On the 4th of July, the 43 annual marijuana legalization march,
originally the "smoke-in" assembled in Lafayette Park for a march to
their concert site on the Mall near 23ed st. As has been the case every
year since 2002, they had to pass through bag search checkpoints to
enter the concert area!


That is what they fall "Freedom" in the post Sep 11 United States-the
"right" to have your bag searched by police, or in this case, event
staff backed by police. The only way to exercise your 4th Amendment
right not to consent to a search is to refuse to enter the area
"protected" by the checkpoints!



"Freedom" in the United States also seems to mean the "right" to piss in
a cup while some swine watches in order to get a job or not be held in
jail pending trial for the most trivial of so-called "offenses."



The march combined medical marijuana advocates with others who quite
sensably advocate an end to this "war on drugs" that has allowed brutal
cartels to terrorize northern Mexico while shitting on people's rights
to control their own body.



The cartel violence was not mentioned during the speeches, but the exact
same protests could have been staged by relatives of those murdered by
the Zetas, (often SOA graduates), to speak on the hypocrisy of a "war on
drugs" foreign and domestic policy by a nation that is the world's
leading consumer of recreational drugs. Drug testing, jump-out cops, and
the police terror in our inner cities are all symptoms of this
moralistic hypocrisy, and so is the blood-curdling violence in northern
Mexico, sometimes worse than Iraq at the height of the war,.