The Criminalization Industry in America

Though America already has far and away more people behind bars than any other so-called democracy in the world, the criminalization industry in America continues apace. Thanks to a new police sting operation in certain southeastern states, "Operation Meth Merchant," operators of Mom and Pop stores are being arrested for selling things like Sudaphed, Kitty Litter, coffee filters, and aluminum foil. The early victims of this sting operation are immigrant south Asians, for whom the drug war is culture shock to say the least. As if the country didn't have enough salaried drug warriors, now citizens are being forced by penalty of imprisonment to serve as enforcers in this misguided war. If you're a sales clerk and you suspect your customer is going to cook up some crystal with the perfectly legal items he's buying, then guess what? You've been deputized to call the law, or go to jail yourself.

The justification for this new intrusion into civil liberties is the honorable "aiding and abetting a crime" rationale. Perhaps stores who knowingly or carelessly put carts full of Sudaphed into irresponsible hands should pay a penalty, as many of them are (Walgreen, Walmart etc). But the concept of "Equal Justice" demands....well, equal justice. Can anyone think of a commercial enterprise that puts dangerous items into the hands of criminals and gets away with it Scot free? I can. The gun industry. So powerful is the double standard of justice that permits this, that critics have almost given up the ghost in fighting it. If a store clerk in Georgia is aiding and abetting a crime by selling Sudaphed, then so is the store clerk who sells a gun to someone who goes on to use it for a crime.

Eros Rising has an explanation for the explosion in Crystal Meth use in America. It's the drug war itself, stupid. By making the virtually safe drug, marijuana, all but impossible to get for pleasure seekers in poor and rural areas, the government itself has fueled the epidemic in this poor man's drug. Am I the only one who can put this together? Eros Rising has no compuctions whatsoever in using the term "pleasure seekers" to describe the people, who he largely sympathizes with, who are at the center of this storm. Eros Rising celebrates the seeking of pleasure. Safe pleasure. And there are fewer sources of (relatively) safe pleasure in the world than marijuana. The desire for pleasure is a primal force. Only a society utterly whipped by its churches and politicians would submit in such servile fashion to the tyranny against pleasure that we see in this country. It is the people in the world who want to stamp out pleasure who will be paid back with bad Karma in the next life. Of course they have not renounced pleasure themselves. They get their kicks by kicking others, if you know what I mean.

So how many more prisons are we going to build today, Uncle Sam? Criminalizing pleasure is a super growth industry. Perhaps someone on Wall Street should pull together a speciality Mutual Fund for it. This would include not only all the prison builders and contractors, but most of the nation's law firms as well (except few of them are stock corporations).