Connexion
Former President Donald Trump made an early morning surprise appearance at a New York City construction site on Thursday to rally union workers before appearing for trial.
The post Donald Trump Rallies NYC Union Workers Shouting ‘We Love Trump … USA’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Former President Donald Trump will be back in a New York City courtroom Thursday as his business records trial resumes after a day's break.
The post Trump Trials: NY Jury Hears Tabloid Publisher’s Testimony, Supreme Court Hears Immunity Arguments appeared first on Breitbart.
Though most Americans expect our judges to be neutral arbiters of the law, Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the New York trial against President Trump, is anything but.
The post Exclusive—Matthew Whitaker: Conflicts of Interest Abound in Judge Merchan’s Handling of the Trump Sham Trial appeared first on Breitbart.
New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan could fine former President Donald Trump up to $11,000 for violating a gag order that his legal team argues prevents him from defending himself publicly in a case where a Democrat district attorney is seeking to put him in jail.
The post Judge Juan Merchan’s ‘Manifestly Unfair’ Gag Order on Trump Comes Under Serious Legal Scrutiny appeared first on Breitbart.
Justice Juan Merchan appeared to show his dark side during a Tuesday gag order hearing concerning former President Donald Trump.
The post Gag Order Hearing — Justice Juan Merchan Rages at Donald Trump’s Lawyer: ‘You’re Losing All Credibility’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Donald Trump continued to rip Justice Merchan for implementing an "unconstitutional" gag order that prevents him from "telling the truth."
The post Trial Day 4 — Donald Trump Slams Judge’s Gag Order: ‘They Can Say Anything They Want’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Court reporter Maggie Haberman's statement confirms a widely held belief among Republicans that former President Donald Trump will not receive a fair criminal trial.
The post Reporter: Potential Trump Jurors Are ‘More Left-of-Center Than Not’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Justice Merchan excused a second seated juror for unknown reasons during the third day of the Trump criminal trial.
The post Trump Trial Day 3: Judge Excuses Second Seated Juror for Unknown Reason appeared first on Breitbart.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan reportedly warned court reporters on reporting about the "physical descriptions" of jurors in former President Donald Trump's criminal case.
The post Report: Judge Juan Merchan Warns Court Reporters About Writing ‘Physical Descriptions’ of Trump Jurors appeared first on Breitbart.
Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley said Wednesday on "Americas Newsroom" that it was not likely Judge Juan Merchan woukd be removed from former President Donald Trump’s New York hush money trial over the judge's daughter once working as a political consultant for a Democratic client.
The post FNC’s Turley: Trump Likely Won’t Get Judge Removed, Actions of Adult Child Not Relevant appeared first on Breitbart.
Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed a bill on Thursday that would have legalized the sale of recreational cannabis.
The post Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin Vetoes Bill for Recreational Cannabis appeared first on Breitbart.
Former President Donald Trump blasted Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing his New York criminal case, on Wednesday–a day after he imposed a sweeping gag order on Trump.
The post Donald Trump: Merchan’s Gag Order ‘Unconstitutional,’ Rulings Against Me Benefit His Daughter appeared first on Breitbart.
Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing former President Donald Trump's criminal case in Manhattan, issued a gag order against the 45th president on Tuesday.
The post Judge Merchan Gags Donald Trump in New York Criminal Case appeared first on Breitbart.
A member of Mexico’s National Guard at the border fence in Playas de Tijuana in February. Some Biden Administration officials question whether the Mexican government is doing enough to drive down a surge in illegal crossings.
Karl Lauterbach, Germany’s health minister, left, and Lisa Paus, the minister for family affairs, senior citizens, women and youth, at the Bundestag, Germany’s Parliament, in Berlin on Friday.
The FIFA corruption case burst into public view with the arrests of top soccer officials at a Zurich hotel in 2015.
Wanda James at her recreational cannabis dispensary, Simply Pure Denver. A former Navy lieutenant, she now advocates for racial justice in the changing cannabis landscape.
