America's artificially manufactured crime wave

December 3, 4:41 PMDallas Libertarian ExaminerGarry Reed

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Cops cracking down on gangland soap sellers and parsley peddlers?
(source: daylife.com) 

Selling soap? Peddling parsley? You could go to jail as a Drug War prisoner.

According to recent stats, one out of every 100 adult American citizens calls the hoosegow home.

Nationwide, the New York Times reports, the prison population grew by 25,000 in 2007, bringing it to almost 1.6 million, which is roughly the UN 2005 census figure for The Republic of Guinea-Bissau in Africa, where you probably wouldn't want to live either.

Or to put it another way, as the Baltimore Sun did way back in 2003, not only does the U.S. imprison its own citizens at a far greater rate than other developed Western nations do, but also at a greater rate than impoverished and authoritarian countries do."

Most of this increase is due directly to the ever-escalating War Against Some Drugs, specifically against nonviolent pot smokers, who, so says stopthedrugwar.org, contributed over 700,000 arrestees to prison overcrowding last year.

As for all nonviolent "criminals," the Justice Policy Institute reported in 2002 that "The Federal Bureau of Prisons has the highest percentage of non-violent offenders of any prison system in the country: over 70% of federal prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent offenses."

Add to that every state prison and county and city jail plus six years farther down the road and you begin to see why prisons are so overcrowded.

But cops arrest only those who the laws say they can arrest.

In other words, criminals are manufactured in federal state and city governments by power-addicted politicians mindlessly putting words on paper. The same is true with all levels of bureaucracy in which bureaucrats are held virtually unaccountable – they run amok with rules and regulations and "decisions" that become laws and create criminals of anyone who even accidentally break the rules.

What this rampage of lawmaking eventually leads to are articles like these:

Wilkes-Barre, PA – A 38-year old man was arrested for possession of soap because he hoped to sell it to unsuspecting addicts as cocaine. He was, the newspaper article stated, charged with "intentional possession of a controlled substance – namely soap in lieu of crack cocaine – with intent to deliver."

Port St. Lucie, FL – A 15-year-old boy was arrested on his way to play a trick on his friend. He intended to show the friend a Baggie of oregano but tell him it was pot. The kid was actually arrested "on a charge of possession of a counterfeit controlled substance with the intent to deliver."

Flagler County, FL - Two 10-year-old girls were arrested for possession of fake drugs for bringing a bag of parsley to school and pretending it was marijuana.

Kingston, NH – Three men caught in a drug sting operation trying to sell grocery store mushrooms colored blue with food coloring to make them look like magic psilocybin shrooms were charged with sale of a narcotic drug and theft by deception, even though the store-bought fungi weren't the least bit hallucinogenic or illegal.

Muscatine, IA - A couple was arrested for selling fake "ice methamphetamine" to an undercover cop. They are charged with "delivery of a simulated controlled substance." The actual substance wasn't identified.

Lord help the little five-year-old preschooler who makes a mud pie and invites an undercover FDA food inspector to taste it. She'll end up in nursery prison.

In a libertarian society there would be no illegal drugs so people would be arrested only for the crime of defrauding their unsuspecting customers. But in any actually sane society soap is not soap-in-lieu-of-crack-cocaine. If that was the case, we all have bars of crack cocaine sitting in the crack dishes next to our bathtubs and sinks right now. In the sane world, soap is soap and cocaine is cocaine. Parsley is not fake marijuana, it's parsley. A mushroom is either hallucinogenic or it isn't. Meth is meth is meth. It can't be both fake and meth.

So here's the official logic: selling certain illegal substances is illegal and can land you in jail, but selling legal substances while pretending that the legal substances are illegal substances is illegal and can land you in jail.

If fake is the same as real, why don't they make these dangerous felons take fake drug tests? And let them pay their fines with fake money? And send them to fake jails?

Answer: because that would be logically consistent. And we can't have our officialdom acting that way, can we now?