John,
You bill yourself as an Independent candidate for President. Have you looked into the Libertarian Party?

I have found that associating myself with a political party, with all of whose positions I agree, hardly compromises my
"independence". I wandered about by my ideological lonesome for three decades before I discovered the Libertarian Party
and what it stands for, about a decade ago. I do run into people who call themselves libertarians but with whom I to
some extent disagree on certain issues. But it is amazing to
what degree and across what a broad spectrum of issues I find
myself in complete concurrence with people who classify their
positions under the word "libertarian". What a joy it is to
have discovered this ready-made group of comrades-in-arms!

Some people categorize the LP as being "on the right". A few
others classify it as being "on the left". What I have found
is that the left-right spectrum is fairly nondescriptive of
what is important about the political positions one can hold.

Anyway, if you've not already done so, maybe you could take
the time to look into our organizationally dysfunctional but
ideologically coherent party. Phone 1-800-682-1776 for a free
introductory packet on the National LP, or to the bunch whose
email addresses I've put under the "cc" heading. You might
find alot in common with us. We need all the allies we can
get, if we are going to make the sort of difference we seek.

Here's my reaction to your (MAMP) Minimum Acceptable Marijuana Policy:
It is well-intentioned and reasonable, but it is too complicated in unnecessary ways to make for good argument.

I believe your MAMP gives away too much territory to people
who don't deserve it, and who have no principles on their side
at all. The only thing they have on their side is power and
the money to maintain that power. They are not interested
in "reasoning" with you or me or with any other powerless
persons. Might *does* make "right" in a certain brutal sense
that history is written by the winners, and right now history
is being written and we are not at this time the winners.

That is the story about the War on Drugs thus far, and about the War on Guns that the War on Drugs has spawned.
It is the story about the mounting war against all aspects of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States.
Which is a grossly misunderstood document whose purpose it was to *LIMIT*
the legitimate power which the fledgling government was intended
to have over the people it was to "represent" and to "serve".

When we offer those power brokers our proposed "compromises",
we are pretending to ourselves that we are entering a bona fide
"reasoner's" stance, when the truth of the matter is that we
are in fact confronting our opponents' machine guns. The Newt,
Gingrich, sneers at the people he calls "the legalizers".

Well, why does he sneer at them? He wants to tar the "medical"
merijuana people, the "harm reduction" people, with that tar
brush, does he not? With the tar brush of "legalizer". And
why shouldn't he do that, thus arguing from the high ground,
if we allow him and his weaselly sort to get away with that
level of obvious sophistry? Shall we fiddle at Schubert for
our Nazi masters, while they are taking a break from the labor
of assembling the "transportation" lists?

The Ninth Amendment of the fundamental law of our land, which
is the Bill of Rights of our U. S. Constitution, reads thus:

"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not
be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Nowhere in the Constitution is the power given to the federal
government to decide what goods citizens need to be "allowed"
to grow, to produce, to transport, to sell, to buy, to own, or
to consume. Furthermore, the Constitution specifies, precisely
IN ORDER TO LIMIT, powers legitimate for the federal government.

by the people". Thus the very first drug laws, and
all of the subsequent drug laws, were disallowed: unconstitutional.

There is no legitimate reason, other than a fear of governmental
raw and untrampelled and unprincipled military/police power for
any citizen to tolerate *any* laws "controlling substances" that
individual citizens may choose to use for their personal pleasure,
enlightenment, self destruction or whatever... so long as their
acts are personal and contractual among the consenting parties,
and *directly* affecting (the equivalent rights of) nobody else.

We citizens have *INALIENABLE* RIGHTS, according to that other
great American document underlying and underwriting our nation:

According to that Declaration of Independence, those rights of
ours, those *inalienable* rights of ours!, include life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. Our right to produce or to grow,
to transport, to sell, to buy, to possess, and to ingest any rugs
we choose; this right is subsumed under the heading of all three
of those inalienable rights that the Declaration of Independence mentions.