A police officer checked the room where a journalist, Juan Jumalon, was fatally shot during a live broadcast at his home in the southwest Philippines on Sunday.
A “Social equity” program rebrands convicted criminals as budding entrepreneurs.
“Equity is not a thing. It is the thing.”
With this unreadable statement, the architect of marijuana legalization in New York introduced the state’s Social and Economic Equity Plan for the budding cannabis industry.
Chris Alexander, who had been the lead drafter of the bill that legalized recreational marijuana in the Empire State, was appointed executive director of the state’s Office of Cannabis Management—one of the first appointments made by Governor Kathy Hochul after she took the reins from Andrew Cuomo.
“One of my top priorities is to finally get New York’s cannabis industry up and running,” Hochul said after Alexander’s confirmation. But Hochul and her fellow Democrats didn’t just want to open dispensaries; they wanted particular people to sell weed to particular communities. After legalizing recreational cannabis in 2021, New York implemented a “social equity program” under Alexander’s direction, seeking to provide a head-start in the state-level industry to certain groups historically impacted by cannabis criminalization. The program gives preferential treatment to racial minorities, women, and convicted criminals, which the program calls “justice-involved individuals,” under the nebulous guise of equity.
In an attempt to effect reparations for the war on drugs, initial rounds of licensing were opened to individuals convicted of a marijuana-related offense or their family members. The first round of New York’s tiered cannabis licensing consisted of Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary (CAURD) licenses, and guidelines stipulated that over half of CAURD license had to go to a “justice-involved” person. Upon receiving a license, individuals became eligible for a loan of $500,000 to $1.5 million and a retail space remodeled at the state’s expense.
At the outset, Governor Kathy Hochul designated $200 million to support businesses licensed under the social equity program. With this massive endowment, Alexander was bullish on the program’s prospects. In March 2022, he told the New York Times that he expected to distribute between 100–200 licenses to people who had been convicted of a marijuana-related offense.
Unlike any other part of the program, Alexander’s estimate proved far too conservative. CAURD has doled out at least three times as many cannabis licenses for ex-convicts than the 150 originally intended. In the summer of 2023 alone, New York’s Cannabis Control Board approved 212 additional licenses for former offenders, doubling the number of licenses given to individuals with former cannabis convictions in a matter of months. As of July, New York state had allowed 463 ex-convicts to become legal drug dealers.
Who are these former offenders? What exactly were their crimes? No one really knows—and, in the eyes of the state, you really shouldn’t be asking. New York has made sure that no one can get answers to these questions.
When the state legalized recreational cannabis, their policy included an automatic expungement of former cannabis-related convictions, meaning that marijuana crimes predating March 31, 2021 no longer appear on background checks and cannot be found by law enforcement unless the convicted individual is applying for a gun license or a law enforcement job. To make matters more confusing, the charges on record don’t always match the crime committed. The charge of cannabis possession often results from a plea bargain, which commonly occurs in situations where the offender is charged with a more serious crime, like trafficking. A drug dealer who pleaded down a sentence to possession is now able to pick up right where they left off, with the blessing (and funding) of the State of New York.
A few of these individuals became momentary media darlings, propped up by mainstream outlets as budding entrepreneurs whose dreams were no longer deferred. New York City resident Baron Fajardo, who had been arrested at age 16 for smoking marijuana, was subsequently arrested six additional times for both possession and distribution. Under the social equity program, Fajardo’s dealing would gain the government’s sanction.
“As a person you feel down, a little bit defeated, like ‘Oh, I got a stain on my name… Now, that stain is actually the same thing that can help you,” Fajardo told the New York Times.
Eager to give people like Fajardo the opportunity to get back in the game—and pay taxes this time around—the Cannabis Control Board heralded the program’s expansion as “a momentous leap forward in our pursuit of an inclusive and fair cannabis industry.”
But their enthusiasm wasn’t shared by all.
This August, a group of veterans filed a lawsuit arguing that regulators weren’t applying their equity plan equitably enough. Veterans and racial minorities had been promised special privileges alongside former “justice-involved individuals.” But when it came time to dole out the licenses, regulators limited the initial round of licensing to an applicant pool made up solely of individuals with former marijuana convictions.
