Robin Prosser: Victim of Paternalistic Totalitarianism

"Eeet's naht a TOO-mah!" If it were a tumor, and Arnold's treatment program included marijuana, the Feds would intervene.


Arnold Schwarzenegger suffered a fit of clarity during a recent interview with GQ, creating a small pseudo-controversy quickly cleaned up by a press aide.

Asked about drug use during the 1970s, the seven - time Mr. Olympia – whose hypertrophied form eloquently testified to the copious non-clinical use of steroids – insisted that he was clean. Reminded that millions have seen footage from the documentary Pumping Iron of the future California Chief Executive blissfully sucking on a spliff, Arnold insisted: “Marijuana is a leaf, not a drug.”

That's a perfectly defensible distinction (unlike the spurious one Arnold drew between adultery and carnal acts that fall short of the “act”). Arnold's comment, and the de rigueur “clarification” offered by his press aide, provided a brief ripple of general amusement, and the high priests of the news cycle were able to advance the story while avoiding the question of whether the remark had merit worthy of further consideration.

Marijuana is many things, both troubling and helpful. The most destructive role played by the Demon Weed is not the impact it has on the sensory perceptions of those inhabiting the Hackey-Sac and Jam Band subculture; rather, it is the exploitation of this relatively innocuous leaf by Leviathan as a way of aggrandizing its power and subsidizing its crimes.

In a society where the regulated consumption of alcohol and nicotine is perfectly legal, it makes no sense to ban consumption of cannabis. As is the case with prohibition of any kind, criminalization of marijuana has done nothing to reduce the extent of its consumption. But this is to be expected, since the War on Drugs isn't an effort to reduce narcotics use; instead, it's a singularly lucrative public works project for prosecutors, police, and others in the business of retail coercion.

Cynical sort that I am, I find myself wondering if the reason why Arnold's comments were given such wide circulation was to help bury a more noteworthy marijuana-related story – the death, by suicide, of 50-year-old Montana resident Robin Prosser on October 18. For decades, the Missoula woman suffered from systemic lupus, an immunosuppressive disorder that attacked her internal organs and slowly robbed her of the ability to live a normal life, leaving in the place of her stolen physical skills a residue of ever-growing chronic pain.

At one time, Robin was a well-paid systems analyst with a refined gift for playing the piano. At the time of her untimely death last week, she was living in a small, unventilated apartment, penniless and deeply in debt, unable even to go for a long walk: What for most people would be the welcome caress of sunlight to her would be an unbearable assault. Like many others dealing with chronic pain produced by incurable degenerative diseases, Robin benefited from the medical use of marijuana.

Robin was elated when Montana voters approved the state's Medical Marijuana Act in 2004. Although she was probably too weak and tired to be outraged by the Supreme Court's Gonzalez v. Raich decision the following year upholding the federal government's claim that it could ignore state laws permitting the medical use of marijuana, enforcing its own edicts by arresting sick people who use marijuana for the purposes of pain abatement and the compassionate health care providers who help them obtain it.

The Raich decision is marked by a singular cruelty. The majority opinion concedes that the California residents who brought the case, Angel Raich and Diane Monson, are people suffering from incurable diseases who endure “excruciating pain” and could die without the medically supervised use of marijuana. Neither of them was “trafficking” in marijuana; Monson cultivated her own, Raich received hers through two anonymous caregivers. Their behavior was perfectly legal under California's 1996 “Compassionate Use Act,” and had no nexus of any kind with “interstate commerce.”

When deputy sheriffs, in the loathsome company of a group of armed parasites from the DEA, visited Monson's home in August 2002, they concluded that “her use of marijuana was lawful as a matter of California law. Nevertheless, after a 3-hour standoff, the federal agents seized and destroyed all six of her cannabis plants.”

For this act of malicious vandalism, the feds should have been arrested by the deputies and frog-marched to the nearest jail. The deputies should have turned their guns on the Feds and defended Monson's right to life and her personal property – which is the sole reason why the office of County Sheriff exists in the Anglo-Saxon Common Law tradition. Instead, they behaved in the fashion we should expect, now that the Homeland Security apparatus has absorbed every formerly independent police agency in the country.

