Would it not reasonable to assume that the unrestricted sale of dynamite would pose a far greater threat to the public safety than Marijuana. I'll go further than that cocaine , methamphetamine , and heroin while indeed dangerous to the user are nothing compared to dynamite. I came across this story by pure accident and what I found shocked me to say the very least.
The other day while scrounging through old newspaper archives I came across a 1906 story citing a lynching which had occurred in Salisbury , North Carolina. The week before an angry mob had gone to the county jail in Salisbury armed with dynamite. These vigilantes had threatened to blow the jail up unless the Sheriff handed over two African American men who were in his custody. Obviously fearing for his own life the Sheriff immediately released the 2 black men to the lawless gang of thugs who hung them in a nearby tree until both were dead.
In this 102 year old article from North Carolina a local reporter upset over the lynching was chastising his states prohibitionist lawmakers. They had banned the sale Alcohol and Cocaine but had no laws restricting the sale of Dynamite. There would be no Federal law concerning the unrestricted sale of dynamite until 64 years later in 1970.
THE ARGUS
May 3, 1970
Fremont - Newark. California
Dynamite... it 's as easy to buy as ginger snaps
By DAVID SMOTHERS
UPI Senior Editor
2 United Press International reporters proved it is easier to buy dynamite in Michigan than to get a strong Cough syrup. They picked up 12 sticks of dynamite for $13 in
a Lansing hardware store without offering any explanations, but had to sign a form to purchase a bottle of Cough syrup containing codeine in a nearby drug store.
In 1957, Dr. Robert S. de Ropp, biochemist and writer on mind affecting drugs, added this comment:
Just why the alcoholic is tolerated as a sick man while the opiate addict is persecuted as a criminal is hard to understand. There is, in the present attitude of society in the United States toward opiate addicts, much the same hysteria, superstition, and plain cruelty as characterized the attitude of our forefathers toward witches.
Legislation reflects this cruelty and superstition. Prison sentences up to 40 years are now being imposed and the death sentence has been introduced. Perhaps one should feel thankful that the legislators have not yet reached the point of burning addicts alive.
If one insists on relying on terrorism to cope with a problem which is essentially medical one may as well be logical and go the whole hog.
Only after several bombings by the Weathermen did our nations lawmakers see fit to pass any legislation regarding the unrestricted sale of dynamite. In late 1970 when the RICO act was passed they attached an amendment to it banning the unrestricted sale of explosives this obviously included dynamite. Yet 33 years earlier in 1937 they totally banned not only Marijuana but Hemp as well a plant that couldn't get you high if you smoked several acres of it. In 1914's Harrison Narcotics Tax Actthe legal sales of Cocaine and Opiates (Opium , Morphine , and Heroin) were restricted but not totally banned like Marijuana was in 1937. Even today you can legally get treated with opiates and cocaine under a physicians care but not Marijuana.
Everything about the failed war on drugs is insane. Restricting the sale of or Banning drugs outright several decades before restricting the sale of dynamite in my opinion fit's the definition of insanity.
To prohibit vice is not ordinarily considered within the police power of the state," asserted the CALIFORNIA State Supreme Court in an 1887 opium case (In re Sic), "The object of the police power is to protect rights from the assaults of others, not to banish sin from the world or make men moral."
We need our police to focus on violent crime instead of assuming the role of moral squads and terrorizing pot smokers in their homes. Were well on the road to a total police state instead of a democracy. The drug war breeds Fascism , corruption , and greed.
In 1983 Reagan Officials purged our nations Libraries of any Drug Literature prior to 1980. They removed all medical & scientific literature that defined addiction as a disease instead of a crime. Dan Baum reporter with Wall Street Journal & Rolling Stone as well as the author of Smoke & Mirrors: The War on Drugs & the Politics of Failure comments on the GOP Book Purging in this 38 second video.
I recently read a book by Richard Lawrence Miller that every freedom loving American should be required to read. This book literally sent chills down my spine the name of it is Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State. The excerpt below is from another one of Richard Lawrence Miller's fine works.
In my files I have a story of children bound in ropes and shackled in leg irons, taken against their will to facilities where some were malnourished, where some were psychologically tortured, some physically tortured- -one until his ribs broke, another bleeding while he was hauled along pavement in handcuffs. In these same facilities children were subjected to dubious medical research, with results printed in scientific journals, whose staffs praised the determination of the experimenter, and ignored the plight of the experimental animals.
Those incidents, however, did not occur in Germany during World War II. They occurred in the United States during the drug war in the 1980s. The victims were teenagers who smoked marijuana.
TEENS AND MARIJUANA:
ETHICS OF RESEARCH
Richard Lawrence Miller