These veterans aren’t the only ones confused about what exactly equity is—or isn’t. Activists pushed an anti-criminalization agenda for years, crafting a narrative of draconian enforcement built on systemic racism. The combination of national anti-police fervor and widespread misconceptions about marijuana’s social and medical dangers delivered an easy victory. But it seems that pro-cannabis politicians didn’t seriously consider what law and justice would look like in a marijuana-friendly state.
“Advocates fought hard to put racial equity at the center of New York’s cannabis legalization regime,” District Attorney Alvin Bragg of Soros funds and Trump trial fame said this February, expressing his disappointment at the proliferation of black-market storefronts throughout New York City. Never mind that black-market weed isn’t inspected or regulated—it frequently contains contaminants, heavy metals, and pesticides. No, Bragg was more concerned that the black market doesn’t live up to the “promise of equity and fairness” that he believes legalization offers to the industry.
Bragg teamed up with New York Mayor Eric Adams to take “direct action” against illegal dispensaries. Despite sending warning letters to over 400 illegal smoke shops in Manhattan, the dynamic duo shuttered only four—1 percent. Six months later, New York City is still home to over 1,500 unlicensed shops.
Now, pro-cannabis progressives find themselves in a tricky situation: After decrying the War on Drugs as a racist crusade, they’re beginning to realize that legalization hasn’t actually eliminated the need to enforce laws, even if New Yorkers now can light up legally. Equity is the thing, after all, and if equity means reparations for people who faced penalties for buying, selling, or using marijuana before 2021, does the same equity not extend to those who break the law now?
The post Green New Dealers appeared first on The American Conservative.
Juan Guaidó in Miami in April. He was once the face of Venezuela’s opposition, but his support has since waned.
A Mexican envoy is violating his diplomatic privileges and immunities by leading a partisan political attack against Governor Ron DeSantis and a new Florida anti-human smuggling law.
It is past time for the U.S. State Department to declare the Mexican Consul Juan Sabines persona non grata and ask him to leave the country for behavior inconsistent with his diplomatic status. Consul in Orlando, Florida, Señor Sabines has clearly crossed a line, publicly denouncing Governor Ron DeSantis and condemning Florida’s new statute criminalizing the transportation of illegal migrants into the state. There should be consequences.
It makes no difference that Sabines is advocating for the rights of an arrested Mexican national, Raquel Lopez Aguilar, who is himself unlawfully in the U.S. and now facing felony charges for transporting illegal migrants into Florida. The recognized consular duties of Sabines include helping Lopez Aguilar hire a lawyer, relaying messages to the accused’s family, and keeping his foreign ministry in Mexico informed on the case. Sabines’s duties definitely do not include going to the press to publicly denounce DeSantis as being “anti-immigrant” and labeling the Florida statute “racist.” His consular immunities and privileges do not entitle him to act as just another open-border Democrat politician in the Florida state legislature.
Sabines’s rhetoric speaks for itself. The envoy stated before the media: “I ask myself again, could it not have been because [Lopez Aguilar] was brown [that he was arrested]? Because this law is evidently racist. I don’t know if what has happened to a Mexican immigrant would have happened to a blond, blue-eyed Argentinian, I highly doubt it.”
Since when are Mexican diplomats allowed to mau-mau the governor and law enforcement authorities in Florida?
Sabines has called the case against Lopez Aguilar a “complete injustice” and complained that the governor has turned down Mexican requests to discuss the new state law, a decision totally within DeSantis’ judgment to make. It reveals incredible nerve that the consul, on instructions from Mexico City, is actually denouncing DeSantis because he is refusing to accommodate the illegal presence and unlawful activities of Mexicans in Florida. Because of this “anti-immigrant” and “racist” policy, according to Sabines, Governor DeSantis is endangering normal relations between Florida and Mexico.
