The Free Journal/ASCII Edition Volume II, Issue 8 Copyright 1992 The Partnership for a Free America (Individual articles copyright by author) Editor-in-Chief: Sameer Parekh (zane@ddsw1.mcs.com) This is the Free Journal. Submissions are welcome. Some characters have the high bit set. Distribute at will; cite authors. (Or editors if no author is given.) This is not meant to be an electronic newsletter. This is meant to be an example of on-paper underground newspapers to educate the people about freedom and similar issues. _______________________________________________________________________________ -- Living in America -- Last night I was involved in what I call a riot. Some guy I went to high school with happened to be at this party, and he got pretty wasted on ALCOHOL and went totally berserk. He was hitting women and tried getting into a fight with about 6 of my friends in the span of about 5 seconds, including Frank Leider. Imagine a guy so big and so strong that a basement full of about 60 people (there were over 100 people there but only about 60 in this one room) could not control him. There were at least 8 or 9 people holding this guy trying to control him, but it just didnUt happen. I had a severe adrenaline rush, and I was holding him tight around the waist from behind, because I knew he wouldn't hit me (I went to high school with him). This was a case of 2 big drunks versus about 60 totally cool, nonviolent people. The only thing that kept this thing from turning into an incident where people may have been killed or seriously injured was the fact that I hadn't been drinking; I was high; and many of the people there were high. I was able to grab hold of this guy and secure his arms in a non-threatening manner so that he knew I was only trying to calm him. If so many people hadn't been high, I'm sure that the consensual drunk level would have been great enough that a total communication breakdown would have occurred, and somebody wouldUve gotten stabbed or seriously injured, if not by the cops who later showed-up to throw everyone out of our friend's house. I was involved in a much worse scenario in Bloomington, MN where a cop went for his gun while his partner beat a man into a bloody mess of fractured facial bone and torn flesh. The man was beaten and arrested with his hands in his pockets, and they had to pull his hands out to cuff him. They drug him from his own home after asking the police to leave because they had no warrant or probable cause. Another man, whom tried to verbally negotiate with the cops about his friend being beaten into a pulp before getting violent, was beaten in the face, as well, with a heavy steel rod until his face was fractured and spilling blood over the cop's arms. I had my hands in my pockets to display a definite non-aggressive stance while I watched the beating only feet in front of me. A cop stood over me with one hand on his gun and the other on his club. I was unable to aid the victim in fear of being killed by that police officer. The cops entered the home by breaking the door from its hinges after I locked it in front of them and spoke through the glass requesting a warrant. They only complied by breaking the door down and initiating a riot. I attempted to call 911, but they had already cut the phone line; the idea was to get more, perhaps more just, law enforcement officials there. Once the second beating began, the third bystander cop screamed "riot!" into his radio. There were 10 citizens present, 4 of which lived in that home (upper middle class neighborhood), 2 of them were women, and the other three were cops. The riot consisted of 2 cops beating two people to near-death and another standing over me with a gun. There were no illegal drugs present; it was a college-age keg party. The party was over before the cops showed-up. By the time I left, there were 7 squad cars in front of the house, and there were approximately 30 cops, some in riot gear, walking around the yard and parts of the neighborhood. I left the house unharmed and unquestioned and drove myself home. I later spoke with the Bloomington Chief of Police by telephone demanding to know what instructions his officers were given. He claimed that they were authorized to use any level of force necessary to make an arrest. I assumed this included justifiable murder of an ordinary citizen in his own home for having a party and meeting his friends. I love Amerika. AND, just last week one of my best friends was arrested in Worthington, MN for no apparent reason by a local cop. He was pulled-over without reason. His plates and tabs were current. We was not driving recklessly, nor was he under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He was not in possession of either, as well. There was already a warrant for his arrest because he missed court over a paperwork mistake a few months earlier. The paperwork mistake involved a time-delay between drivers license issuance and data entry. My friend fled the cop in panic and was later taken-down by a German Shepherd police dog. He was hospitalized for multiple lacerations and bites on the arms, legs, and throat. His words to me from jail (over the telephone) were "The