The collateral damages of present policies on sex, drugs and violence are unacceptable to true patriots who believe in the American dream of self-government, free from the tyranny of official lawlessness, wars of aggression and religious dogma. The state does not run the affairs of people in a free society. It upholds justice between people who conduct their own affairs.

The Spirit of '76 was the Holy Spirit and is our true north. Many church officials like their government counterparts are corrupted by these morally bankrupt policies. Bible thumpers are blasphemous in their support of the drug war and their hypocrisy is exposed in this very book they bear witness is the true word of God. Drug prohibition goes against fundamental principles in the Scriptures.

Here are clear Biblical messages about these basic ethics*: 1 Timothy 4:4 For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving; 5 for then it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer, puts prohibitionists in opposition to the Bible regarding bans on any plant. Saying that creations of the Almighty are evil and harmful is clearly blasphemy by Bible definition. Blasphemy is a much much more serious sin than being an alcoholic or a drug addict. A key Jewish and Christian premise is "God is always right no matter what men may think," and means you don't tell the Creator he made a mistake. .

JOHN 8:44 and PROVERBS 19: 9 are a couple of many verses about lies and bearing false witness which drug warriors do to excess. In fact all of the "evidence" used to support marijuana prohibition is false witness. The drug warrior's lies about cannabis are direct insults to the Almighty and break Bible teachings about honesty.

Drug prohibition violates the Bible standard of justice. Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, Deuteronomy 19:21 Punishment should fit the crime. Laws based on lies sure don't meet the Divine standards for just punishment.

The idea that a man is corrupted by consuming a drug scuttles Jesus' teaching at, Matthew 15: 10-19. To paraphrase, its not what we ingest but the morally bankrupt things we say and do that defiles man.

What about the commandment to "love your fellow man as yourself." If a believer or his loved ones developed a drug problem would they want prison as treatment?

Racism is epidemic in how prohibition laws are implemented. What about: every color, every race is precious in his sight, "Jesus loves the little children of the world."

Redford Givens swears, "My study of history reveals that there was no such thing as a "drug problem" before we had drug laws." Repeated searches of old newspaper archives do not reveal any accidental heroin overdoses or drug crimes before drugs were outlawed (i.e. robberies, murders etc. done because of drugs). Crime and drug use became entwined after the drug laws went on the books, not before. No one was robbing, whoring and murdering over addictive drugs when addicts could buy all of the heroin, cocaine, morphine, opium and anything else they wanted cheaply and legally at the corner pharmacy. When drugs were legal addicts held regular employment, raised decent families and were indistinguishable from their teetotaling neighbors. Overdoses were virtually unheard of when addicts used cheap pure Bayer Heroin instead of the toxic potions prohibition puts on the streets." (See: The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs - Chapter 5. Some eminent narcotics addicts)

"Where drug crime was unknown we now have prisons overflowing with drug users. Where addicts lived normal lives, we have hundreds of thousands of shattered families. Where overdoses were extremely rare we have tens of thousands of drug deaths every year. The addiction rate is now five times greater than when we had no laws at all." What a Snow Job!

Overdose Awareness Day is August 31. More than twenty five thousand Americans will likely die of an accidental drug overdose this year (75 a day). Most overdose deaths can be prevented.

Big corporations and governments have psychopathic tendencies and are often lacking in conscience and empathy. Big churches seem to have the same problem, in God's name! Celebrating our similarities, free trade or the free market plus building bridges of tolerance to differences in religion, race and lifestyle will create a world of abundance and peace.

Prohibition has become a war on parental authority, local government decision making and free speech. Current policies destroy families and official lawlessness rules. Alcohol makes domestic violence 8 Xs more likely, cannabis does not. Taking children out of homes of nonviolent cannabis users and placing them in homes in which alcohol is the drug of choice is discrimination and a policy bordering on insanity! Meanwhile, damage from fetal alcohol syndrome fill our prisons with folks who can not comprehend the consequences for their actions...

Taking property from people who have made a safer health choice is legalized discrimination and extortion! States seized $1.52 billion in 2007. End asset forfeiture! We owe reparations to people for all this tyranny.