It is acceptable for diplomats to “speak frankly” when they are behind closed doors and privately dealing with host government officials, but they must exercise the highest discretion when they go before the press and speak on social media. The diplomatic immunities and privileges that come with their official position are not a platform to publicly interject themselves into local controversies.
When I served as an American diplomat abroad, we often delivered forceful, but private, messages to host country officials, particularly when we knew that an American citizen was being improperly detained. But most Americans get arrested abroad under perfectly legitimate local laws, and they are entitled to no special “get out of jail free” card just because they are U.S. citizens. Instead, they must go through the host country’s legal process, which sometimes convicts and sentences them to long prison terms.
As an American diplomat, I went to prisons to meet with detained U.S. citizens and made sure they had access to lawyers and were not unduly abused while in custody. We kept Washington informed on all arrests, submitted reporting cables describing the cases, and notified family members in the United States. We did not, however, go before the media and publicly interject ourselves into the political situation at hand, openly attacking local authorities. To do so, particularly in a country like the United States where there is basic rule of law in criminal matters, is to become a foreign politician meddling in the host country’s domestic business, which is totally inappropriate behavior for a diplomat.
Sabines should leave any inflammatory public statements, if they must be issued at all, to the defense attorney that he has arranged to defend Lopez Aguilar; this is the practice consistent with well-established diplomatic norms. Although in most cases the defendant or his family must pay the lawyer fees, Mexican taxpayers are footing the attorney’s bill for Lopez Aguilar because the Mexican president wants to make this Florida matter a cause célèbre.
It is no surprise that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) is pushing Consul Sabines into Florida’s politics. Most informed Americans are accustomed to regular comments from the Mexican president on how the U.S. should run its business, particularly on how we should treat illegal immigrants. AMLO always insists outsiders respect Mexico’s “national sovereignty”—meaning no criticisms are allowed from foreigners—but American national sovereignty is fair game.
AMLO constantly interjects himself into U.S. elections, regularly denouncing Republicans and conservatives, and urging Americans (particularly those with Mexican heritage) to vote against them. The Mexican president, who speaks no English and knows little of American constitutional values, traditions, or respect for the rule of law, never hesitates when telling us how to enforce our immigration statutes.
AMLO has in particular a special vendetta against DeSantis, since the governor actually believes in enforcing U.S. and state laws against clandestine migrants who cross the national border and travel into his state. For AMLO, the effort of DeSantis and American law enforcement authorities to defend national borders or state lines against illegal immigrants is a form of “discrimination.” For the open-border Mexican president, that absurd concept has become the centerpiece in the U.S.-Mexican bilateral relationship.
Despite irresponsible but predictable charges of “racism,” Florida is entirely within its Tenth Amendment state powers to enact statutes to protect its citizens. For example, current laws in many states block illegal migrants from obtaining driver’s licenses or taking work opportunities away from citizens and legal residents. DeSantis has been a leader in implementing E-Verify in Florida. He is showing his fellow governors exactly how to protect American workplaces from unauthorized laborers, who undercut wages and abet unscrupulous employers in evading other legal standards.
Moreover, there is no doubt that state legislatures can authorize governors to interdict the transportation of clandestine migrants across state lines, as Florida has done in enacting the statute that is being used to prosecute Lopez Aguilar. As the governor’s office made clear in a statement that spoke not just for Floridians but for millions of Americans: “In Florida, we will not stand idly by while the federal government abandons its lawful duties to protect our nation. Legislation signed by Governor DeSantis gives Florida the most ambitious anti-illegal immigration laws in the country, fights back against reckless federal government policies, and ensures the Florida taxpayers are not footing the bill for Biden’s Border Crisis.”
Exactly. Americans know the real culprit in the ongoing U.S. national border crisis is not our southern neighbor, not Mexican diplomats, and not even AMLO, no matter how infuriating his rhetorical meddling in U.S. elections can be. The real culprit is our own benighted President Joe Biden and his lawless open-border policies.