fucking cop ran up and started yelling to the dog 'Get that fucker! Tear him apart! Rip that fucker up!' And I was hollering to him 'Get him off me! Call him off!'". He may now face over a year in jail for resisting arrest because The System has placed a lifelong fear of police into him. His life declined to this level because of the contemptuous attitude of one particular cop on one sunny day in Minneapolis, MN. He was stopped for having a crack in his windshield, and the cop chose to distrust him (claimed his drivers license was a forgery) rather than trust him. His license was valid but hadnUt reached the copUs squad car via their computer network yet. How I LOVE Amerika! -- Garreth Angell July 9, 1992 "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself." -- President Jimmy Carter October 2, 1977 -- Doors in the Wall -- The following is taken from Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception (1954) p. 64. Huxley wrote Brave New World and Island. Ours is the age, among other things, of the automobile and of rocketing population. Alcohol is incompatible with safety on the roads, and its production, like that of tobacco, condemns to virtual sterility many millions of acres of the most fertile soil. The problems raised by alcohol and tobacco cannot, it goes without saying, be solved by prohibition. The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones. Some of these other, better doors will be social and technological in nature, others religious or psychological, others dietetic, educational, athletic. But the need for frequent chemical variations from the intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run that it does good in the short. Such a drug must be potent in minute doses and synthesizable. If it does not possess these qualities, its production, like that of wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco will interfere with the raising of indispensable food and fibers. It must be less toxic than opium or cocaine, less likely to produce undesirable social consequences than alcohol or the barbiturates, less inimical to heart and lungs than the tars and nicotine of cigarettes. And, on the positive side, it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition. To most people mescaline is almost completely innocuous. Unlike alcohol, it does not lead the taker into the kind of uninhibited action which results in brawls, crimes of violence and traffic accidents. A man under the influence of mescaline quietly minds his own business. Moreover, the business he minds is an experience of the most enlightening kind, which does not have to be paid for (and this is surely important) by a compensatory hangover. . .Although obviously superior to cocaine, opium, alcohol, and tobacco, mescaline is not yet the ideal drug. Along with the happily transfigured majority of mescaline takers there is a minority that finds in the drug only hell or purgatory. Moreover, for a drug that is to be used, like alcohol, for general consumption, its effects last for an inconveniently long time. But chemistry and physiology are capable nowadays of practically anything. -- "Reefer Madness" >From The Nation, 1987 -- If there was anything unusual in Judge Douglas Ginsburg's rapid descent, it was probably the sight of White House conservatives scrambling to create a loophole in the national drug hysteria that would mitigate occasional marijuana use by a Supreme Court nominee. Never mind that President Reagan said last year that drug users are "as dangerous to our national security as any terrorist"; he tried dismissing Ginsburg's indiscretion as nothing more than "youthful fancy." There was nothing surprising about Reagan's expedient reversal. For six years, the only consistent thing about our national drug policy has been its inconsistency. Harsher penalties, urine testing, hysteria, budget cuts and the simplistic "Just Say No!" campaign (the equivalent of telling manic depressives to "just cheer up") have returned drug education and treatment to the Reefer Madness era. Since 1980 the President and Nancy Reagan, Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d and White House drug policy advisers such as Dr. Carlton Turner, have made numerous rash and absurd statements about drugs. Dr. Turner claimed that smoking marijuana leads to AIDS (the sequence: Pot leads to harder drugs, which lead to sharing needles, which leads to AIDS). Peter Besinger, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, claimed that marijuana was harmful because it "contained dioxin." The dioxin, of course, came from government spraying. Such statements are reminiscent of the 1920s, when the public was told that cocaine made blacks impervious to bullets. Truth has been the first casualty in this so-called war on drugs. When Reagan labelled drug abuse "an evil scourge" that has become the nation's number-one social problem, during the 1986 campaign, the nation had been whipped up into such a frenzy that polls showed the citizenry believed him. On October 27, 1986, Reagan got what he championed: the fifty-fifth Federal anti-drug bill in eighty years. Congress authorized $3.96 billion to attack what Newsweek, with