Reefer Madness: Biden White House Director’s Cut

Reefer Madness movie poster, 1936 (public domain)
Reefer Madness movie poster, 1936 (public domain)

“Dozens of young White House staffers have been suspended, asked to resign or placed in a remote work program,” The Daily Beast reports,  “due to past marijuana use.”

Or, rather, due to having truthfully disclosed that marijuana use when applying for their jobs. It’s a felony to lie on forms like the Office of Personnel Management’s “Questionnaire for National Security Positions,” which asks “In the last seven (7) years, have you illegally used any drugs or controlled substances?” Presumably some applicants decided to risk the felony rap rather than out themselves. They’re apparently the smart ones.

I’m not prone to pity for government employees who find themselves kicked out of Uncle Sugar’s paycheck mill and into the productive sector, but the sheer idiocy of this move doesn’t augur well for drug policy in general.

If you believed that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were really going to take a different approach to the “war on drugs,” and voted for them on that basis, you got conned. And you should have known better.

When it comes to marijuana in particular, every winning presidential candidate since Bill Clinton has pulled the old “Lucy tells Charlie Brown to kick the football then pulls it away” routine.

Barack Obama and Donald Trump might have fooled you, but they were elected president as, more or less, political novices, without records of actual governance to compare their campaign rhetoric to.

Biden and Harris, on the other hand, have both spent their decades in political office gleefully doing their damnedest to put users of substances they disapprove of behind bars — Biden in the Senate and Harris as both a prosecutor and US Senator. Their supposed slight changes of heart on the presidential campaign trail were simple opportunism, and transparently so to anyone knew their records.

If America in general ran on the White House policy we’re seeing here, US unemployment would stand at (at least) 52%. That’s the percentage of adults who admitted to having used marijuana at some point (and 44% of those claimed to still use it) in a 2017 Marist/Yahoo News poll.

Fortunately, America in general is way ahead of the federal government, and the Biden/Harris administration in particular, on marijuana. Medical marijuana is legal in 39 states and DC (five more have legal CBD), while 15 states and DC have legalized recreational use (although South Dakota’s governor is pushing malicious litigation to overturn the will of the voters on the subject).

The war on marijuana may not be over, but marijuana is clearly going to win it. The only question is how many more victims Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will have abducted and put in cages (or killed) before America recovers from its chronic case of reefer madness.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Censor”: When a Word Means Everything, it Means Nothing

Illustration of Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass, by John Tenniel, 1871. Public Domain.
Illustration of Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass, by John Tenniel, 1871. Public Domain.

Some words carry emotional force such that using them creates an immediate negative reaction on the part of the listener or reader. That makes such words useful — until they get over-used and misused so much that they cease to have the effect.

Lately, the trending “creep people out to get them on my side” word of choice is “censor” or “censorship.” Most of us support free speech. None of us want to be censored ourselves, and most of us don’t want others censored either.

But what do those words mean?

To censor (verb), according to Oxford Dictionaries, is to “examine (a book, movie, etc.) officially and suppress unacceptable parts of it.”

A censor (noun) is “[a]n official who examines material … and suppresses any parts that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.”

Implicit in both those definitions is that censorship is an act of the state, backed by force of law and if necessary the physical force of government agents.

I’ve often explained censorship this way:

If I tell you that you may not sing “Auld Lang Syne” or I will send police to break up the performance and haul you off to jail, I am censoring (or at least attempting to censor) you.

If I tell you that you may not sing “Auld Lang Syne” on my front porch at 3am and by the way get off my porch, it’s 3 in the morning, I am not censoring you. You’re still free to sing the song anywhere else and any other time, just not on my property while I’m trying to sleep.

Which maps neatly, I think, to Twitter and Facebook deciding who gets to post what on their platforms. They can’t stop you from using other platforms to say whatever it is they don’t want you to say.

It maps less neatly to Apple, Google, and Amazon colluding to destroy one of those other platforms (Parler), seemingly on behalf of government officials who think it’s their business who says what and where. Thankfully Parler survived and returned, but we’ve definitely got some “edge cases” going that certainly at least resemble censorship, and that I was admittedly somewhat asleep at the switch on until that wake-up call.

Recently, I’ve had to add a third example to my explanation, though. Some friends of mine — very libertarian friends, in fact — recently held that Dr. Seuss Enterprises is “censoring” books it chooses not to publish. So, explanation of censorship, part three:

If I choose not to sing “Auld Lang Syne” myself, I’m not “censoring” the song.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

There seems to be a lot of Humpty Dumpty usage of the word “censorship” lately. If we’re not careful, abusing it to mean “anything I don’t like” may drain it of its rightful argumentative power and leave us in the grip of the real thing.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Daylight Saving Time Kills

Brown and Green Grass Field during Sunset. Photo by Jonathan Petersson
Brown and Green Grass Field during Sunset. Photo by Jonathan Petersson.

March 14 marked the beginning of National Tired and Grouchy Week in much of the United States as we participated in the annual gimmick of “springing forward” to Daylight Saving Time.

Tired and grouchy people don’t drive as well. According to a 2016 study by University of Miami economics professor Austin Smith, “springing forward” results in an average of 30 excess auto accident deaths, at a “social cost” of $275 million, each year.

So, why do we do it? Well, because the government says we should.

Why does the government say we should? In theory, we owe the practice to things like a need for farmers to have more daylight during their waking hours, or to energy savings from not needing as much artificial lighting during working hours in town.

If those sound to you like concerns from a century ago, when society and commerce didn’t run 24/7, when automotive lighting was unreliable and roads weren’t very good, etc., bingo. The US adopted Daylight Saving Time in 1918.

The whole thing was a silly idea even then — instead of everyone changing their clocks, people who really felt a need for more daylight during their waking or business hours could have just changed those hours.

I once read a mention — I don’t know if it was true or not — of a  tower built on the cliffs of Dover in the early 19th century, staffed with eagle-eyed watchmen whose job was to warn of any impending seaborne invasion of England by Napoleon. As the story had it, the British government finally got around to decommissioning the facility 150 years later, long after the invention of radio and radar (not to mention the death of Napoleon) had made it superfluous.

Daylight Saving Time is even dumber than that watchtower. It’s never served any truly compelling function. These days, its only beneficiaries are probably computer programmers who get a little extra work coding for automatic transitions to and from it, and funeral directors who get a few extra burial fees out of it each year.

It makes a certain amount of sense that my clock and my neighbor’s clock should be in sync with each other.

It makes no sense at all that both clocks, and all others, should “spring forward” by an hour in March and “fall back” by an hour in November.

If state legislatures are going to prescribe time settings, each legislature should prescribe one setting, applicable year-round.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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