AMLO’s well-deployed and capable diplomatic corps in the United States, where Mexico has 53 consulates, should be reporting back to Mexico City on the rising political wave of more and more Americans, including those with Hispanic heritage, who reject the phony charges of “racism” and “discrimination” in immigration enforcement. These Americans recognize that Biden’s lawlessness is at the root of America’s border and illegal immigration debacle. All American citizens, of all races and all heritages, have a right to live in a country with protected and controlled borders.
Americans are fed up, and many believe there is a coming and justified national backlash. New political leadership will implement security policies that bring about novel U.S. diplomacy in dealing with Mexico, one that will restore, strengthen, and even leverage the border between our countries. Sabines should be cabling that message back to Mexico City for AMLO to ponder.
Mexico’s diplomats are some of the world’s best, and understand perfectly well how to distinguish their role from that of hired defense lawyers. Since Sabines obviously is refusing to make the distinction, he should pay the consequences. The State Department’s Office for Foreign Missions in Washington, D.C. should “PNG” Consul Sabines, revoke his diplomatic visa, and set a deadline for his immediate departure from the United States.
The post The Mexican Consul Must Leave appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Senate is considering a bill to ease restrictions on banks that deal with the cannabis industry in states where the drug is legal. It may or may not pass—while it previously seemed like a sure thing, the bill may run aground on arguments about ancillary provisions, some of which seem worthy enough.
This is, of course, madness. Cannabis is still a federally scheduled substance (and with good reason, although that is beside the point). If our lawmakers think its consumption and sale should be legal, fine. They can change the law. Adding a layer of codified winking at illegal activity is an offense to reason and to the rule of law. Why are we even bothering with legislative government if this is the kind of arrangement it cooks up?
The post Reefer Madness in the Upper Chamber appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Marijuana is indeed a “revolutionary” drug.
The Peter Hitchens essay on marijuana legalization leading our site is typically well done and thought-provoking.
Hitchens touches on many of the themes from our reporting on the failed pot legalization initiative in Oklahoma. Voters in Oklahoma had both practical and cultural concerns with recreational pot. They worried about the medical effects, especially on adolescents. They also saw the widespread gang activity that followed the state’s legalization of medical marijuana years earlier and feared recreational use would exacerbate the problem. But they also worried about the cultural effects of legalizing a drug that, by its nature, is anti-social.
Wherever its use becomes widespread, marijuana births certain habits, opinions, and values. It tends to make people apathetic, less capable of appreciating higher things, and more willing to tolerate disorder. As Hitchens notes, “Drugs destroy the old landscape of literature and art, and leave blighted minds craving different sorts of satisfaction.”
Both proponents and opponents of marijuana legalization recognize that the cultural question, not medical or legal effects, is at the heart of the dispute. One of the most striking quotes I found while researching the Oklahoma legalization referendum came from Lawrence Pasternack, a proponent of legalization. He called his opponents “anti-revolutionary forces” who “want to return Oklahoma to their dream of this bygone era” and “see marijuana as anathema to that dream.”
That is true, I think. Marijuana, despite its proponents’ pretensions to the contrary, is a revolutionary drug at the level of its effects. Its proponents want to smoke, yes, but they also want the social revolution widespread pot use entails—the indifference, the apathy, the empty pleasure that robs man of the joy for which he was created.
Its opponents, then, are “anti-revolutionaries.” They stand between proponents and an abyss that Hitchens describes in his essay’s close:
Back in the 1960s, my generation thought we could have a Revolution in the Head. I remember it, the shiver of anticipated pleasure and longing, the Pied Piper’s enchanting tune luring us away from the dull and the workful, the dutiful and the ordinary. We thought it would free us. Many still think this and have not noticed, as they skip and dance through the grim gates of the new world, what is written above them—something about abandoning hope, though the lettering nowadays is much obscured by moss and decay—and how strangely dark it looks down there.
The post Pot and the Abyss appeared first on The American Conservative.
As marijuana legalization has failed on its own terms, its proponents must be regarded as revolutionary cultists.
