Drug War: License to Kill Your Pets

Friends, the War on Drugs is not about stopping drug abuse. It is about providing an excuse for government-employed thugs, jumped up on testosterone and adrenaline, to kick in the doors of innocent family homes, shoot their dogs, handcuff them to the table in their underwear, and bloodily ransack the house.

Cheye Calvo tried to tell the armed men who were holding him and his mother-in-law hostage, who had just assassinated the family's pets, that he was the mayor. They called him crazy and left him handcuffed in the living room for nearly two hours. "They" were police officers who never bothered to inform the local Berwyn Heights police of their planned operation. Tracking a drug ring, Prince George's County Police intercepted a package addressed to Calvo's wife, Trinity Tomsic, a finance officer for the state of Maryland. That package, that Mayor Calvo unwittingly brought into his home, was full of marijuana, part of an elaborate scheme that used the addresses of unsuspecting victims to help deliver the goods. Several days after the raid, authorities arrested several men, including a FedEx delivery man. And County Police Chief Melvin C. High finally admitted that "Ms. Tomsic and the Calvo family were innocent victims of drug traffickers."

This, for a package of marijuana. For those of you more innocent than Pretty Lady, marijuana is an herb that, when smoked, makes people annoyingly spaced-out, and philosophical in an exceedingly banal way. It does not provoke violence, destructive addiction, or ruinous gambling habits; it does not kill the soul; it eases pain, glaucoma, and nasty chemotherapy side-effects. It is in no way sufficiently dangerous to justify the violent shooting-up of a household; it was originally declared illegal in order to sustain the timber empire of Randolph Hearst. (Hemp makes excellent, durable paper, rope, and fabric, and additionally preserves ancient stands of valuable forests while doing so.)

Pretty Lady hates to obsessively point out the obvious, but the obvious fact is that we are paying for this. Taxpayer money goes to support these thugs, these raids, these guns, these criminal prosecutions, these violations of life, liberty and privacy, while children in need of education, good nutrition and access to quality healthcare go ignored.

Send the testosterone-filled thugs to Afghanistan and Darfur where they belong. Keep them out of our homes.