I always look forward to Monday morning coffee. It’s brewed fresh, almost worth the $5 fee. But this Monday was different. This Monday offered a first look at a new improved Department—this after I had just figured out their last set of improvements. You see, the DCB brews adventure along with the coffee. I never know what kind of experience I’m going to get. Unfortunately, like every other Monday, I did find out.
I entered the establishment. It looked the same. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all, I thought. I walked up to an empty teller and placed my standard order.
“I’d like a large coffee with cream, no sugar.”
Without a word, the man behind the counter made an expressionless gesture toward an overhead sign, one of several identical placards, hand-crafted in uppercase letters:
TEA AND COLA
THIS WINDOW ONLY
Ignoring the misstatement, I replied, “Okay. So where do I get my coffee?”
He silently reached behind the counter and handed me a full-color brochure: Guide to the new Department of Caffeinated Beverages: Dedicated to serving you better.
“Okay. But where do I go to get my coffee?”
With an indication of actual human emotion, he thrust a finger to the right and sternly intoned, “Over there.”
I turned and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. There was a crowded seating area arranged in two sections with a single aisle between. The seats faced a counter. A sign read:
Tue, 06/13/2000 - 19:02 — Tim King
The failure of drug prohibition dwarfs that of violent crime. Drug prohibition is the direct cause of most violent crime. Peaceful non-governmental public-service organizations—churches, inner-city missionaries, drug intervention programs—could accomplish ten times over what the government can, if only we Christians were permitted to give our money to them instead of to the DEA.
But none of this really matters. Because the strongest case against drug prohibition is simply that it is anti-christian and immoral.
Tell me, if you discovered that your own son or daughter were involved with drugs, what would you do? Would you turn her in, so she could spend years imprisoned under mandatory-minimum sentencing laws? Or maybe you would willingly forfeit your belongings under our nation’s anti-racketeering laws. Or you could make an anonymous tip and inspire a SWAT team to kick in your door in the middle of the night. Or perhaps, as a last resort, you could leave your daughter’s life in the hands of the pushers and black-market thugs.
The politicians in Washington know the correct answer. Whenever one of their sons or daughters is caught with drugs, they treat it as a private family matter. They even pull strings to get the DEA off their backs. But, in their arrogance, they refuse to let America’s parents take responsibility for their own families.
There is nothing godly about using the force of the police power to quell consent. Is it good when government social workers intrude into the homes of christian home-schoolers? Is it right to force people to associate with homosexuals? Should we rejoice that our tax dollars are being used to fund smut and anti-christian schools? Yet this coercion flows from the same idiocy that promotes drug prohibition. Click to continue »
