REASONABLE GOAL OR PURE IDIOCY?

Letter to the editor:

I respond to Deanna Wrenn’s December 18 article, “Growing hemp legally on hold in state,” which stated industrial hemp farming is legal under West Virginia law but nonetheless banned, as the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration doesn’t discriminate between hemp, which is not a drug, and marijuana, which is.

Officials in West Virginia and other states have sent the DEA letters asking how they might proceed with cultivation without meaningful reply. One gets used to the ordinary procession of tax dollars’ obituaries, but the abrupt plunge here is startling. Obscure functionaries in a shadowy bureaucracy reminiscent of an eastern-bloc intelligence service decide they needn’t bother distinguishing illegal drugs from other matter, impose bans at whim, and stonewall the puzzled inquiries of several states.

When idiocy of this magnitude can masquerade as virtue on the facile premise that fighting drugs trumps all competing concerns and constraints of law, logic or linkage to reality, it is time to consider whether a “drug-free society” is a reasonable goal or a mirage perpetually chased by politicians, bureaucrats and gullible voters in mutually reinforcing folly.

The predictable “soft on drugs,” “coddling criminals” and “sending the wrong message to children” triteness will erupt, but the message our descendants inherit from the present softness on stupidity and coddling of nitwits may be a gene pool depleted of intellect.


Pubdate: January 6, 2003
Mett Ausley, M.D.
Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina
Charleston Daily Mail.
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