Marijuana is the idol and emblem of a movement and a cult. It is not just a drug, and its enthusiasts, though nowadays they have a lot of money, are no mere lobby. Try to fight them, and you will see what I mean. I have been doing so for more than a decade and I have not even scratched their paintwork. It is quite obvious when you think about it. By the time I was at college in England, more than 50 years ago, the use of dope was very nearly universal in my generation. I was almost alone among my fellow students, at the fashionable new University of York in northern England, in not being a regular user. And this was because I was that rare thing in those times, a puritan. As a serious Bolshevik revolutionary, I would do nothing to attract the attention of the police. And in any case, we believed that the proper response to an unjust world was to overthrow its institutions and replace them with our own, not to stupefy ourselves into dozy contentment.
Our planned revolution, an Edwardian-style seizure of power based upon an angry, organized working class led by a revolutionary party, would in fact flop utterly. The very idea of a proletariat became absurd. Even as we conspired and propagandized, the revolutionary movement was shifting and transforming itself into a vast all-embracing attack on the existing Christian culture of the Western nations. And as it turned out, drugs were a central part of that, alongside a complete transformation of sexual morality and family life. Their actual revolution, whose slogan was “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll” rather than “Workers of All Lands Unite” would succeed beyond all measure.
There is an astonishing passage in Ian McDonald’s clever book on the songs of the Beatles, Revolution in the Head, that explains this. MacDonald wrote of the 1969 song “Come Together” that “enthusiastically received in campus and underground circles, ‘Come Together’ is the key song of the turn of the decade, isolating a pivotal moment when the free world’s coming generation rejected established wisdom, knowledge, ethics, and behavior for a drug-inspired relativism which has since undermined the foundations of Western culture.”
Allan Bloom, in his once-celebrated, now forgotten The Closing of the American Mind, made a similar connection between the effect of drugs and their ally, the new music. He said,
In my experience, students who have had a serious fling with drugs—and gotten over it—find it difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations.
It is as though the color has been drained out of their lives and they see everything in black and white. The pleasure they experienced in the beginning was so intense that they no longer look for it at the end or as the end.
They may function perfectly well, but dryly, routinely. Their energy has been sapped, and they do not expect their life’s activity to produce anything but a living, whereas liberal education is supposed to encourage the belief that the good life is the pleasant life and that the best life is the most pleasant life.
He then made a metaphorical connection between the drugs and the music that goes so closely with them, saying that, as long as they listen to the music on their headphones, “They cannot hear what the Great Tradition has to say. After its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find that they are deaf.” Drugs destroy the old landscape of literature and art, and leave blighted minds craving different sorts of satisfaction.
I can remember this going on, the invasion of our young lives by a music so utterly distinct from anything that had gone before that it was as if some sort of euphoric substance had been put in the air and the water. We thought we could hear the Chimes of Freedom flashing, and there was no doubt at all that marijuana was part of this mystical re-evaluation of the world. I recall it more clearly perhaps because I consciously rejected it around the age of 19, turning instead towards Beethoven’s symphonies and the Marxist classics. For me, Petrograd in 1917 took the place of Jerusalem, the source of the world’s most profound myth and of mankind’s most exalted aims. I confess this frankly rather bizarre set of beliefs to explain how it came to be that I was not interested in the phony Holy Communion of the shared marijuana joint, reverently rolled in semi-darkness, ceremoniously lit, and then piously handed round the group of initiates, all of whom were knowingly breaking a law that in those days was sometimes still actually enforced. Who needed the Catacombs?
I thought I had something better than this, and in a way I did. At least my revolution concerned itself with reason, history, and a thirst for justice, however twisted and misdirected. Theirs was just the ultimate expression of self-pity, the poor bruised soul soothed by the sweet fumes of tetrahydrocannabinol. And by the time I realized I did not have anything better after all, I was adult enough to be suspicious of the drug culture anyway.
