The endless Republican love affair with the war on drugs

While I have no love for Democrats, I am not happy with Republicans.

Especially Republicans who promote the war on drugs, and want to extend its reach into the lives of every American possible. In Michigan, Republican legislators have enacted a new law enabling roadside saliva testing for drugs:

LANSING, MI — The Michigan State Police is working on plans to establish a pilot program for roadside drug testing, a spokeswoman said.

A new law instructs the state police to pick five counties where it will run a one-year pilot program for saliva-based testing to check drivers for drugs like marijuana, heroin and cocaine.

“We expect the counties to be finalized this summer with a pilot to begin sometime later in the year,” MSP spokeswoman Shanon Banner said.

The five counties will be determined based on criteria including: the number of impaired driving crashes;the number of impaired drivers arrested; and the number of Drug Recognition Experts (DREs) trained in the county, she said.

Never mind the 4th Amendment. And never mind that police drug tests are notoriously inaccurate, and that even if we assume that saliva tests are accurate enough to detect drug metabolites, a serious problem  involves the window of detection. A test which reveals that a substance was consumed sometime in the past 1 to 5 days does not determine whether the person is currently under the influence, so obviously, our Orwellian rulers are targeting something beyond driving under the influence.

Don’t these idiot Republicans realize that putting laws like this on the books makes citizens hate the police?

Is that the idea?

I’m not advocating hating the police, mind you. They are ordered to do things like swabbing your mouth with a QiTip, sticking their fingers up your ass because of an arrest for a traffic infraction, and worse. They are only obeying orders, so it is just as wrong to hate them for doing a job people hate having them do as it is to hate anyone else for doing a job people hate having them do. (Hey wait! Oh never mind…)

As if that news wasn’t enough, it’s now looking like the Republicans will be tapping an outspoken Drug Warrior for the 2016 ticket. He’s on record as wanting to toughen marijuana laws at the behest of prison guards.

Ganja-friendly legislation has come to two states in the U.S. and others have either passed or expanded medical marijuana laws, but not Indiana, where Republican Gov. Mike Pence has proposed an overhaul of Indiana’s criminal sentencing laws, after questioning whether penalties for low-level drug offenders were strict enough.

While Pence’s proposal would lead to more persons convicted of low-level felonies spending time in a work release program rather than prison, the plan also would require those convicted of more serious crimes to spend more time in prison.

A “serious crime” in Indiana includes marijuana dealing and possession charges, which the state Senate’s Criminal Law Committee wanted to change from a high-level misdemeanor to a low-level felony charge.

The committee also proposed extending the felony charge to possession of one-third of an ounce of marijuana, down from 30 grams or one ounce of marijuana.

Pence posed these changes to the public as a message that the state is tough on drug dealers, but as some organizations have pointed out, Pence may have been financially inspired to invoke tougher laws as a favor to GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the United States.

Though GEO Group is based in Florida, the prison has made contributions to political campaigns across the U.S., mostly to Republican candidates. In the last 10 years, the company has spent more than $3 million on direct campaign contributions, and the number is a low estimate since many state contribution records are either incomplete or missing.

But based on the data that is available, Indiana ranks No. 8 on GEO Group’s list of campaign contributions — spending about $60,000 in state elections. Pence himself received $12,500 from GEO Group for his 2012 gubernatorial campaign, making the prison group one of Pence’s top 30 corporate contributors, and trumped donations made by U.S. Steel Corp., Caterpillar and Koch Industries.

Great. (Naturally, Pence is a gung-ho social conservative.)

I keep trying to tell myself that as bad as Republicans are, the Democrats are worse.