Should the police break down your door for marijuana?

You're in your house, sound asleep, and a group of men kick down your front door in the middle of the night. They have guns drawn, pointing at you and they are shouting. You wake up from a sound sleep and you don't know who they might be. Your children are crying, they are scared.

Your dog is barking at the intruders. Who are these armed men? Well, all too often, they are cops who got the wrong address and are raiding your house because they believe, sometimes just on the word of an informant who wants to make a deal, that you have drugs. Sometimes, the drug is marijuana. Marijuana of course being less harmful than alcohol. The drug that about one-half of Americans have taken in their life, without becoming violent drug fiends.

The drug that our government finds bad enough that it is willing to engage in no knock searches in the dead of night, knowing that innocent people will die defending their homes from who they believe are intruders. When these innocents are killed, police or their commanders are almost never punished. If you are an innocent person who kills an officer you believe is an intruder, there is almost no chance you won't be charged with Murder 1.

These are the facts of the drug war in America. Americans losing their property not because they are accused of a crime, but because the property is suspected to be the product of drugs. The government can actually charge your car with essentially a crime, and the burden is on you, not them, to show why it shouldn’t be seized.

Illegal searches in the streets of America happen everyday, in fishing expeditions in the war on drugs, or more aptly, the war on our Constitution.

Teenagers who never sold drugs a day in their life, are urged by attractive undercover cops in high schools to sell them drugs. When they finally do, they get years in prison. Indeed, the cops in these cases insist on paying for the drugs, to increase the charges.

This is the product of the drug war, how much longer before we cease to be free at all?