The morality police are fighting for their very livelihood!

Lately, people — especially those who have the power to tell others what to do or imagine themselves charged with telling them what to think — are absolutely freaking out about marijuana.

TV celebrity and former prosecutor Nancy Grace is hopping mad:

On Tuesday, Nancy Grace claimed that people on marijuana shoot, stab and strangle each other, and that children shouldn’t bear witness to their parents drinking soda.

I do not doubt that people on marijuana have done all sort of terrible things. So have people not on marijuana, and so have people on booze.  Personally, I don’t like marijuana, but in my experience alcohol is much more likely to make people violent. If I had to be locked up with a drunk or a stoner, I’d choose the stoner any day.

Then there’s the DEA:

“This is a bad experiment. It’s a bad, bad experiment,” [Drug Enforcement Administration Chief of Operations James L. Capra] insisted. The drug-warrior lifer (he’s been in the DEA since 1987) got emotional, and then apologized for his excitement, proving that whatever the prohibitionist side may lack in sense and respect for liberty, it doesn’t want for sweaty dedication to the cause. Or maybe he just hit way too many of those Starbucks while counting dispensaries. It’s thirsty work.

“You’re going to demand from me…You’re going to demand from DEA: How are you going to stop that?” he said, seemingly on the verge of tears.

Senator Dianne Feinstein voiced sympathy for Capra’s outburst, attributing it to “great law enforcement frustration.” She then called marijuana a “gateway drug” and repeated her longstanding opposition to legalization, though she allowed for some medical use.

Hey wait! Don’t they have it backwards? It’s not legal marijuana that’s the “experiment” here,  but illegal marijuana. Surely the DEA of all people must know that marijuana was legal until the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Well?

This country survived 160 years of legal marijuana. Was that a “bad experiment” that failed?

The frantic desperation of these people reminds me a bit of the uproar over legalizing gay marriage, but fortunately there has never been a Marriage Enforcement Administration dedicated to locking up illegal couples. The claim that the institution of marriage will be destroyed is a bit lame, because there really is no organized “institution,” and no one will be put out of work.  In the case of the DEA, real careers and jobs are at stake.

The drug warriors are real morality police, and I don’t think they will go gently into the good night.