Given that Monson's behavior was perfectly legal and absolutely necessary for her survival, why did the Court rule against her?

"Everything within the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State": That was Mussolini's totalitarian formula, symbolized by the Fasces, which can be seen at left in an Axis commemorative stamp, and in the U.S. House of Representatives behind the Speaker's chair (see below).

This case “is made difficult by [Raich and Monson's] strong arguments that they will suffer irreparable harm because, despite a congressional finding to the contrary, marijuana does have valid therapeutic purposes,” the Court allowed, with “Justice” Stevens employing that tone of sympathetic regret often used by people making indefensible decisions that harm innocent people.

However, the Court was zealous to preserve the power of Congress, as the legislative appendage of the Leviathan, to impose its will on the entire American population – even when doing so results in unambiguously bad policy that expands the compass of human misery. This is because central government supremacy must be maintained at any cost.

According to Stevens' opinion in Raich, the controlling precedent is the pernicious Wickard v. Filburn, the 1942 ruling that turned the Constitution's Commerce Clause into a license for totalitarian regulation. On Comrade Stevens' reading, “Wickard ... establishes that Congress can regulate purely intrastate activity that is not itself `commercial,' in that it is not produced for sale, if it concludes that failure to regulate that class of activity would undercut the regulation of the interstate market in that commodity.”

In the case of Wickard, the commodity was wheat grown by a farmer purely for his own consumption on a tract of land he owned; in Raich, the commodity was marijuana produced solely for the consumption of individual patients under medical supervision (and in Monson's case, she grew her own). Yet because Congress has decreed that marijuana grown and consumed under such circumstances could affect interstate commerce in some way only those omniscient seers can detect, it has the power to criminalize that activity.

Most likely for tactical reasons, the respondents in the Raich case didn't challenge the constitutionality of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention Act; after all, they weren't trying to decriminalize narcotics, they were simply trying to compel the Feds to respect state medical marijuana laws. But in any case, the Court isn't receptive to the idea that there are limits of some sort on the powers of the central government:

“The Supremacy Clause unambiguously provides that if there is any conflict between federal and state law, federal law shall prevail. It is beyond peradventure that federal power over commerce is `superior to that of the States to provide for the welfare or necessities of their inhabitants,' however legitimate or dire those necessities may be.... Just as state acquiescence to federal regulation cannot expand the bounds of the Commerce Clause, ... so too state action cannot circumscribe Congress' plenary commerce power.”

Here Stevens was just a tad precious in trying to demonstrate his even-handedness: His attempt at dialectical symmetry falls apart when he refers to the congressional commerce power as “plenary,” which would mean that it had no place to “expand.” But he's lying (no other word fits) in his depiction of the Supremacy Clause.

The entire point of enumerating federal powers is to restrain the central government to the specific enumerated functions. The entire point of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments is to protect individual rights and reserved state powers against federal encroachments.

And as James Madison instructs us in Federalist essay number 45, under the Constitution it is the states, not the central government, that have plenary authority to deal with “all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State” -- including the issue of whether or not critically ill people can exercise their God-given right to seek palliative care in the form of medical marijuana.

In his concise and well-reasoned dissent from the Raich majority, Justice Thomas points out: “In the early days of the Republic, it would have been unthinkable that Congress could prohibit the cultivation, possession, and consumption of marijuana.”

By ratifying the Bush Regime's policy of ignoring state medical marijuana laws, “Here, Congress has encroached on States' traditional police powers to define the criminal law and protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens.... Further, the Government's rationale – that it may regulate the production or possession of any commodity for which there is an interstate market – threatens to remove the remaining vestiges of States' traditional police powers.”

And this is the entire point, of course – not only of this execrable Supreme Court decision, but of the entire War on Drugs: The consolidation of a unitary, omnipotent State.