typical hyperbole, compared to "the plagues of medieval times." (That plague wiped out two-thirds of the people in Europe. According to government statistics, in 1979 3,500 deaths were attributed to illicit drugs. No deaths, incidentally, were caused by marijuana.) Then, after the elections, Reagan cut $1 billion from his own war on drugs program and, in the harshest blow, recommended that no money be spent on drug rehabilitation and treatment in fiscal 1988. Like the Red Menace of the early 1950s, the current drug hysteria has led to a loyalty oath--this time, the urine test. Extrapolating from margin-of-error figures supplied by manufacturers of standard drug tests (5 percent) and instances of laboratory mishandling documented by the Centers for Disease Control (15 to 20 percent), one can easily agree with a Northwestern University report claiming a national error rate of up to 25 percent. That means roughly one of every four persons tested for controlled substances could wrongly be fired, not hired, or denied promotion. But Reagan's not one to quibble about margin of error or unreasonable biochemical searches. Last year, when he announced the notorious drug-free workplace edict, he targeted Federal workers as an example for all labor. New applicants and tenured employees were forced to submit to urine tests. Of course, he wants to test all workers in America, which is rapidly occurring: In the private sector an estimated 35 million people were screened this year and the White House hopes to see 90 million being tested by 1990. It is time to rethink a complex problem like drug abuse and disregard the simplistic nonsense of the Reagan anti-drug campaign, which has ignored scientific evidence and overridden fundamental values of privacy and due process. -- Abbie Hoffman Fed up with Left/Right labels? Use this improved political compass to test your identity. Take the WORLD'S SMALLEST POLITICAL QUIZ. Circle "Y" when you agree, "M" for Maybe or unsure, "N" for No. Are you a self-governor on PERSONAL issues? 20 10 0 * Military service should be voluntary. (No draft).......... Y M N * Government should NOT control radio, TV or the press...... Y M N * Repeal regulations on sex by consenting adults............ Y M N * Drug laws do more harm than good. Repeal them............ Y M N * Let people immigrate and emigrate freely.................. Y M N My PERSONAL self-governor score: 20 for Y, 10 for M, 0 for N _________ Are you a self-governor on ECONOMIC issues? 20 10 0 * Businesses & farms should operated without gov't subsidies Y M N * People are better off with free trade than with tariffs... Y M N * Minimum wage laws cause unemployment. Repeal them......... Y M N * End taxes. Pay for services with user fees............... Y M N * Europe & Japan should provide their own defense........... Y M N My ECONOMIC self-governor score: 20 for Y, 10 for M, 0 for N _________ How to use the Self-Government Compass Mark your PERSONAL score on the left and your ECONOMIC score on the right. Then, follow the grid lines (rows of dots) until they meet at your political identity! An example for someone who scored 20 on Personal and 30 on Economic is indicated with an asterisk (*). The compass measures self-government. Liberals (LEF) value freedom of expression. Conservatives (CON) value free enterprise. Libertarians (LIB) value both. Authoritarians (AUT) are against both. . LIB = Libertarian ./ \. CON = Conservative (Right) ./ . \. CEN = Centrist ./ . . \. LEF = Liberal (Left) ./ . . . \. AUT = Authoritarian ./ . .LIB. . \. ./ \. . . . ./ \. ./ . \.___.___.___./ . \. ./ . . ! . . . ! . . \. ./ . . ! . . ! . . \. ./ . . . ! . . . ! . . . \. 100 \. .LEF. ! .CEN. ! .CON. ./ 100 90 \. . . ! . . . ! . . ./ 90 80 \. . !___.___.___! . ./ 80 70 \. ./ . . . \. ./ 70 60 \./ . . * . \./ 60 Personal 50 \. . . . ./ 50 Economic Self-Governor 40 \. .AUT. ./ 40 Self-Governor Score 30 \. . ./ 30 Score 20 \. ./ 20 10 \./ 10 0 0 The compass measures self-government. Liberals value freedom of expression. Conservatives value free enterprise. Libertarians value both. Authoritarians are against both. Examples: M. Thatcher (right) F.D. Roosevelt (left) Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Jefferson (top) Stalin and Hitler (bottom) Would you like an information kit about libertarian ideas, including a best-selling hardbound book, five quiz cards, and more? Send an $8.00 contribution to help with the costs to: Advocates for Self-Government, 3955 Pleasantdale Road #106 A, Atlanta, GA 30340 Tel: 404-417-1304 800-932-1776 The Advocates for Self-Government is a non-profit educational organi- zation. Our purpose is to present libertarianism -- the freedom philosophy -- honestly and persuasively. Contributions are tax deductible under section 501(c)(3). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (The original Worlds Smallest Political Quiz is available in several forms [poster, postcard, business card, paper] from the Advocates for Self-Government. This electronic/text version was created by Toby Nixon and modified by Paul Schmidt. Permission is granted to distribute this freely in any form so long as the Advocates for Self- Government credit is retained.)