Tuesday morning, as I was headed to the nature center to do my volunteer bit, I ran over something that punctured both of the right-side tires of my pickup truck. While I was waiting for a tow truck to haul my Dodge Ram 3500 to the Discount Tire store, I whiled away the time (and my foul mood) by listening to Michael Berry on radio station KTRH. Berry, a former city councilman, is Houston’s hometown version of Roach Limburger.
I listened to Berry rant for 15 minutes or so about how the war on drugs made criminals out of otherwise law abiding citizens. Berry claimed that the war on drugs is a failure and compared it to prohibition which he said also made criminals out of law abiding citizens just for consuming alcoholic drinks. He said the cartels would be out of business if we legalized drugs. Berry said people should be able to smoke marijuana if they wanted to.
During those 15 minutes or so, he kept repeating over and over again the central theme of his rant: We are making criminals out of otherwise law abiding citizens.
Well I’ve got news for that buffoon. The war on drugs is not making criminals out of anybody. The pot smokers, crack users, coke sniffers, meth users, etc. are making criminals out of themselves by using substances they know to be illegal. When you knowingly and intentionally break a law you are committing a crime and that is what makes you a criminal. It’s not the law or the enforcement of the law that makes a citizen a criminal, it’s the citizen himself.
As for the cartels, they would not be out of business if drugs were to be legalized. Like the Mafia after the repeal of prohibition, the Mexican drug cartels would find other criminal enterprises to profit from.
I would expect a liberal or a libertarian to say that we are making criminals out of law abiding citizens, but a conservative? I wonder if Michael Berry was stoned during his broadcast. At the very least he sounded just like a drug user trying to justify his use of illegal drugs.
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