THE DRUG WAR is out of control, and it’s causing a huge problem for hundreds of totally innocent rural property owners. A new dwarf hydroponic marijuana strain has hybridized with a local Ozark line — and that local strain had already been shrinking in size.

Outdoor marijuana growers have always returned to their pot patches to pull the males, but have typically missed the little runt males, often only a foot high, whose pollen then is blown on the wind, fertilizing other patches all over the Ozark woods.

Moreover, the hydroponic lines grown on artificial light are naturally well adapted to the lower light conditions under the forest canopy. So not only are the plants smaller, but they are also hidden by the trees.

As a result, aerial surveillance flights have been far less effective and cut way back. In recent years, choppers are only sent out if the authorities have received a tip. Tips, by the way, often result from illegal trespass.

When you add all this up, and look at the arrest records, you find the drug enforcement agencies are no longer doing the field work to identify and bust up drug rings, but use these cases only as a means to seize property. And with these new dwarf marijuana plants being less than three feet tall, they don’t stick up over a fence line so the land owners don’t even know they are there. Nevertheless, they stand in grave danger of losing their land and everything they own to asset seizure laws.

The new dwarf seed is so well adapted it will sprout if merely tossed out a car window while driving by. But in any case, if a drug dog smells it, or if someone wanted the property and planted the seed and then calls in the tip — the land owner is arrested.

This makes huge amounts of money for bondsmen and lawyers. A slick lawyer can often get a landowner off for a price (unless the judge has a friend who wants the land, in which case he can ignore the indications of trespass or lack of evidence that the owner knew the plants were there). But no matter what, every such case means more money for the lawyers.

My own particular medical marijuana test case is reported on at http://daybrown.org — but researching Arkansas records and online articles will show the researcher claims from several sources alleging that Judge Clawson, local lawyers, the 20th District drug task force, and the Van Buren County, Arkansas Sheriff’s Department have been using asset seizure to reward insiders and friends — and that somebody is reselling the seized marijuana. I have no doubt this sort of thing goes on in any rural area where these plants grow.

Whether you think marijuana should be legal or not, you do not want law enforcement corrupted in this way — or the property rights of citizens abused like this to enrich lawyers and friends of the courts. If what you want is marijuana to be kept away from kids, then the whole system needs to be re-evaluated.

What I’ve proposed online for years is to regulate marijuana the same as alcohol and tobacco: no sales to minors. Every sale should be recorded so that food stamps, welfare, or those on the dole can’t be using taxpayer money to get high. And, if there are problems with legal marijuana, then the family can sue the dealer to recover the cost of tutoring, therapy, job loss, drug rehab, counseling by the family’s clergy, or whatever. As it is now, the dealer’s money goes to bondsmen, his lawyer, and hidden payoffs to members of “law enforcement.”

Is that really what we want?

Legislatures won’t introduce reform because they see it will reduce the incomes of defense lawyers. No law is ever passed which cuts the incomes of lawyers, it is said. But it’s high time to try.

I’ve snail-mailed and emailed my senators, Blanche Lincoln and David Pryor, my congressman Vic Snyder, and Governor Beebee. All I ever get back is spam asking for campaign donations. My local state assemblyman, Robert Dale, did email back. Once. Saying he was interested. We’ll see. How far up the power structure does the corruption of the drug war go?

AT THE OPENING of The Golden Sayings of Epictetus, he notes how young artists practice with the eye, musicians the ear, athletes the body — and wonders if it is not possible to strengthen the mind before taking on the issues of philosophy. After all, weight lifters do not start out with the most massive objects.

So, he says, put these questions about the nature of the divine aside, and deal only with simpler issues to acquire the skill to think clearly. He also advises proper diet and exercise.

And now, after all this time, the sciences like neurology, brain chemistry, sociology, and psychology show he was correct: It is possible to increase the power of the mind and deal with these great issues more rationally.

A lot of this insight comes from recent studies on childhood development. But we also see how trauma and other environmental effects can preclude maximal mental development — which many of us now struggle with.

So then, after Epictetus’ example above, is it possible to design a community, that, from the outset, is designed to maximize the mental powers of each of the children raised in it — and minimize the risk of trauma?

Don’t we use car seats for kids even though only a few have been harmed? I can’t, for instance, prove organic vegetables are necessary, but studies have shown the developmental damage some kids suffer that traces back to the contamination of the food supply by organophosphates. Because the FDA and other agencies have been corrupted, we can’t depend on government to solve this problem: Citizens in every community must oversee food production ourselves.

Medical science also reveals how exercise increases blood flow, that then washes toxins out of the brain for clearer thinking. If all you do is sit at a PC, brain function may be far from optimal — maybe even neurotic denial will kick in as you read these lines, and you’ll find some reason not to change your lifestyle. In any case, we have a clue as to why the kids that went to one room schoolhouses — and then walked home — scored better than those now who ride the bus.

Epidemiology shows how, in large schools, pathogens mutate going from one kid to the next, which keeps the “bugs” in constant circulation. And studies on autism show how viruses can trigger its onset. But in small rural schools, with only a few hundred kids, the pathogens run out of new victims as the student body acquires immunity. The result, seen in the small schools of my neck of the Ozark woods, is attendance over 95%.