It was in the course of trying to combat the campaign for marijuana legalization, over many years, that it came to me that I was not challenging reasonable opponents but fanatics and zealots. I would slog to some campus meeting, armed with carefully-researched facts, mostly about how the law against the possession of marijuana was not in fact enforced. And I would find my opponents, often obviously intelligent people, behaving as if I had never even opened my mouth. I might as well not have turned up. They simply repeated the false claim that I had rebutted, making no attempt to challenge my facts. The mythology of the persecution of drug abusers was an essential part of their lives. It was part of the case for legalization. Therefore it could not be abandoned. Therefore challenges to it must be ignored. What did it matter if it simply was not true? As for the strong circumstantial evidence, and the powerful correlations, which suggested that this might not be the moment to put such a drug on open sale, and to allow it to be advertised, this too was ignored as if it had not been said. Mental illness? There was more evidence that peanuts were dangerous to health (I have been told this in supposedly serious debates).
Then there would be the “What About Alcohol?” segment of the discussion in which the presence of one disastrous legal poison was somehow stated to be an argument for the licensing of a second such poison. And finally we would reach “What About Portugal?” or “What About Amsterdam?” in an attempt to pretend that the legal changes in these places showed drugs to be harmless, claims now utterly exploded and never very firmly based. Even the Washington Post no longer believes the claims about Portugal and Amsterdam, and recently reported on the squalor and crime in both places. It is equally easy to discover that two civilized law-governed nations, Japan and South Korea, successfully discourage marijuana use by the simple method, formerly common in Western nations, of prosecuting and punishing its possession. But you will find this will make no difference either. The drug legalization advocates will perhaps giggle, but certainly change the subject. It is as if our entire culture had decided to ignore Sir Richard Doll’s discoveries about cigarettes because smoking was so important to our culture.
I am arguing against a fanatical faith with the weapons of reason, the very thing the “New Atheists” claim (in my view falsely) to be doing in their battle against Christian belief. But while anti-God diatribes and sermons won the New Atheists praise for their alleged courage, originality, and brio, I receive none of that. Like most other socially conservative positions, opposition to marijuana legalization is increasingly an embattled minority view, pretty much a heresy. I struggle to make the case on major broadcast media, and when I do I often find that the officially neutral presenter is (in practice) as opposed to me as the drug advocate against whom I am debating. But in this instance, the heretic wins no credit for his individuality, independence, or defiance of fashion. Rather the reverse.
Those who take up this cause are defying the spirit of the age. And, as so often in such matters, it helps to turn to one of the smarter and more honest thinkers of the new era, Aldous Huxley, to find out what is going on. His Brave New World, an increasingly accurate prophecy of our hedonist, deliberately irrational and ignorant civilization, absolutely requires the fictional drug Soma to make it function. In a world where humans have learned to love their own servitude, the mind must be kept from fretting, doubting, experiencing or expressing discontent. Not only is Soma used to quell a riot among the lower orders, who end up simpering and embracing each other after the police soma sprays have done their work; it silences the questing minds of the elite too. Soma, Huxley explained, had “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects…there is always delicious Soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon.”
Don’t you long for some? In Huxley’s world you could ingest it in the form of ice cream, and refusers were liable to end up in exile on the Falkland Islands. But you cannot get it. You will never be able to get it. Huxley suggested that biochemists, hugely subsidized by a drug-loving state, had somehow managed to make it harmless, but that must be a fantasy. It seems to me that the history of all mind-altering drugs suggests that they must exact a hard price for the artificial joy, and for the undeserved rewards, which they provide. But the advocates of drugs want this not to be so, and will not acknowledge that it is so.
And now here comes the point at which the deep revolutionary nature of the marijuana legalization movement emerges. There may be a parallel elsewhere, but in Britain the moment came in London in the summer of 1967. This was around the time of the first rock festival at Monterey, prototype of hundreds of pseudo-religious gatherings of worshippers of the new morality which to me strongly resemble the services of a new religion. A significant member of the London counter-culture, John “Hoppy” Hopkins, was sent to prison in June of 1967, after being caught in possession of marijuana. He insisted on jury trial, knowing that he would as a result face a higher sentence if convicted, and used the occasion to proclaim that marijuana was harmless and that the laws against it should be greatly diluted. The jury found him guilty, and the judge sent him to prison for nine months (much less than the maximum ten years he could in theory have gotten), calling him “a pest to society.”
