The name of this blog is more or less a reference to the book Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country by Peter McWilliams. That book advances a simple but profound premise: It’s a bad idea to define an activity as a crime unless it causes harm to people who have not consented to being involved.
Peter McWilliams had AIDS and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and the medicine he used to treat these diseases made him extremely nauseated, a condition he was able to calm by smoking marijuana. He was eventually arrested for that, and since his mother’s house was used to secure the bond for his release, he decided to stop using it. Not long thereafter, twelve years ago today, he vomited and choked to death.
When asked about legalizing marijuana, President Obama kidded around with the audience as he said he wouldn’t do that. It’s funny, you see, that libertarians and others want to legalize drugs. You know, because we all want to get high. Ha, ha.
But the war on drugs, including the war on marijuana, is no joke. There are casualties. People get locked up, and people die. Drug legalization isn’t about getting high. It’s about stopping the unnecessary suffering of hundreds of thousands of people at the hands of our nation’s drug warriors.
It breaks my heart.