To the soul-dead functionaries building that system, the sufferings of Robin Prosser (may she rest in God's peace) and others in her condition are a painful but necessary sacrifice – incense on the altar of the Almighty State.

In March of this year, the DEA – acting on a tip from a UPS employee – confiscated a package bound for Robin Prosser that contained less than an ounce of marijuana. Displaying what he probably thought was heroic magnanimity, Jeff Sweetin, the DEA's regional commissar, said that Prosser wouldn't face prosecution.

“We're kind of protecting people from their own state laws,” gloated Sweetin. “Give me liberty, or give me death,” responded Prosser in a despairing newspaper column.

To be free of the besetting pain inflicted needlessly on her by the paternalistic State, Prosser had to die. Tell me again: In what sense is this a genuinely free country?

Video Extra

The late Robin Prosser shares a first-hand account of her plight:

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Here we see Robo-Republican Mitt “Double Guantanamo” Romney confronted by Clayton Holdon, who uses medical marijuana to treat his muscular dystrophy. This exchange from October 6 dispels at least one of the mysteries surrounding Mitt: Given the place he stores his head most of the time, it's no wonder the 60-year-old candidate's hair remains dark brown.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Bloodsuckers In Blue

To "Protect" and Siphon: A "Phleboto-Cop" prepares to drain the blood of a "volunteer."

(Thanks to Freedom's Phoenix)

During the mid-1980s, a state radio broadcast in East Germany proudly announced a record-breaking national blood drive. In the audio equivalent of fine print could be found the critical, defining detail: “Most of the donors were volunteers.”

As with so many other East German episodes of that sort, the Stasi State's practice of compelled blood donation prefigured current developments here in the erstwhile Land of the Free.

An appeals court in New Jersey has ruled that police enjoy “qualified immunity” when accused of excessive force in retraining a man from whom they're extracting an involuntary blood sample.

That decision is veritable layer cake of due process atrocities.

The foundation is the well-established, and constitutionally spurious, concept of “qualified immunity,” the incantation regularly pronounced to protect law enforcement officers from civil liability when they needlessly or improperly injure or kill innocent people.

Offenses against the Bill of Rights – particularly the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination – compose the middle layer.

Topping off the court's unpalatable confection is the claim that it is proper for a police officer to force a subject to submit to those violations of his constitutionally protected rights through abuse tantamount to torture. In this case, a police officer placed his entire bodyweight on one of Russell Johnson's wrists while attempting to handcuff him.

According to Dr. Michael S. Grenis, an orthopedic physician who examined Mr. Johnson, the predictable result of the policeman's action was not only to inflict excruciating pain, but also leave him with permanent nerve damage that may result in “permanent impairment of a significant body function.”

That last line, incidentally, wasn't extracted from the New Jersey court decision, or the physician's report. It was taken from the notorious 2002 “Bybee Memorandum” in which the Bush Regime defined torture as narrowly as it could, for the purpose of enabling that practice as much as it could. This adds another dreadful weapon to the arsenal of the armed parasites called “DUI officers.”

Quite in spite of themselves, DUI officers occasionally identify and remove from the highways people whose state of intoxication make them dangerous to innocent people. In like manner, the police in East Germany did occasionally identify and arrest people who had committed real crimes against persons and property. By this was incidental to the primary purpose of East Germany's police, which was to compel the submission of that nation's captive population.

In much the same fashion, arresting real drunks is peripheral to the prime directive of DUI police, which is to harvest revenue for the jurisdictions they serve. And it's hardly necessary for a driver to be intoxicated – or even to drink at all – to be caught in the clutches of the DUI enforcement system. As California DUI attorney Lawrence Taylor observes, there is a widely observed “DUI exception to the Constitution,” and that “exception” is doing a great deal to make East German-style police behavior the norm.