The cities are designed for adults. The suburbs were set up to provide “each man his castle.” They all inherit law codes and customs from early civilizations that don’t much look like our world, which is driven by electronic media manipulated by those motivated by money and power for the “in crowd.”

Hominids evolved in villages, and so kids are born with sets of instinctive behavior patterns that still work in villages. Not cities. There are no strangers with candy in a village. Kids do not need to be brought up fearful, and that expands creativity and a sense of freedom. Villages are usually homogeneous too — no ethnic conflicts.

The posted national rate for autism is 1:155. Amish kids are still raised on home grown vegetables and go to small schools. Their autism rate is 1:15,000. This fact is never mentioned in the corporate media which profits so handsomely selling us the sugary cereals, junk food, and soda our kids are raised on. That’s another point few will consider.

We can’t reform the world, just that small part each of us lives in. This article is not meant to be a well defined plan, merely an outline of some of the dangers and opportunities we need to be thinking about. Hominid adults evolved in villages too; which all had kids. It was the responsibility for the kids that primarily motivated the adults to be adult and responsible.

We have strayed so far from healthy ways that our women are bringing fewer and fewer children into the world. If women do not have kids, then, as we can see, they will make children of their men — in a self-reinforcing cycle of decline and despair.

THERE WON’T be a new Rome. The powers that be don’t need one anymore. Google is trying to develop a new faster network that will enable the power elites to live on the beach in Hawaii, each with their own Eagle’s Nest during the ski season, or whatever other scenic setting they want for their condos — while their broadband lets them manage their asset base.

Dubai is already a white elephant. The cities, like in Bladerunner, will become de facto concentration camps for the less profitable portions of the population.

A strip “city” has emerged along I-540 from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville to the Missouri border. It looks like any other urban beltway; industrial zones, malls, apartment blocks, and residential housing. But it’s not. There is no urban core. No urban slums. No urban traffic jams. No urban crime. This obscure part of the Western Ozarks is receiving a net immigration of high tech staff from Silicon Valley, RTP, Austin, even Bangalore because the rural land just 15 miles away still goes for $1000/acre.

Turns out engineers and programmers will accept lower — i.e., average — global income levels, but live just as comfortably in the same size home that costs 60 per cent. less and is built in the Ozark mountain woods, where the hunting and fishing are superb.

Dillard’s, the upscale family-owned department store in Little Rock, just built a new store in Rogers, Arkansas, pop. 4,000. Why Rogers? It’s just west of Beaver Lake with so much good fishing and family boating — and just across I-540 from Bentonville, where the global headquarters for Wal-Mart is. The people who run Wal-Mart work in Bentonville, but they sleep and shop in Rogers.

The latest unemployment rate posted there is still at five per cent. Big business is moving: out of town, but not out of the country. Rural families (read: First World families) are more stable, and this lowers staff turnover and raises profits.

There was a similar kind of dispersal as Rome wound down and the elites got the Hell outta Dodge to ‘invest’ in rural Christian communities where we later see them as Medieval warlords and knights.

THERE IS a way out of the ever-increasing tax spiral.

Today, the big need is broadband to outlying areas. The fastest growing Census bureau demographic is the “X-urb”: upper middle class, entrepreneurial, and well-educated people who are moving to rural areas. Maybe they see multi-ethnic cities as powder kegs. Katrina was a wake-up call to those concerned about law and order, and many of us recall how the cops just gave up on it and went home to protect their own families.

Just like during the Great Depression, use the unemployed to build the infrastructure. Urbanites are blissfully ignorant, but the REA (Rural Electrification Administration), in bringing electricity to family farms, allowed agribusiness to develop — and with that came dramatic increases in production at far lower costs. The GOP bitched about “socialized energy,” thinking it would only benefit the small farmers, but they were wrong.

If we don’t find a way out, then the economy will crash — and the people with any foresight do not want be invested, much less live, in multi-ethnic cities during such a scenario.

But this X-urban class of entrepreneurial spirits with access to venture capital needs broadband to support their business plans.

If you further add up the infrastructure support needed by trucking, such as the constant repair to the roadway surface, there is a real niche available for a new generation of heavy freight aircraft — that would go point-to-point unimpeded by traffic jams, road work, road taxes, weigh stations, truck stops, or speed limits. Using state-of-the-art NASA aeronautics software,these  aircraft would get similar tonnage per mile fuel consumption — but move faster than — high speed rail, and do so without the need for roadway right of way and all its attendant problems. They just need airports. If it flies at just 300 mph, it can land at 60mph — on short runways.If that sort of infrastructure isn’t already there, it can be added for minimal expense.

We don’t need to be moving people around, just goods and information. So what we need to empower the X-urbs and their intelligence and productivity is broadband and freight.

By the way, if the Democrats want to do “the poor” any good, they should use FEMA trailers to move moms and kids out of the drug-infested cities onto the farmland where they can be taught to grow their own food rather than have them eat at taxpayer expense with food stamps. The kids would be much healthier. But that would remove Democratic voters from urban polls. And the Republicans do not want Democratic voters moving into their rural districts. So we can’t have that, even though it’d be good for everyone but the major parties.