Hopkins was a founder of the then influential magazine International Times, an organizer of the equally revolutionary UFO Club and a friend of many in the London world of drugs and music. His arrest and imprisonment created alarm among many fashionable and powerful marijuana users. They feared that the old establishment was at last taking the issue seriously, and they did not like that. Hopkins’s conviction was swiftly followed by an “emergency meeting” in the back room of the Indica Bookshop, another small fortress of dope culture in the London of the time. There should be a painting of this occasion.
Afterwards, a brilliant and witty young American then living in London, Steve Abrams, assembled the mighty coalition that would then set about informally destroying the United Kingdom’s laws against marijuana possession. Abrams was a member of a body that had read Brave New World, yet deliberately called itself the SOMA Research Association, and consciously pursued the aim of a hedonistic social revolution. Abrams recruited the superstar Paul McCartney to the campaign and, within a short time, had assembled a battalion of notables, including all four Beatles, the novelist Graham Greene, and a gallery of London’s great and good, to sign an advertisement in the London Times that was published to general amazement in that then-powerful newspaper, on July 24, 1967. It called for the evisceration of the marijuana laws.
And here is the significant part. The call was heeded. Much of its program would be quite swiftly adopted—often de facto rather than de jure—by both major British political parties, the police, and the courts. The key changes were that possession would be regarded far more lightly than trafficking and that marijuana would now be treated separately from (and more leniently than) the other bogeyman drugs, in those days heroin and LSD, and given a special classification of its own. This is the origin of the common false belief that this drug, many of whose users end up seriously mentally ill for life, is “soft.” It was also the beginning of a long salami-slicing process during which the actual penalties imposed for its possession grew so small they became invisible, and after that the police simply ceased to notice its presence at all. London in summertime now smells of marijuana. It was the moment at which modern Britain embraced the complex, contradictory view of drugs—that they are harmless, but that those who hurt themselves and others by their use should be treated as medical victims rather than punished as criminal transgressors; that those who use them should not have their lives ruined by criminal penalties, even though they may ruin their own lives and those of their families with drug abuse. This also goes with the elevation of the idea of “addiction” to official status, thus robbing all drug abusers of free will and undermining any attempt at deterrence.
The defeatist language associated with these defeatist attitudes is often found in the mouths of people who regard themselves as political conservatives. They speak of “soft” drugs, of “addiction” and of “treatment,” quite unaware that by doing so they are spreading the propaganda of the enemy. Some of these also adopt the revolutionary slogan that the “War on Drugs” has “failed,” which requires the acceptance of the fiction that there has ever been any such war. Even Alex Berenson, whose book Tell Your Children has been a potent corrective to much public falsehood about marijuana, concluded that “decriminalization” of marijuana might be a reasonable compromise. Between what and what?
Legalization has already failed on its own terms. The smiling promise that it would “take the drug out of the hands of criminal gangs” has not been fulfilled. Where it is legal, illegal, untaxed, unregulated, markets flourish alongside. All that has happened is that marijuana is now also in the hands of greedy businessmen, remarkably like the old “Big Tobacco” types we all claim to dislike so much. Any concession to this lobby is an abandonment of the rule of law and of common sense. Meanwhile, the circumstantial evidence of the dangers, mental illness, criminal violence, the ruin of families, grows—and remains circumstantial because no rich and powerful force has any interest in researching these miseries.
Back in the 1960s, my generation thought we could have a Revolution in the Head. I remember it, the shiver of anticipated pleasure and longing, the Pied Piper’s enchanting tune luring us away from the dull and the workful, the dutiful and the ordinary. We thought it would free us. Many still think this and have not noticed, as they skip and dance through the grim gates of the new world, what is written above them—something about abandoning hope, though the lettering nowadays is much obscured by moss and decay—and how strangely dark it looks down there.
The post Revolutionary State of Mind appeared first on The American Conservative.
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 