The October 1 installment of the investigative TV program Inside Edition examined the recent DUI arrests of two men – one of them a Polk County Commissioner named Randy Wilkinson, the other an 19-year-old named Robbie Stout – neither of whom had consumed so much as a picogram of alcohol on the day of the arrest. Both Wilkinson and Stout were handcuffed, fingerprinted, forced to pose for mug-shots, and briefly jailed.

What was particularly galling in the case of Randy Wilkinson was that he requested a blood alcohol test, which confirmed that there was no alcohol in his bloodstream – yet the charges weren't dropped until much later. Likewise, Stout underwent a blood alcohol test (apparently not at his request) that produced a negative result – which was also ignored.

On exiting the jail, Wilkinson, who was running for re-election, was greeted by reporters. He was able to get the charges dismissed with relatively little difficulty, but some substantial expense. Stout, a young man of limited means, had to pay several thousand dollars in legal fees in order to clear his name of the bogus charge.

With relatively little difficulty, Inside Edition was able to unearth documentation that DUI officers in Lakeland, Florida -- where those spurious arrests occurred -- are under a strict quota (clothed in the euphemism “Performance Standard”) to make 10 arrests a month. The program's investigative team was able to verify that similar quotas have been assigned to police departments across the nation.

Thanks to a pernicious proviso in nearly every driver's license application called “Implied Consent,” the police can detain any driver at their discretion, conduct a warrantless search of the driver's vehicle, and compel the driver to undergo a “chemical test” for alcohol, via either the admittedly unreliable instrument called a Breathalyzer, or the more invasive method of a bodily fluid test – blood or urine.

Refusal to submit to this procedure will generally lead to summary arrest for “per se intoxication”; furthermore, as one legal advice website points out, “Under implied consent laws, in most states a driver's license is automatically suspended for up to one year, even if the motorist is not found guilty of DUI.”

So, in the East German sense of the expression, those of us who have driver's licenses have "volunteered" to be stopped, interrogated, searched, and surrender bodily samples at the whim of a DUI enforcement officer. And as the cases of Randy Wilkinson and Robbie Stout illustrate, a perfectly clean blood alcohol test will not result in immediate exoneration.

This is because, once again, the purpose of this exercise is not to identify drivers who are dangerously intoxicated, but rather to generate revenue. Former Atlanta DUI Officer Tony Corrado admitted to Inside Edition that filling DUI arrest quotas is necessary in order to keep federal subsidies flowing into “local” police departments.

Matters get worse – they always get worse – at DUI “safety checkpoints.”

One return on Washington's investment in subsidizing DUI arrests is a healthy stream of vital information collected by police at “safety checkpoints.” A May 2, 2005 Washington Post story describes how the hundreds of Washington-area motorists pulled over at “safety checkpoints” were aware that they were being subjected to an involuntary intelligence-gathering dragnet.

One of the innocent people profiled by the Post story, Lisa Davis, was sober and carefully obeying all traffic laws when she was detained at a checkpoint. “Even so,” noted the Post, “an officer jotted down some basic information before letting her go, including her name, address and the time and location of the stop for a police database....”(Emphasis added.)

Which is to say that she – like all the other drivers who passed through the checkpoint – was temporarily arrested (that's the correct term to use when a police officer detains you, however briefly and for whatever purpose) and compelled to surrender personal information at gunpoint.

And just as all drains eventually flow into the ocean, all information collected by “local” police eventually ends up in Leviathan's master databases, to be used as Leviathan's masters see fit – a reality somewhat understood by Miss Davis, if by relatively few others.

“I've got some serious constitutional issues with that,” commented Miss Davis about the police search. “I feel like it's a violation of my rights. It's a slippery slope to Big Brother.”

I disagree with Miss Davis only to this extent: She fears the impending advent of a Big Brother State, rather than recognizing that it has already descended on us. How else can we adequately describe a system in which police can compel innocent people to suffer the invasion of their persons for blood tests – and when a negative result does not provide immediate exoneration?

To "Protect" -- and Infect: James Green, victim of a police-administered DUI blood draw, displays the infection he received as a result.

