I just heard about this smashing victory in our glorious Crusade against Drugs this evening:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Rush Limbaugh was detained for more than three hours Monday at Palm Beach International Airport after authorities said they found a bottle of Viagra in his possession without a prescription.

Customs officials found a prescription bottle labeled as Viagra in his luggage that didn’t have Limbaugh’s name on it, but that of two doctors, said Paul Miller, spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

… The matter was referred to the sheriff’s office, whose investigators interviewed Limbaugh. According to Miller, Limbaugh said that the Viagra was for his use, and that he obtained it from his doctors.

Investigators confiscated the drugs, which treats erectile dysfunction, and Limbaugh was released without being charged.

The sheriff’s office plans to file a report with the state attorney’s office. Miller said it could be a second-degree misdemeanor violation.

— Associated Press (2006-06-26): Limbaugh detained at Palm Beach airport

Well! Thank God for the narcs and the customs goons. If they weren’t there to rifle through your bags and take your pills at gunpoint, who would save us from the scourge of unauthorized erections? Who would protect us from old men having boners not in their own name?

Further reading:

• GT 2005-10-27: Well, thank God.
• GT 2005-12-05: Well, thank God #2
• GT 2006-02-23: Well, thank God #3

I saw this story splashed on the front page of the Detroit Free Press at the gas station this morning:

Teen’s life slips away in drug den

June 21, 2006

BY JIM SCHAEFER and KIM NORRIS
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

Bloomfield Township teen Lauren Jolly clung to life for three hours after snorting a lethal dose of heroin in a Detroit drug house, but police say the man running the place wouldn’t allow anyone to take her to a hospital, the Free Press has learned.

After an ice bath and CPR failed to revive Jolly, 17, the night of May 24, the man, Donald Coleman, carried her to her car, police said. He allegedly then ordered another drug customer to drive Jolly elsewhere in Detroit, park the car and leave the body inside. Coleman gave the woman $30 to return by cab, police said.

But the woman, who is an admitted prostitute, instead took Jolly to St. John Hospital, where the Birmingham Groves High School junior was pronounced dead. When police arrived at the hospital, the woman lied and said she had found the girl passed out in a car near 8 Mile, police said.

— Detroit Free Press (2006-06-21): Teen’s life slips away in drug den

And what makes me so mad about this story is that I knew how it would end before I even read through it. Let’s set aside for a moment the currents (or riptides) of class issues implicit in this sort of front-page shocker — if you know how the suburb of Bloomfield relates to the city of Detroit, you’ll know what I mean. For now, I’d like to point out the way in which this girl’s death is immediately, unthinkingly used for a story about the heartlessness of drug dealers, and the narcs’ battle against the latest grave and gathering threat to the teenagers of the outer suburbs:

No one has been charged in connection with the teenager’s death, but federal and local investigations are continuing in the possible roles of both men and whether Jolly’s overdose was caused by a deadly mix of heroin and the painkiller fentanyl. Authorities have blamed fentanyl — which is many times more powerful than heroin — for at least 83 deaths in Wayne and Oakland counties this year.

… The investigation into Jolly’s death picked up steam over the weekend when state and federal officials spoke with several people connected with the drug house, including the prostitute, who told police she had lied earlier because she was afraid of Donald Coleman.

The woman now described going to the house on Keating to buy heroin and finding Jolly sitting unconscious in the dining room.

The woman told police that she learned that after Jolly took the heroin, Donald Coleman and others had put Jolly in the bathtub with ice cubes to try to revive her. Her wet clothes had been removed.

The woman said that the teenager eventually appeared to stop breathing. She and Donald Coleman then tried CPR, unsuccessfully, police said.

There were about eight people inside at the time, police said. Several people volunteered to take Jolly to the hospital before she died, but Donald Coleman wouldn’t allow it, police said.

… Heroin laced with fentanyl has appeared on the streets in cities from Chicago to St. Louis to Pittsburgh. It has drawn together local, state and federal law enforcement officials to fight it and even extended to Mexico, where a fentanyl lab was raided by Mexican authorities several weeks ago.

The growing threat also has gotten the attention of the Bush administration. Last week, Scott Burns, the deputy drug czar, attended a conference on fentanyl in Chicago.

— Detroit Free Press (2006-06-21): Teen’s life slips away in drug den

That’s right: it’s a scary world out there in Detroit, and you suburban parents had better keep an eye on your teenagers. The cops are looking out for them but they can’t do everything in the face of such a growing threat. The people pushing this stuff are the sort of heartless scum who would let a poor girl die of an overdose and try to dump the body rather than getting her medical attention.

