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- Drug war costing us our liberty?
- SUNNYSIDE--A Sunnyside man was arrested here Feb. 23 as police shut down his pot delivery business.
- Det. Sgt. Jim Rivard said police arrested Alejo Ochoa, 18, and booked him on four counts of delivery and one of conspiracy to deliver marijuana.
- Ochoa was arrested at the Mid Valley Mall for delivering almost a half pound of marijuana. Police said this was the fourth delivery Ochoa made during an ongoing investigation. Two deliveries reportedly were made within 1,000 feet of a school zone.
- Police served a search warrant at Ochoa's home and found under 40 grams of marijuana there, Rivard said. Ochoa's alleged activities are illegal, and police were just doing their job.
- Police, however, also seized Ochoa's car even before his arraignment at Yakima County Superior Court. Police don't need a conviction before they seize a suspected dealer's wheels--or even his house if he owns it and they find enough pot in it.
- Forfeitures are penalties dealers face in addition to fines or jail time. Sales of forfeited properties bulk up a police department's operating budget. This sounds like, well, business as usual. But we believe there are some real dangers here.
- First, we're getting in the habit of punishing persons before they are convicted in a court of law. Few would argue that property confiscation isn't punishment. And reports are rife that persons arrested often have a great deal of trouble getting this property back if they're acquitted.
- We oppose punishment before conviction. Such a thought was inconceivable in the America in which I was raised. And at the risk of being branded a person who "supports dealers", I'm going to say punishment before conviction is blatently unAmerican.
- Second, common economic sense tells us that, as legal penalties to sellers intensify, pot business risks increase. This drives up the price of grass to a point where a free and wild local plant can be sold for hundreds of dollars to buyers who burgle homes and commit robberies to get money to buy the stuff.
- If pot were legal, the pot business would be dead on arrival, just as Al Capone's illegal liquor business was d.o.a. the day we repealed the 18th Amendment. Burglaries, robberies and murders would be reduced. Nobody steals, robs, and kills to obtain wild plants that cost nothing.
- Would private pot use--by free American adults who own their own bodies--go down after legalization? Maybe so, maybe not. At least we know pot would no longer be pushed by dealers. And it would be great not to have to worry so much about burglaries, robberies and murder in the streets and homes of Sunnyside. We believe many violent crimes are conducted to get money to support artifically expensive drug habits.
- We must be very careful with our country's increasingly militarized drug war. Somewhere out there lies a silent, invisible line, and we pray the federal government doesn't blithely step across it one day. It's probably fair to say none of us wants to fight another civil war to stop our losses of liberty, and to regain the many liberties we've already lost in this century.
- But it could happen. --LA
