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?

GIVING MORE power to the regime in Washington is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to bring America back to economic health. Here’s the proposal I’m bringing to the table at Tea Party rallies across the country this week.

1. Reducing regulations is primary, since regulation is what stifles commerce: the more regulations, the more it costs our economy. Most regulations are used by big international corporations to reduce competition, and competition would help us get out of this depression.

2. End the “war on drugs.” Make them legal (increase competition, drive out organized crime) and sold at any drug store. Allow people to decide what to take in — or not take in — to their bodies. Those who make bad decisions will eventually be weeded from the gene pool, just as they should be. We don’t need a police state and a prison on every corner to solve this problem.

3. Eliminate the intrusive and privacy-destroying income tax; have the states ratify an amendment withdrawing the 16th Amendment. We could replace it with something similar to the http://fairtax.org proposal (a federal sales tax) with the same amendment that removes the income tax and abolishes the IRS (preferably a sales tax only on new items).

This will reduce the number of “tax crimes” that good, honest people are in jail for. The tax code is tens of thousands of pages and no human being alive has even read all of it, much less knows for sure if he has “obeyed” every jot and tittle. This is why politically-motivated prosecutors can put almost anyone in jail if they want to: they can always find some violation of some obscure provision in anyone’s 1040 confession sheet. Eliminating the income tax will take away that illegitimate power.

It will also promote green living because people will save more and waste less by buying second hand. They will repair and reuse and wear things out — rather than just discard and buy new.

This new tax policy will financially assault the drug dealers and pimps and other organized criminals by forcing them to have to pay taxes when they spend their money, which will further reduce the benefit of dealing in illegal trade. Right now we are taking money from people’s pay checks before they get them and at the same time we don’t tax drug dealers or pimps or illegals or other economic criminals at all. We are penalizing working Americans. A sales tax will also encourage saving money rather than encouraging the leveraging of every dime you can get, like the income tax does.

This will encourage people in the underground economy to become part of the real economy. It will stop most of the turf killings. It will ease our immigration problems, since illegals will suddenly find themselves paying the federal taxes they were evading before by hiding behind stolen or fictitious identities. Offer illegals less welfare and charge them tax — and they won’t be so eager to come here.

4. Then cut every single expenditure of the government by 10%, and begin to draw down troops immediately from around the world. Relocate half of our hundreds of foreign military bases to our southern border to help the Border Patrol do its job.

5. We don’t need the Washington regime to run our insurance or our pension plan. Make sure workers get back every dime they paid in (how about not one cent of foreign aid until every American worker gets his money back), but grandfather Social Security and Medicare out of existence.

6. Pass an amendment to the Constitution that makes all laws and treaties have a four year sunset clause, with each law or treaty needing to be approved by a separate roll call vote every four years — or cease to exist. As I stated above, our income tax code alone is so complex that no one actually knows what the law even is. That goes double for federal laws in general.

When we have so many laws, they end up being enforced arbitrarily and selectively (in addition to stifling freedom). When laws are so numerous and complex that they can — or must — be selectively enforced or ignored, we no longer have a government of laws. We have reverted to a government of men — exactly what the Founding Fathers were trying to avoid.

7. We need to give up our role as the policeman of the world. Let other nations fight their own fights, as they have for thousands of years. The very idea of forcing “regime change” on “bad” governments is ludicrous. Ninety per cent. of governments are “bad” by our standards, and the regime in Washington isn’t so hot either, come to think of it. But other peoples have other standards. Let them work out their revolutions, if they want them, for themselves.

8. There should be no welfare to banks or other corporations. And the fractional reserve banking system — wherein we allow bankers, including but not limited to the Fed, to create our money out of thin air and then charge us interest on it — needs to be replaced by a more honest and failure-proof system.

I don’t expect the system politicians in Washington to listen. The Republicans are just as much in bed with the financial predators as are the Democrats. And Fox News and its little pet teapots like Sarah Palin are owned by predator-in-chief Rupert Murdoch, for God’s sake. That’s why we need to build the Tea Party movement into a truly independent force. No compromise. We need our freedom and our country back.