It may very well be true that Donald Coleman is heartless scum. Some drug dealers are. But, even then, why would he try to stop the girl from being taken to a hospital? Many of his customers volunteered to take her in; Coleman even tried to save her life himself. But he refused to let her be taken to the hospital. Because he was afraid that if that happened, the cops would arrest him and send him to prison for dealing drugs.

If it were not for drug laws, and the corresponding threats of violence, Lauren Jolly would have received immediate medical care, and she might very well be alive today. It’s not drugs that killed her, or even drug dealers. It’s drug prohibition that made Coleman was desperate not to get the authorities involved. Lauren Jolly is dead because drugs are illegal and drug dealers are constantly under threat from the police.

And yet, even though it is only because of drug prohibition that she is dead, and even though the fact that Coleman was trying to avoid arrest is so obvious that it doesn’t even merit mentioning in the story, her death is still being exploited by the narcs and their propagandists in the local press as yet another opportunity to stir up fear about the dangers of drugs and the need for ever-tougher prohibition.

Once again, the pigs who all but murdered this girl will use the human cost of their own failures as the excuse for even more widespread and invasive powers.

In a remark on my last post on Iraq, Sam Haque points out:

The situation is that occupation forces have taken for themselves the role of guardians by and large without the consent of those who they are ostensibly protecting.

— Sam Haque, comment (2006-05-10) on GT 2006-05-08: Why We Fight

This is true, and not just of the situation in Iraq. It is as accurate and concise a description as you could make of what governments do for a living, always and everywhere. It’s war that brings this into the sharpest relief, because the normal restraints on brutality are released, the beneficiary-victims are strangers in a faraway land, and the public intellectuals and the official press line up to shout down any serious challenge to the progress of war aims. But war and occupation are only the starkest and most explicit expression of what State power essentially means, not just with bombers and soldiers and tanks, but also with every spook, cop, G-man, prosecutor, jailer, and hangman whose paychecks we are forced to cover. Consider, for example, the local cops in New Britain, Connecticut, who protected the hell out of an 11 year old boy and his mother in the name of serving a drug search warrant without interruption, or last week’s riot and reign of terror by Mexican police asserting their authority to protect and serve the people of San Salvador Atenco, whether they like it or not.

The State is, as Catharine MacKinnon says, male in the political sense. But not only because the law views women’s civil status through the lens of male supremacy (although it certainly does). It is also because the male-dominated State relates to all of its subjects like a battering husband relates to the household of which he has proclaimed himself the head: by laying a claim to protect those who did not ask for it, and using whatever violence and intimidation may be necessary to terrorize them into submitting to his protection. The State, as the abusive head of the whole nation, assaults the innocent, and turns a blind eye to assaults of the innocent, when it suits political interest — renamed national interest by the self-proclaimed representatives of the nation. It does so not because of the venality or incompetance of a particular ruler, but rather because that is what State power means, and that is what the job of a ruler is: to maintain a monopoly of coercion over its territorial area, as a good German might tell you, and to beat, chain, burn, or kill anyone within or without who might endanger that, whether by defying State rule, or by simply ignoring it and asking to be left alone.

Or, as Ezra Haywood once put it, A cruel kindness, thought to be friendly regard, assumes to protect those who, by divine right of rational being, are entitled, at least, to be let alone. We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors. And so it is for us civilians, facing the doorkeep before the Law.

Further reading:

• Randolph Bourne (1918): War is the health of the State
• Lysander Spooner (1867–1870): No Treason

(Link thanks to The Bellman 2006-04-24.)

Ever wondered what you’d get if you created an unholy cross between We Are The World and Nightmare on Drug Street?

Well, citizen, wonder no longer.

A quick word of advice. If you’re planning on quitting drugs, you should not go out dancing in the street while you wait for withdrawal to kick in. Also, you should not just throw your bag full of pills, or crack, or whatever, into the garbage truck. Especially not right in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s creepy, watchful face.

Roderick’s recent post (2006-01-06) reminded me: Cory Maye needs our help, and we need to keep eyes on his case. About a month ago, I mentioned the case of Cory Maye in the course of my commentary on the premeditated murder of Tookie Williams by the state of California. Maye was sentenced to die by poisoning on January 23, 2004. Now, as far as the death penalty is concerned, I just don’t care whether Maye is innocent or guilty. Innocent or guilty, the state of Mississippi has no right to kill him when he poses no threat; that’s premeditated murder, with or without the black hood and the Crown on the heads of those responsible. (See GT 2004-12-15: God damn it and GT 2005-12-13: Murder in the first for further discussion in the context of different cases.)

