I've had UK friends call, kids hysterical wondering if I died; so confused. Muslim friends can't go out for fear of their lives. Other confused friends, arguing with me (doh, I aint Pres. Bush), about how the United States is going to start WWIII. NYC best friend lost a shitload of firefighter friends.

My dad flew B17s in WWII, 35 missions, and he's upset too. We ALL are.

I'm hanging in there via music, basically. (PEACE SELLS...BUT WHO'S BUYING?)

My sympathies to Rainbow Farm:(

Here is the one I found so far.

Ok government, now that I have praised you, the war on peace has shown its folly. Property seisure laws only make our civil servants want our property for their own greed. It is a complete corruption of what is proper.

The European witch hunts was a social control movement supported by the most learned men in both the religious and secular legal and intellectual worlds.

In that case, the target was women. The first target of all women were the women who handled herbal medicine. The midwives who knew how women could control their fertility using herbs.

This was at the time when professional medicine was just beginning. That was part of why they hunted midwives as witches and called the agents of Satan. The Church had a monopoly power over universities back then, and anyone who wanted a medical degree had to be loyal to the Church.

Women were barred from univerities, and that reinforced the idea that midwives and herbalists represented unclean, unholy knowledge of medicine, whereas male doctors certified by the Church represntec knowledge that was safe and clean and certified by God.

The European witch hunts were not irrational, they fulfilled a rational plan of the ruling forces in society at the time to marginalize and disempower certain classes of people, mostly women. (abpout 85-90% of those executed were women.)

The standard of a socially ideal woman BEFORE the witch hunts was a lusty women who was large and gifted with many skills, who knew how to use herbs for healing the sick. Back in that period a large fraction of businesses were owned by women. Women were also taking up preaching.

In one English city they banned women from wearing men's clothing, because there was so much gender equality that women were just abandoning any pretense of obeying social restrictions on their clothing and behavior.

Tha standard of a socially ideal woman AFTER the witch hunts were over was a frail thin helpless creature who would faint at the mere mention of anything related to sexuality, who was driven to hysteria by any physical labor, who was Christian to the point of absolute sexlessness, who would never dream of donning male attire, had absolutely no knowledge of any herbal potions, and deferred completely to male doctors for everything concerning her body and mind.

The War on Dugs, it is not hard to see, has been largely a war against MEN. Black men, mainly, but also Hispanic men, and then in the hippie era, a war against white men who were seen as a threat to the traditional military power system.

Yes, those damned anti-war protestors.

Marijuana has been demonized beyond all reason, so in some way the war against pot seems irrational. But at a social and political level it is not irrational at all, not any more irrational than were the European witch hunts.

Look at a before and after picture and you can see the reason behind it. The Drug War has been a force running in the oppsoute direction from the Civil Rights movement. How many black men have lost the right to vote thanks to the crack laws?

And can anyone imagine asking workers in 1968 to pee in a cup when applying for a job?

There would have been urine riots if drug testing had been suggested back then.

I am smiling now at the thought of a urine riot. Wouldn't that be nice?

Why don't we all make a giant urine collection and mail it to Washington DC to Asa Hutchinson? The world's largest urine sample!

Before the Drug War, nobody peed for a job. Now we're all willing to pull our panties down and let Uncle Sam into our urethra.

It's a complete parallel to the intimidating, tranformative effect that the European witch hunts had on women.

That's right. We know that drugs a harmless diversion and we're much less frightened by and controlled by the government. Except, of course, being shot and killed for disagreeing with the system.

We have no illusions about the toll drugs have taken on individuals, on neighborhoods and on society.

You mean drugs-WAR don't you? Get your approach straight before you try it out on the public. Drugs would not be the scourge that they are without the "ninny-nanny Puritannical hysterical War on the Drugs that you don't like and demonize." Remember, black markets come from ILLEGAL activities, not legal ones.

I love these people who hate and demonize drugs, yet continue to state "Why don't we just give up on this stupid war?" It's the former belief that fuels the intolerance.

LEGALIZE IT ALL. WE CAN DEAL WITH THE REPERCUSSIONS LATER!

...after watching events unfold at Rainbow Farm in Vandalia last week, in which two advocates of marijuana use are dead and the campground burned to the ground, we are beginning to wonder if this nation's War on Drugs is becoming a War on Drug Users.

Mighty slow on the uptake, to have to take this long to make that determination.

It has ever been so: The DrugWar has never been about inanimate objects but repressing, incarcerating, and murdering flesh-and-blood people. And these people are just tumbling to this, now, after 87 years?

Well, at least they're awake. Hopefully, they'll remain so.