Zero tolerance for drugs means zero tolerance for disagreement!

As M. Simon’s recent post makes clear, the War on Drugs is not only far from dead, but its proponents have come up with a new tack: target dissenters, like commenters to Reason. Prosecutors are targeting anonymous blog commenters by going after the blog proprietors with grand jury subpoenas. The prosecutor going after Reason contends that bombastic and obnoxious comments about the judge who sentenced the Silk Road defendant to life in prison represent true threats to the judge’s safety. While clearly the comments are over the top, and some even deranged, the whole thing strikes me as deliberate political harassment of Reason, which is of course a major enemy of the government’s War on Drugs.

M. Simon also linked a post titled “The First Rule of the war on drugs is don’t talk about the war on drugs.” Excerpt:

Siobhan Reynolds is a vigorous critic of the government’s failed, life-destroying, state-power-accreting, ruinously expensive War on Drugs. Specifically, she’s a critic of the federal prosecution of doctor Stephen Schneider and his wife (and nurse), Linda, in Haysville, Kansas. The government said the Schneiders were illegally dealing pain pills to their patients, encouraging addiction and abuse. The Schneiders, and pain-relief advocates who support them, say the government is full of shit, and is preventing adequate treatment of chronic pain by applying blundering War-on-Drugs mentality. I’m not a doctor, or a drug addiction expert. I don’t know who is right. But I used to be a prosecutor, and now I’m a defense lawyer, and I’ve worked one side or the other of the War on Drugs for sixteen years, and I am inclined to agree with others that the government is full of shit.

But it shouldn’t matter whether critics of a prosecution are on the mark or off of it. Their right to criticize the government for such prosecutions should be above question. But, in reality, apparently it isn’t. Assistant United States Attorney Tanya Treadway was enraged by the criticism of Siobhan Reynolds and her Pain Relief Network. Treadway took the astounding step of demanding that a court gag Reynolds and her organization, asserting that Reynolds had “a sycophantic or parasitic relationship” with the defendants Treadway was prosecuting, and that she was using the case “to further her own personal interests.” To Treadway, speech ought not be free if the speaker is advancing a personal interest. That’s an odd interpretation of the First Amendment, and not one that the judge was willing to accept.

Treadway was not deterred by the federal judiciary’s minimal resistance to her efforts at censorship. Having failed to use one tool — a gag order — she resorted to the federal prosecutor’s favorite tool: the grand jury.

Eventually, the prosecutor got her way, and all records are sealed — including friend of the court briefs filed by the Reason Foundation. (Even the New York Times couldn’t get it.) Unfortunately, that brave woman (who fought her case all the way up to the Supreme Court) died in a plane crash.

But you don’t have to be a nutcase commenter or someone who devoted her life to taking on the Drug Warriors to merit ruinous legal attention. I just read about the case of a boy who dared to open his mouth during one of those Stalinesque War on Drugs indoctrination seminars.

His “crime”? He merely opined that medical marijuana had helped his mother in her lifelong battle against Crohn’s Disease:

Kansas mother Shona Banda is unable to see her child and faces decades in prison after authorities confiscated marijuana from her Garden City home in March.

On Friday, the state of Kansas charged Banda with “five felony counts of possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute, manufacturing Tetrahydrocannabinol, an oil extracted from marijuana, two counts of possession of drug paraphernalia and one count of child endangerment,” the Washington Post reports.

Banda began using medical marijuana about five years ago to treat Crohn’s disease, according to the Kansas City Star. Symptoms of the condition include severe diarrhea, weight loss, and malnutrition. Crohn’s can be physically debilitating and even life-threatening. Before she began cannabis treatments, Banda “walked with a cane and often couldn’t get off the couch.”

“I spent years raising my children from a couch, not being able to move much,” Banda says. “I wasn’t able to be a proper mother when I was sick. And now I’m a fantastic mother.”

During school “drug education” programming on March 24, Banda’s 11-year-old son spoke out in class about the benefits of medical marijuana. The treatment had saved his mother’s life, he told teachers and classmates.

Teachers relayed the boy’s story to school administrators, who then called the police, who in turn brought in Child Protective Services. Officials searched Banda’s home, confiscated medicine and other property, and prohibited her from seeing her son. As of press time, the mother of an elementary school-aged child has been legally able to see him only once since March 24.

So much for the idea that the country has gone soft on marijuana. And so much for the idea that this is a free country. State apparatchiks have damaged that boy and his mother for life, and all because he dared to disagree with them and was seen as a challenge to the stupid, murderous, and evil war on drugs.

I suspect that the kind of people who would imprison a sick woman and take away her son not only abhor free speech, but democracy itself. They will not go away quietly.