Ryan Frederick was asleep this January when he awoke to the sound of his front door being bashed in. He had experienced a break-in earlier that same week, so Frederick grabbed the gun he kept for self-defense and fired through the broken door at the intruder. The bullet struck Detective Jarrod Silvers of the Chesapeake Police Department and killed him.
Ryan Frederick is in jail and has been charged with first degree murder. The warrant the police obtained said that an informant had confirmed that Frederick was growing large amounts of marijuana in his garage and that he had been in Ryan's home three days prior, around the time Ryan reported having experienced a break-in.
Frederick's neighbors characterize him as an avid gardener. The police found plenty of plants - including a Japanese maple, which looks very similar to a marijuana plant - but did not find any evidence of marijuana being grown. They did find a small amount of marijuana inside the home, but only enough to charge him with a misdemeanor.
The police were wrong, and it led to tragedy. But even if they were right, would it have been reasonable for them to raid the home of a man with no prior criminal record after nightfall?
Hundreds of these raids, often serving nonviolent drug warrants and resulting in the death of an innocent, have occurred in recent years. The New York Times recently reported that the United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world, with one in every 100 adults behind bars. Almost 4,000 people are arrested every day just for possession of illegal drugs, which is more than are arrested for aggravated assault, burglary, vandalism, forcible rape and murder combined.
This is unlikely a surprise to UMass students. There have been dozens of marijuana-related arrests these past two semesters, and students defiantly celebrated the holiday of Mary Jane this past month on April 20 at "Extravaganja," for which the UMass Amherst Cannabis Reform Coalition reported having the best turnout ever. UMass's fight-the-power tradition of activism epitomizes the fundaments of drug decriminalization.
We could talk about how unnecessarily costly the drug war has been. Or about how prohibition in no way decreases the availability of drugs. We could talk about how prohibition is what associates drugs with violence, theft and abuse by driving it into the black market. We could talk about the veritable harmlessness of marijuana, which the government puts into the same category as heroin. Or about cases in which the government imprisons sick people for using that drug for medical purposes.
While these are all valid considerations, they remain on the periphery of the issue at hand, and avoid the most fundamental question: Should the government engage in a "war" on the right of adults to consume whatever substances they want? Studies show that people are much more apt to commit violent crimes under the influence of alcohol than when they're high on marijuana, heroin or cocaine. Is it the responsibility of the government to protect us from ourselves?
The mindset that the government must use laws to ensure that we don't consume substances they deem inappropriate leads to extremes, like in 2006 when New York became the nation's first city to ban trans-fats in restaurants. Not only must the government protect us from using hard drugs, but they must also regulate our diets? Aren't we adults? Can we not be respected enough to make decisions for ourselves, even if they might be bad ones? In a free society, the people ought to be free from the heavy hand of governmental force; free to make their own decisions.
People find all sorts of reasons to justify government usurpation of power. Whether it's protection from weapons of mass destruction (that don't exist), the plight of the poor, the success of the rich, fat people eating fattening foods or marijuana use, everyone has their pet issue, their plea for more powerful, more controlling government. They either forget or ignore the simple equation that as government expands, liberty contracts.
In no way is the case of Ryan Frederick characteristic of what a free country should resemble. A team of government paramilitary enforcers raiding the home of a man who committed no act of violence or coercion against any other citizen, on faulty intelligence and misled laws, sounds to me like the antithesis of the liberty we're supposed to uphold in this country.
Whenever the domain of what is legitimate for the government to control is expanded by the pleas of the misinformed that prefer centralized power over liberty, individual rights are trounced upon, and expansive campaigns of unintended consequences transpire. Problems are created, not solved. So the next time you're inclined to entrust and implore our government to exceed its constitutional limits to protect you from this or provide you with that, think of Ryan Frederick and Jarrod Silvers, whose lives didn't have to be ruined, but for the earnest pleas of the misinformed.
John Glaser is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at jwglaser@student.umass.edu.
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