A few years ago, Arizona became the first state to train police officers to collect their own blood samples. This procedure is now used in Utah, Texas, and perhaps elsewhere. Although they are trained to render emergency aid, Police are not health care professionals – as Arizona resident James Green learned, to his dismay, when he was arrested on suspicion of DUI by a Pinal County Sheriff's Deputy.

Despite the fact that the arrest took place within walking distance of a hospital, the deputy insisted on performing the blood draw. Two inept and unhygenic needle-sticks later, the deputy has his blood sample – and Green had a nasty infection that lasted for months and forced him to miss work as a test pilot.

Da Boyz in Blue Had Their Fun: Brian Sewell displays injuries sustained in a Taser attack inflicted on him when he refused to let Sheriff's Deputies draw his blood.

Green was more fortunate than Brian Sewell, another Arizona resident who was arrested for DUI in 2004 and forced to undergo a blood draw. Like many others, Sewell is deathly afraid of needles, and didn't consent to be stuck. He received three Taser shocks while resisting efforts by deputies to draw his blood. Eventually the charges against Sewell were dropped.

Given that blood test evidence isn't considered conclusive (at least for purposes of exculpating the accused), what is the purpose of such behavior by the police?

We should never rule out simple sadism.

“Blood draws allow the police to take out a little bit of `street justice' on suspects who refuse to cooperate by sticking a needle in them,” opined a defense attorney in commenting about an essay by the above-mentioned Lawrence Taylor. “If an officer is angry with the suspect, he may present an unreasonable risk of harm to the suspect. Also, the officer is less likely to establish phlebotomy safety protocols. I have a client who was stabbed with a needle 5 times by a police officer before they took him to the hospital to get a blood draw. The client told the police that he had collapsed veins and they would not be able to get his blood. The police did not listen because there had been a scuffle and they were angry with my client. My client took pictures of the puncture wounds the next day. We have a hearing on the matter in December.”

We shouldn't be surprised when we learn that the officers in that incident "behaved professionally" and "acted within department guidelines." The outcome of official inquiries into police misconduct is usually as predictable as an East German election.

___________

A friend in the health care field corrected my improper use, in the original version of this essay, of the term "dysgenic" to refer to a non-sterile needle stick. Thanks, Bud!

Dum spiro, pugno!

"Diplomacy" As The Art Of Cultivating Conflict

The purpose of diplomacy is to protect our independence and security through means other than war.

Those occupying the upper echelons of the Bush Regime define diplomacy as the practice of removing impediments to war. Indeed, for Dick Cheney and his cohorts, manufacturing pretexts for war is the highest form of diplomacy.

But then again, as Stephen Kinzer documents extensively in his fascinating (and infuriating) book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, that type of perverse “diplomacy” has long been the Power Elite's stock-in-trade.

Of John Foster Dulles, scion of a family deeply rooted in the Anglo-American Elite, one biographer noted that “it was not too difficult ... for threats and interests to merge in [his] mind,” leading him to the conclusion “that the United States might actually have an interest in being threatened, if through that process Americans could be goaded into doing what was necessary to preserve their way of life.” Thus Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, arranged the 1953 Iranian coup that deposed Mohammad Mossadegh, thereby creating the conditions for several decades of stimulating conflict in the Persian Gulf that may well culminate in an apocalyptic war.

I hasten to clarify that the “way of life” referred to above is one in which the bulk of the American population dutifully submits to the benevolent supervision of the likes of Dulles – the anointed Guardians of the Bipartisan Consensus. Keeping the population perpetually alarmed over some foreign threat is a vital part of maintaining that sinister stability; absent such a perpetual crisis, at least some of the people would start agitating for a smaller, less expensive, and less invasive government.

So threat cultivation is necessary in order to ensure a rich harvest of government power. This is hardly a secret; it's been the common practice of rulers for as long as they have afflicted humanity. But the Bush Regime has distinguished itself somewhat by its vulgar, transparent lust for war, and its dogmatic refusal to explore alternatives. It's not their wealth that's being wasted, or their own flesh and blood being rent, by the needless wars they pursue.

