Heads Down
Drug War 3.0 is upon us
“When Stephen Miller and his flunkies get frustrated at how slow it’s going, they’ll turn from immigrants to disciplining the native population, and the dopers will be among the lowest-hanging fruit and the first targets. The Drug War infrastructure—like Drug-Free Zones, HIDTA’s, and mandatory minimums—is still sitting there, waiting to be fully utilized again.”
I missed the Trump administration’s suspension of habeas corpus as a means of speeding up the process from the get-go. I naively thought deportations were going to be conducted in accordance with the law. And while the courts have reiterated the need for due process, their rulings have done nothing to slow the detentions.
The Trump Class War has indeed been expanded to include workers the cannabis industry—a couple California-licensed grow facilities were raided earlier in July.
The source video for this story from DC popped into my social media feed, yesterday. Here’s local station WUSA9’s report:
Reporter: Tuesday evening people who were here in Logan Circle say they saw Park Police come up to a man on a bench, arrest him, detain him, and then haul him off. All for smoking marijuana.
Witness Mai Manon: These are the three cops, Park Police. I’ve never seen them here before in my life.
Reporter: Summer afternoons in DC, you’ll see dozens of people flocking to parks like Logan Circle.
Manon: People do picnics here and stuff.
Reporter: Mai Manon says, on Tuesday she staked out a bench to write.
Manon: And a guy sat down next to me on the bench and started to smoke a joint that was clearly from a dispensary, um, so purchased legally.
Reporter: It’s what happened next…
Manon: It’s incredibly jarring.
Reporter: That shocked her.
Manon: I had my headphones on and then I looked over at one point and three cops had come up behind him.
Reporter: Mai says US Park Police officers handcuffed the man, picked him up, and that’s when she started recording.
Manon: I told them, “Are you seriously arresting him for smoking? I’ve never seen you guys here before. I am here all the time.” They said, yes, they are. They took him away.
Reporter: This wasn’t the only arrest like this. Witnesses say they saw a similar scene later on in Logan and in Dupont Circle.
Manon: The park is always calm like this, and so, for people to be swept up like that is—yeah, incredibly jarring.
Reporter: Dupont and Logan Circle fall under the jurisdiction of US Park Police. Now we asked a Park Police spokesman what’s going on, and they said in part USPP officers are enforcing executive order, making the District of Columbia safe and beautiful. Now since it went into effect in March, the spokesperson also said they've made 468 arrests across the DMV, including the last few days in DuPont and Logan Circle, where police arrested three people for possession of open containers of alcohol and one person was arrested for public consumption of marijuana. While DC may have varying degrees of enforcement or legality, none of these activities are legal on federal property. Park police said later that one of the people arrested had an active warrant for burglary.
Manon: The car pulled up there and swept him.
Reporter: But Mai says the arrest has broken the calm, summer feeling in the park.
Manon: Scooping people off of park benches at 7 o'clock on a Tuesday is kind of outrageous and feels very dystopian.
The post-WWII political landscape in the United States has always been inclining toward fascism. Even when the enemy was identified as fascist (state socialism) itself, the response was to discipline the domestic population, especially as it regards their thinking and conceptions of the world.
It started with McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee, with public dressings-down, badgering, red-baiting, and demands for loyalty oaths. The Nixon War on Drug Abuse followed, criminalizing substances themselves and expanding federal authority. The Reagan-Bush Drug War established private prisons, set up a two-tier enforcement system that doubly-criminalized urban spaces, led mass incarceration, and brought the U.S. military into domestic enforcement.
Were it not for September 11, 2001, we still would have seen further incursion on constitutional protection under the W. Bush administration, but the attacks served as the (too?) perfect pretext to ram through the PATRIOT Act, which was already composed (anyone else see a little Project 2025 in this?) and passed through Congress, literally too fast for those voting on it to have actually read it. That is what launched the domestic spying program Edward Snowden would later expose. It turns out the saying “If you see something, say something” does not count, when it’s the government that poses the threat. Snowden remains in exile.
And now we have Project 2025 and the leader of Coup Americaine holding the White House, ignoring constitutional rights and court orders, and dispatching secret police to disappear “illegals,” and, it turns out, folks who just want to get high and be left alone.