But there are good reasons to think that Maye is innocent, and that the crime of murdering him would be doubly foul. Radley Balko has been talking this up since discovering the case in early December. There are lots of legalistic worries about the conduct of the police and the progress of the trial. It’s important to keep track of those for the purposes of defending Maye’s life, but it’s also important to remember that the pretext on which the narco-cops were storming Maye’s house in the first place — the so-called War on Drugs — is itself a massive, systematic, and senseless paramilitary assault on innocent people, for committing the crime of taking drugs without a permission slip — an act which is at worst foolish, perhaps a vice, but which can at worst hurt only themselves. The cops, in other words, had no damn right to storm Maye’s house, and the state of Mississippi couldn’t give them one even if they had complied with all the official paperwork (which it seems that they didn’t). Whether or not a judge wrote them a warrant that covered Maye’s home, they had no right to be there. Whether or not they knocked and identified themselves, they had no right to break into Maye’s house by force. And when an armed gang that has no right to be there invades your home without your permission and comes after you, you have a right to defend yourself, by force, if necessary. Balko’s right to say:

Maye’s case is an outrage. Prentiss, Mississippi clearly violated Maye’s civil rights the moment its cops needlessly and recklessly stormed his home in the middle of the night. The state of Mississippi is about to add a perverse twist to that violation by executing Maye for daring to defend himself.

— Radley Balko, The Agitator (2005-12-17): Cory Maye

But it’s important to note that that’s true even if the police and D.A.’s version of the story were (as it almost certainly is not) true from beginning to end. The War on Drugs is indeed a war — but it’s a war on people, not substances, and those people have done nothing to deserve being attacked by the paramilitary forces of the State. The warriors are trying to make Cory Maye its latest casualty. They must be stopped.

WikiPedia’s article on Cory Maye summarizes the details of the case. There’s a new website, MayeIsInnocent.com, that provides a clearing-house for information and news about the fight for Maye’s life. If you want to help, here are three things you can do:

1. Write a couple letters: Read over the information on Maye’s case at The Agitator, at WikiPedia, and at MayeIsInnocent.com. Write a polite, well-considered letter to Governor Haley Barbour (for an example, see Silent Running (2005-12-10): An Open Letter) mentioning the legalistic details that I’ve mostly set aside here, and ask him to grant clemency or a pardon. Be sure to mention what you’re going to do next: take that letter, pare it down to 300 words or fewer, make it a bit less polite, and send it to your local newspapers. Be sure to include URIs for Balko’s coverage and/or MayeIsInnocent.com. The more heat that Barbour gets, and the more that it makes its way into the Op-Ed pages of newspapers across the country, the more pressure there will be to act. And the more that it appears in those Op-Ed pages, the more people will learn about the case.

2. Post news or commentary on your website about the case. If you haven’t done so already, get on it. If you have, mention anything that’s new since your last post. Why? Because this is important, but it’s in danger of receding into bloggers’ archive sections and out of public sight. Keep the debate alive online and it will have a better chance of reaching more ears both online or offline. If you’ve written letters, you can post copies online for other people to see. If it’s nothing more than a Cory Maye is still in jail and the state of Mississippi still threatens to murder an innocent man, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. Because he is still in jail and the state of Mississippi is still threatening to murder an innocent man; the sword over his head hasn’t moved away just because your attention has. (If you’re the sort to post buttons or banners at the top of your page, Roderick (2006-01-08) and Laura Denyes (2006-01-04) have some suggestions. Don’t forget to link the image to MayeIsInnocent.com or a similar clearing-house.)

3. Help Cory defend himself in court. If you have the money, you can help by contributing to [Cory Maye’s legal defense fund]. Even small contributions ($10, $20) can be immensely helpful in a case like this. Maye’s case is on appeal, but his current lawyer is a public defendant and needs financial help to be able to continue his investigative and advocacy work on Maye’s case. Contributions can be sent by mail to:

   Cory Maye Justice Fund
   c/o R.E. Evans
   P.O. Box 636
   Monticello, MS 39654

   See Balko’s post (2005-01-06 for the details.

Battlepanda (2005-12-13) suggests some more ways you can try to raise a ruckus about this. Let’s get on with it: an innocent man’s life is on the line.