To get some sense of just how alienated the Regime is from reality as the rest of us experience it, consider this: The administration's eagerness to go to war with Iran has alarmed Fareed Zakaria.

A little more than a decade ago, Mr. Zakaria – at the time managing editor of the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs – kicked off his career as foreign affairs columnist for Newsweek with an essay entitled “Thank Goodness for a Villain.” The piece contained this breathtaking specimen of Establishment “wisdom”:

“If Saddam Hussein did not exist, we would have to invent him. He is the linchpin of American policy in the Mideast…. If not for Saddam, would the Saudi royal family, terrified of being seen as an American protectorate (which in a sense it s), allow American troops on their soil? Would Kuwait house more than 30,000 pieces of American combat hardware, kept in readiness should the need arise? Would the king of Jordan, the political weather vane of the region, allow the Marines to conduct exercises within his borders?… The end of Saddam Hussein would be the end of the anti-Saddam coalition. Nothing destroys an alliance like the disappearance of the enemy.”

Of course, the Power Elite Zakaria spoke for did indeed create Saddam, for precisely the purposes Zakaria describes. As I've said before, rational people understand that sometimes it is necessary to create alliances to confront enemies; the depraved, power-intoxicated people Zakaria communes with prefer to create enemies in order to justify entangling alliances.

However, at some point Zakaria seems to have retrieved his conscience, or at least recovered his sense of the absurd. With the administration and its supposed Democratic antagonists lusting for war with Iran, and the Regime's media minions depicting Iran as a world-historic menace, Zakaria has taken up the unfamiliar role of dissident.

“Iran has an economy the size of Finland and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion,” he wrote in a recent Newsweek contribution. “It has not invaded a country since the late 18^th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?”

“We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country's vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us – just as Iraq had become in 2003.”

Zakaria cites the account of James Dobbins, who served as Bush's representative to the international donor's conference in Bonn following the eviction of the Taliban. Dobbins recalls that the Iranians “were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful.” After dipping their toes in the mysterious waters of Washington-centered diplomacy, the Iranians wanted to take the full plunge, offering additional cooperation in Afghanistan and wide-ranging talks with the US on a variety of issues.

“Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence,” recounts Zakaria. “The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, `looked down and rustled his papers.' No reply was every sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They're mad.”

The current issue of Esquire offers a similar account of Bu'ushist "diplomacy" toward Iran.

In April 2003, State Department official Hillary Mann received a detailed four-page fax from the Iranian government. The document, which was sent through the Swiss embassy in Tehran (through which Iran and the US have maintained back-channel contacts) contained “a detailed proposal for peace in the Middle East, approved at the highest levels in Tehran.”

The Iranians offered to recognize Israel, cut off all support for the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, banish or imprison all international terrorists residing in Iran, and to end its nuclear program. The message urged Washington to re-open formal diplomatic channels that have been closed for decades.

The Bush administration refused even to acknowledge the overture from Tehran. Former National Security Council official Flint Leverett (who resigned in digust following the needless invasion of Iraq) protested that the rejection would mean “an Iran that has nuclear weapons and no dialogue with the United States.”

Odd as this result might seem to those familiar with conventional diplomacy, it makes perfect sense once it's understood, once again, that the purpose of Bush/Cheney-style diplomacy is to facilitate, rather than mitigate, conflict.

As the estimable Charley Reese observes with characteristic concision, “The reason our so-called diplomacy hasn't worked [as most people would understand the term `worked'] is because the Bush administration position is this: Iran, unless you stop what you are legally entitled to do (enrich uranium for nuclear fuel), we won't talk to you about not doing what you are legally entitled to do. You can't have talks if your position is that the other side must give in to your demands as a precondition.”

But once again, talking with the Iranians is exactly what the Bush Regime wants to avoid. Direct talks with the Iranians, after all, might lead to a solution other than the war Washington craves -- and what responsible leader would run such a risk?