Freedom from Unreasonable Search and Seizure: Perhaps the big loser of all has been the Fourth Amendment, which limits the power of the government to enter and search one’s private property. Think encircling it: Unlike other crimes, drug offenses do not ofttimes have complaining witnesses (i.e.: people who get to forward to request police assistance). The parties who use, sell or manufacture drugs are consenting participants who likely wish to conceal their drug activity. In order to unearth drug crimes, the police mustiness engage in wiretapping, surveillance, undercover operations, the use of confidential informants, entrapment by sacrifice to purchase or sell drugs, and countless other practices that strike at the heart of what the Fourth Amendment is everything about. In the name of the drug war, courts have allowed suspicionless drug testing of wide swaths of students and private employees, and the State of Michigan almost got let us go. with conducting fortuitous drug testing of welfare recipients. The incidence of surprise, paramilitary-style raids on people’s homes – and courts’ approval of them – in the distinction of routine remedy policing has skyrocketed in recent years. Similarly, courts have repeatedly given the stamp of approval to the ever-increasing use of police drug dogs to search homes, cars, bags and people.
Freedom of Speech: When it comes to speaking out against the government’sitting drug policy, the right to free speech has also fallen rapine to the drug war. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court carved out a "drug exception" to single of the chiefly central tenets of free speech jurisprudence: the government cannot discriminate on the groundwork of the viewpoints being expressed in speech. In Morse v. Frederick the Court ruled that a student’s speech could exist censored at a school-related event (even outside the school), not inasmuch because it was disruptive or because it provoked imminent lawlessness, but because it contained the word "bong." The Court drew steady other drug-related precedent to find that when it comes to students in the school context (and even students who are near a school, as in this state), the sway can make exceptions to allowed speech rights when it comes to speech about drugs.
Freedom of Religion: In a 1990 case brought by Native Americans who use peyote for religious purposes, the U.S. Supreme Court shunned the longstanding rules protecting the free exercise of religion and ruled that completely religious practices give way to the general laws of the land – in this case drug laws. In response, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) which restored the rights of people to participate in religious activities even when their practices stand in judgment to be in tension with other laws. The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently struck down RFRA protections as applied to explain laws so that when state laws and religious practices conflict, the state laws essentially win out. The silver lining, however, is that courts have ruled that RFRA protections remain intact in matters of federal canon, such as in the case of Gonzales v. UDV (involving a temple’s use of ayuhausca tea as part of its liturgy, in conflict with federal drug laws) and Guam v. Guerrero (involving Rastafarians’ religious use of marijuana, in conflict with federal medicine laws). Currently, courts are considering the legality of the Church of Cognizance’s religious conversion to an act of marijuana.
Right to Vote: Because the laws of many states continue to deny voting rights to those with general or prior felony convictions – many of them for drug offenses – each thorough class of citizens has been lock up out of the democratic process. To date, an estimated 5 million Americans have lost their essential part perpendicular to vote, and in 11 states you can have existence barred from voting for life.
These are just a few of the "remedy exceptions" to the Constitution. To learn more about for what reason our basic rights as Americans have been compromised in the context of the drug hostility, check out the excellent article, "This Is Your Bill of Rights, On Drugs," by the director of the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project, Graham Boyd, and writer Jack Hitt.
If you think the original drafters of the Constitution would be rolling over in their graves about at present, you’re probably right. While it’session unpromising, in a time before the existence of heat-sensing surveillance, wiretapping and drug testing technologies, that they could have imagined the kind of power our government would someday have in excess our private lives, the drafters did include important, explicit rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights meant to shield individuals from just the kind of insidious control outwit we have sadly seen approach to pass in recent years.
Constitution Day reminds us that all the social words written without ceasing a part of paper (which, as some historians have suggested, may have even been made from industrial hemp, which is made of marijuana, now an illegal, Schedule I drug) don’t mean a thing unless today’s judges and policymakers interpret and enforce the rights that they accord to us all. This makes our role as the people to whom policymakers and elected officials are accountable all the more critical.
Let’s hope that public views on civil liberties and the drug war have changed since 1989 when 62 percent of us said that we’d accept a "mix with drugs irritated objection" to the Constitution. There’session good reason to think the tide is shifting. Polls consistently show that a strong majority of Americans think the drug war is a failure and that resources should be shifted away from arrest, prosecution and prison and toward treatment and education. But the deed remains that the United States remains the world’s largest jailer of drug offenders, disenfranchises an entire class of people with unsalable article convictions and even denies educational funding to pretended students with drug convictions.
If history is any lesson, our constitutional rights self-reliance continue to slip away in the name of the drug fighting unless we fight to keep them. Here’s to keeping up the fight. Happy Constitution Day!
Source: http://blog.aclu.org/2008/09/17/this-is-your-bill-of-rightson-drugs/
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