Posted 11/10/2007 04:36:00 PM by Douglas

At 18, you can drive a car, vote, stand trial for your life, join the military or own property, as long as that property doesn't contain an ethanol molecule. Apparently, the Marine Corps thinks that's silly and wants to allow their 18 to 20 year old Marines a drink if they want before or after their deployment. Of course, MADD is choosing to be total douche bags about it:

A dispute currently pits the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton, California, against MADD. The Corps wants Marines serving under the age of 21 to have the right to consume alcoholic beverages. MADD is steadfastly opposed, and is spear-heading efforts to block the Corps from accomplishing this feat.

The issue at the heart of this confrontation extends far beyond the base limits of Camp Pendleton and the borders of California. It needs to be addressed nationally, and as soon as possible for the benefit of the men and women serving in all the U.S. Armed Forces.

Why is it that everyone else discovered that prohibition doesn't work almost 75 years ago?

Labels: prohibition

Posted 11/02/2007 05:49:00 PM by Douglas

Hell is quickly on its way to freezing over. A Panhandle county deciding for themselves whether or not they want to come out of the 1920 and allow their citizens to chose for themselves if they'd like a beer with their dinner. Shocking, I know.

Residents of Childress County are deciding the fate of alcohol sales in the county in a wet/dry election.

The turnout has been very good in early voting, said County Clerk Zona Prince. By noon Thursday, 413 had voted.

"Everybody's interested in this, but I don't know why. Quanah's wet, Estelline's wet and Vernon," Prince said.

If passed, beer, wine and mixed drinks could be sold throughout the county in licensed stores, bars and restaurants.

And, yet another reason for residents in neighboring dry counties to drive to Childress and spend money there. As if they needed another one.

Labels: prohibition

Posted 10/31/2007 05:56:00 PM by Douglas

Prohibition is closer than you might think. This time, in our nation's capital.

The breath test revealed that Bolton's blood alcohol content (BAC) was 0.03 percent, a level a 120-pound woman could expect after drinking one glass of wine. It was well below the 0.08 percent limit that marks a driver as legally intoxicated in D.C. It was not low enough for the arresting officer, however. This middle-aged mother of two, who hadn't drunk to excess, who hadn't run a red light or run a stop, was arrested, handcuffed, and fingerprinted for an innocent mistake. She sat in a jail cell for hours and was finally released at 4:30 a.m. Bolton spent four court appearances and over $2,000 fighting a $400 ticket. She then spent a month fighting to get her license back after refusing to submit to the 12-week alcohol counseling program.

The arresting officer, inaptly named Dennis Fair, insists: "If you get behind the wheel of a car with any measurable amount of alcohol, you will be dealt with in D.C. We have zero tolerance....Anything above 0.01, we can arrest." Fair recognized that nearly everyone in D.C. was unaware of this zero tolerance policy. Still, he told The Washington Post, if "you don't know about it, then you're a victim of your own ignorance."

And the idiocy goes on like that. This is a really great article, and it goes on to talk about several states with dumb drinking laws, but the best line is from Candace Lightner, founding mad mother of MADD.

Lightner has moved on from MADD, and since then has protested the shift from attacking drunk driving to attacking drinking in general. "I worry that the movement I helped create has lost direction," she told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1992. BAC legislation, she said, "ignores the real core of the problem....If we really want to save lives, let's go after the most dangerous drivers on the road." Lightner said MADD has become an organization far more "neoprohibitionist" than she had envisioned. "I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol," she said. "I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving."

Wow, she sounds like a rational person. It's no wonder she's not involved with the nutjobs at MADD anymore.

Sad, really, when the legalized (read: taxed) drugs take a cue from the insanity of the Drug War, and not the other way around.

Labels: prohibition