The truth about drugs will keep our children off them. Sound medical and unbiased scientific knowledge are the most effective moral persuasions. Present policy falsehoods and scare tactics undermine our credibility.

We want to encourage drug free behavior not awaken their curiosity. Effective drug education based on medical science builds student's confidence to make informed responsible choices. Drug testing, scare tactics and other propaganda don't work as well as truth, trust and reason.

Have you noticed opportunity may knock once, but temptation bangs on your door forever or how forbidden fruits create many jams? Sex and drugs, for both abstinence is safest but few choose it. When individuals remain in control of their own bodies (including anything ingested) society benefits.

Don't believe the propaganda; we wage this war to protect our children! The devastating and deadly facts are our babies; especially teens have become collateral damage in this grossly failed war. The destruction of the sacred family unit is one of the worst consequences prohibition forces on children.

Brutal, bloody prohibition supports despicable people who sell drugs to children, recruit them to sell to their peers and arm them to kill the competition. Despite having six times the Netherlands adult incarceration rate, this insane policy has created an obscene teenage murder rate that's nineteen times higher than in the Netherlands, where drugs are regulated, controlled and taxed!

Only 50 percent of high school students graduate in our ten biggest cities and only 40 per cent graduate in NYC, Baltimore and Detroit. In the Netherlands 92 percent graduate; that's No Child Left Behind!

Stephen H. Frye MD, retired medical school professor's book exposes facts related to our babies, teens especially, being collateral damage of this demented, violence triggering policy! "We Really Lost This War! Twenty-five Reasons to Legalize Drugs." Here's a better alternative to the current failure of a policy: SAFETY FIRST...a reality-based approach to teens and drugs.

See a Power Point Slide Show Now! On the Drug Policy Forum of Texas Speakers page scroll down to Suzanne Wills and click "How We Got Into This Mess and the Special Interests That Keep Us Here" Politics and money, is there a way to separate them? Get Power Point Viewer download FREE!

Across the US last year a third of the murders, almost 60% of the rapes and about half of the aggravated assaults went unsolved! The cumulative effect of this is horrendous. While we police individual recreational and medicinal use of drugs; murderers and violent sexual predators roam free. Law Enforcement keeping the focus on marijuana despite the rise in violent crime is policy bordering on insanity or reefer madness.

Our corrupt policy attracts too many of those who want to milk it for all it is worth. I encourage you to make the LEAP, help restore justice! Attract more of those who will make our system run with the milk of human kindness.

Incarceration is seven times more expensive than treatment. Less than 1% of US are actually addicted to anything illegal. Restore public and law enforcement safety around the globe! Change to ethical policy and show fiscal responsibility! Use resources to catch more violent and sexual predators or incarcerate more of those morally bankrupt selling drugs to children or driving intoxicated. Save lives instead of ruining them. Restore Justice, the guardian of liberty!

The truth about sex and practicing safety fist beats abstinence only programs in protecting young adults. Present policy falsehoods and scare tactics undermine our credibility. A 2010 report to the UN General Assembly dared to say that comprehensive sex education shouldn't merely seek to scare adolescents by emphasizing deadly or disfiguring sexually transmitted infections or lecture on family planning. Instead, it suggested attention to pleasure and enjoyment of sexuality, including as an objective of sex education 'abolishing guilt feelings about eroticism.' "

American advertisers use sex to sell everything from lipstick to laptops but fear and silence around sex and sexuality also permeate our culture. American teens are paying a terrible price for this confusion in unintended pregnancy, STDs, and even HIV. And American taxpayers are paying billions to treat these entirely preventable problems. These facts are from, "Let's Talk About Sex" a 2009 earnest and engaging documentary about modern adolescent sex.

It spotlights a host of these alarming trends and truths: Yearly, the US has over 750,000 teen pregnancies (that's approximately 2,400 young girls a day), experiencing much higher pregnancy rates (1 out of 3 teens) than those in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Ten thousands US teenagers contract a sexually transmitted disease every day. That's over four times the rate of the Netherlands and over three times that of Germany and France.