What else can our right to LIFE, LIBERTY, and the PURSUIT OF
HAPPINESS mean if it does not mean in particular a manifestation
in the area of personally ingested psychoactive drugs?

We belong to ourselves. We are not the property of the state.

People living under a fascist tyranny belong to the state. We citizens of a constitutional republic do *not* belong to the state,
but to our own selves. We have the right to use our property as we see fit, so long as we do not interfere with the equivalent rights BR>of other free people.

We have the right to make ourselves great. We have the right to
seek enlightenment where we ourselves best believe we can find it. We have a right to our personal mistakes, and a consequent duty to
endure the ills which naturally (not UNnaturally) devolve from our own mistakes. We equally well have the right to destroy ourselves.
That is to say: We are as entitled to our despair as we are to our
joy; and we are indeed entitled to both despair and joy.
Among other things, this means we have a right even to suicide!

Since we have a right to life, it is a corollary that we have a right
to the implements of lethal force, empowering us to defend themselves
against the threat of lethal force that menaces them -- as we were
all menaced by the weapons on the hips of the cops who corralled us
like sheep, last Saturday, from Washington Square Park to Battery
Park. We had and have a right to be armed -- ESPECIALLY when we are
surrounded by armed police who are "escorting" us as if we were cattle
to be driven hither and thither, and ordered to keep off the street.

When we voicelessly and voluntarily surrender our rights, as we are
constantly pushed into surrendering them, under threat of imprisonment
or even of death, then we have given up ground which is ours.

The more such sacred ground we surrender without a murmur, the less
free, the less self-realized and honest, and indeed the less human are
we. All our lives we have been surrendering rights which we therefore
hardly imagine to be legitimately OURS. Our parents were not vigilant,
and we live the lives of domesticated animals and of slaves, and we do
not even see that this is true of us now. We do not allow ourselves
to acknowledge our degradation and humiliation; we content ourselves
with purely symbolic gestures of defiance, which are hardly more than
the angry lowing of a herd which moves at the behest and under the
command of absolute leaders whom we have not in fact chosen, and the
limitations on whose rule over us we no longer even think to control.

Your Minimum Acceptable Marijuana Policy is *not* acceptable to me.
But, in fact, even *it* will not be *granted* to us, because those
who are in a position to "grant" or to deny "policies" we "demand"
are under very little actual personal pressure to yield anything to us.

So why should they yield us anything at all? There is no reason they
can perceive that they should respect us. In fact, they are under no
significant pressure to give up a featherweight of the power they have
over us, over our families, over our lives, over our thoughts, over
our property, over everything of ours that might threaten to move them
with force to change the sway under which they hold us in dominion.

That is the truth of the matter, is it not?

The first thing we must do, if we are to have any chance at all of
regaining our lost liberties, is to be honest at least with and among
ourselves. We must *see* and *acknowledge* just how far we have slid
into the slough of degradation. At least the truth about our condition
must be ours again. Else we are permanently paralyzed and blinded.

At first, that truth is essentially all that will be ours. The rest
we shall have to retake, and we shall have to sacrifice very dearly to
retake any of it at all. That is another truth of the matter.

It is not a yellow brick road we shall follow out of this Oz into which
some odd wind of circumstance has blown us. It is a road whose bricks
will of necessity become slimy with blood.

Thomas Jefferson put it more or less in this fashion:

What free nation has ever lasted two and a quarter centuries without a
rebellion? "The tree of liberty must be fed from time to time with
the blood of patriots and of tyrants. It is its natural manure."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." We have been exceedingly
nonvigilant. A great number of us feed, like the swine we have become,
at the public trough. The slops that slosh down that trough towards
our waiting mouths are goods that have been seized at gunpoint from our
fellow citizens and indeed from ourselves. We are slaves because we
have sold out our birthrights as free citizens.

Acknowledging this is a first step back towards the light of freedom.

Donald Silberger,
Libertarian candidate for Lieutenant Governor of New York

Driving spiders crazy since 1995
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