Raving Lunacy

[DixieBelle]

Stepping back into the time machine.....2002 to be exact. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,58663,00.html

Now Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., has introduced a bill (the "Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act of 2002," cutely called "the RAVE Act"), also sponsored by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Richard Durbin, D-Ill. The bill would essentially write into the crackhouse statute the same approach already rejected by the district court in New Orleans. According to The Washington Post:

When he introduced the bill in June, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., said "most raves are havens for illicit drugs," and congressional findings submitted with the bill label as drug paraphernalia such rave mainstays as bottled water, "chill rooms" and glow sticks.

My three-year-old nephew is fond of bottled water and glow sticks, and usually needs a "chill room." Presumably Biden regards him as a dangerous criminal.

The RAVE Act should, all by itself, serve to explode Democratic claims that it's only the Republicans who pose a danger to civil liberties: nothing in the Bush administration's anti-terror plans would criminalize bottled water. Unfortunately, the RAVE Act (what is it with these cutesy acronyms, anyway?) also suggests that there's a lot of raving going on in Washington — raving lunacy.

SNIP

Unable to endure the continuing evidence of drug-war failure, the drug warriors are lashing out, hoping that the ignorant will be convinced that they're earning their pay. Congress is playing along because, basically, Congress isn't up to the job of riding herd on the massive drug-war bureaucracy.

The drug war has been a massive failure: a waste of money, of lives and of time. It's also been accompanied by extensive inroads on traditional American freedoms: property forfeitures, "no-knock" searches, expanded wiretap authority, and the destruction of financial privacy, to name just a few.

These are inroads that have served the agendas of bureaucrats but that haven't done anything to solve the problem that was claimed as their justification. And the drug war's combination of intrusiveness, corruption and ineptitude calls into question the government's ability to carry out the war on terrorism.

This was written by Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit) who is a conservative libertarian in my book. I sometimes disagree with him but I'm pretty much in agreement with the overall principle about how the war on drugs (and poverty for that matter) has been a failure in a lot of ways.

I can't wait until DU finds out about Biden wanting to take away their glow sticks though.