reach of marijuana prohibition to as many people as possible through "drug testing" that primarily detects marijuana, but not alcohol or pharmaceuticals, and through expanded penalties that reach into the middle class. If marijuana use per se doesn’t ruin your life, they will! In the real world far more people have problems with the marijuana laws than have problems with marijuana.

Punishment is the preferred way of dealing with any action that challenges the orthodoxy. Speech can be drowned out in the cacophony of the mass media, but actions have to met with force. This is why punishing medical marijuana users is so important. Theirs is the greatest sin of all. They don’t just fail to suffer, they benefit. This is why the Sacramento wants medical marijuana to have to hide their use.

At first, the ends justify the means, then the means become ends in themselves.

While marijuana prohibition began with the police, it has now expanded to include the military and their suppliers. Moreover, maintaining prohibition depends on a massively expanded prohibitionist propaganda program that creates vested interests in a "new class" of "drug experts" and "therapists" analogous to the old Soviet nomenclatura. The existing education and medical industries are easily co-opted into this. There are privileges for going along and ostracism for heresy, again the late Soviet model.

The stories linked below all have one thing in common. The laws originally justified as "saving the children" from marijuana have now mutated into attacks on children, depending on lies told to children, to save marijuana prohibition. Lying to children has terrible consequences.

Marijuana prohibition actually aggravates our most serious substance abuse problems. As they make the problems worse, the solution is to do more and more of the same.

Will the prohibitionists overreach themselves?

I think that the key to hastening the end of the war on marijuana users is to mobilize the campuses. The most recent outrage from the Federal government is a direct challenge.

As NORML reported, on October 8, 1998, President Clinton signed legislation denying convicted marijuana offenders federal student loan assistance. An amendment to the Higher Education Act (H.R. 6), mandates that "A student who has been convicted of any offense under any Federal or State law involving the possession or sale of a controlled substance shall not be eligible to receive any [federal] grant, loan, or work assistance."

Congress is denying financial aid to students for minor non-violent marijuana offenses, while a felony conviction for a serious violent crime brings no such penalty.

First time offenders are barred from receiving student aid for one year. Second time offenders will be ineligible for two years, and multiple repeat offenders will be barred indefinitely.

This is something that should be opposed on every campus in America.