"As females become sexually active at younger and younger ages, state legislatures have stupidly raised the age at which it is legal to engage in sexual activity. Today, a significant percentage of new prisoners are young men imprisoned for engaging in sexual activity with teenage girls. In the US, criminal justice (sic) has more to do with ruining people than with punishing criminals," says Paul Craig Roberts. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Happy Birthday, to the US! Sept. 17 is Constitution Day. If the Declaration of Independence was our divorce decree: it said who we are not; then the Constitution is our birth certificate: it proclaims who we are. "The problem isn't the Constitution; it's the fact that it's been applied inconsistently, opportunistically, and dishonestly over the decades like folks urging new laws on guns, because the existing laws haven't been applied." Buford Terrell

Julian Assange: A Modern Day Hero? Inside the World of WikiLeaks is worth the watch. He is a modern day Internet guru and a simply a man of the people, radical and unapologetic. Australian publisher and journalist Julian Assange created massive controversy in 2010 by making public a flood of secret correspondence among US government agencies via the WikiLeaks website. Assange was already engaged in distributing "secret" information in the public interest before the revelations that made him world famous.

Our flag is a symbol of liberty, justice and freedom! It is a beacon for hope in a troubled world. Don't let its reputation be tarnished by incidents of torture and other war crimes. Recapture the Flag by demanding a government that respects human rights, leadership that rejects all forms of corruption, and elected officials who fiercely challenge anyone who seeks to undermine the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. One of the 2011 Rebel with Just Cause portraits will be shared by Bradley Manning and Julian Assange: for posting the Afghanistan war diaries on wikileaks. It is not a crime to expose war crimes.

"An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."- MLK. Marc Emery is our hero and wins the other 2011 portrait for taking a stand for justice against a morally bankrupt, violence triggering, nightmare policy.

I am a peace activist and feel our over grown military industrial complex and law enforcement complex are the biggest threats to liberty we face. War is a tool governments use to make us more accepting of their waste of our precious lives and resources. War creates a booming economy for some on the suffering of many. All wars of aggression and the drug war are smokescreens for corruption but something smells rotten!

Do we want to be known as a disgusting military super power, policing the world or as a humanitarian super power? "Strike the root!" Be brave, that's how we end terror. All we have to do is stop being afraid, and stop acting out of fear.

We're in more than 200 TIMES the danger of being killed in our own cars than by terrorists. When we resolve conflict diplomatically within the rule of law, we create peace and abundance. Do not escalate to war, good for absolutely nothing but creating a booming economy for some on the suffering of many.

Empire-building, policing the world, and casting off the Constitution's restraints solidifies tyranny at home, devastates the economy, and increases the threats to our national security. I believe in, promote and defend a safer, constitutional, non interventionist foreign policy. This is the safer policy envisioned by our founders. I support our troops and want to bring them home safe. Secrets put our troops and all of us in more danger than transparency. Truly ethical leaders have no need for secrets, cover ups, covert operations, lies and propaganda.

The truth is the wealthy will do more social good with investing and philanthropy than by paying those dollars in more taxes to the federal government. Let ethics and the free market rule.

Several leading politicians would have us believe that a Balanced Budget Amendment is a good idea because 49 states have such a requirement. As Dr. Phil might ask, "How's that working out?" Unsurprisingly, many state governments have figured out how to game the system. Funny how Congress is great at playing "con" games. Here's the ruse. See if it sounds familiar...read today's DownSizer Dispatch. There’s a much better tool for enforcing budgetary sanity: The debt ceiling must never be raised again.

Tell your government servants, they must MAKE CUTS NOW -- lots of them. "Cap the debt!"

How Rick Perry Created Jobs in Texas made me realize Perry will not get my vote. He thinks big government.will solve all our problems.

Save lives instead of ruining them. Join LEAP, COP and DownSizeDC!

Get tough on violent crime! Restore Justice, the guardian of liberty!

Track your Senators' and Representative's votes by e-mail.

Changing who's in charge will not affect much. The real cause of this huge quagmire of failed policy is the beast, big government, that money hungry beast, Uncle Sam! Ma Freedom tells it like it is! The beauty of it is when we focus on down-sizing our government we regain our roots of self-government and secure the blessings of liberty for future generations and ourselves.

Compiled and written by Colleen McCool

*Special thanks to R. Givens for Bible principles against prohibition.