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If you want to gauge how far out of kilter our country's legal system has gotten, consider my friend Bernie, who was busted for growing marijuana to give to people with medical needs. The feds tried to put him away for a five year mandatory minimum, but for reasons I will go into shortly Bernie pulled eighteen months in a halfway house (which my informants tell me is actually tougher than jail) and two and a half years of “supervised release,” plus the federal government wants to effectively fine him a million dollars by confiscating the farm where Bernie has lived for the last forty years. And, they have appealed his parole and are asking that he be given even more than five years. Please notice it's the feds doing this. If Bernie's case had stayed at the state level, he would have been dealing with two years of probation and an eight thousand dollar fine, and would not be faced with losing his home. Those are the broad outlines. The more I ponder the details, the more I have to mourn what a Kafkaesque mockery “justice” has become in this country.

At tremendous risk to my sanity, I read ONDCP's blog Pushingback.com so you don’t have to. Keep in mind that the following was posted sequentially within a 24 hour period:

First ONDCP criticizes Gov. Bill Richardson for signing New Mexico's medical marijuana law:

Medical Marijuana in New Mexico: A Triumph of Politics Over Science

Next, it reports that prescription drugs now kill almost as many people as murderers:

Report: Prescription Drugs Deaths Nearly Equal Murders

Then it follows up with this:

"Anti-pot Message Needs to be Louder."

The announcement that prescription drugs are killing people at alarming rates is sandwiched between two hysterical posts about medical marijuana. Apparently, it requires massive loss of human life to distract ONDCP even briefly from its frantic campaign against patients with pot.

Meanwhile, murderous FDA-approved medicines are massacring Americans left and right, a fact to which the ONDCP pays lip service before exclaiming, in its very next post, that medical marijuana must really be very dangerous precisely because it hasn't been approved by the FDA.

ONDCP's mantra that FDA-approved medicines are safe and effective and that non-approved medicines are dangerous and unpredictable is exposed as utterly hollow and meaningless right on the front page of its own blog. And they have no clue because the actual human consequences of various medical decisions are the furthest thing from their minds when they write this malicious drivel.

Only by ending the fraudulent campaign against marijuana can the anti-drug movement salvage the credibility necessary to warn people about drugs that can kill you. But they're not ready for that. ONDCP is still busy touting these very same killer drugs as alternatives to medical marijuana. If attempting to comprehend the unintended irony of all this makes you nauseous, you're not alone.