But seriously

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GWBUSH.COM is often asked, "Why Bush, and why bust his ass on drugs all this time?" Well, here's why:

We take drugs very seriously in this country. Our justice system will jail almost anyone connected in any way with drugs. Even people whose crimes are long past are frequently arrested and convicted.

This is why Bush must look the American people in the eye and say whether or not he has committed a crime for which tens of thousands are serving time.

Possession and use of illegal drugs such as cocaine are crimes Bush will not deny committing. Yet our whole criminal justice system is based on sending people who commit these crimes to jail for a very long time. US drug laws, enacted in 1986 by a Democratic congress under a Republican president, made it easy for prosecutors to imprison small time or one-time sellers of drugs, and anyone connected to them in any way.

Prosecutors can now charge interconnected drug users and dealers with "conspiracy" to distribute drugs. Even spouses, roommates, friends and family who did not use drugs can be charged and convicted based only on the testimony of other defendants--no other evidence is necessary. The testimony of a single defendant is all it takes and there are high incentives for helping to convict co-defendants.

The law allows for the least significant member of the "conspiracy" to be given the maximum sentence allowed for the worst crime committed by one of the other "conspirators".

This all sounds impossible, but it is all true. For example, Lula Mae Smith of Mobile Alabama served 7 years in a federal prison beginning in her early 50's. Her crime? Her son was a drug dealer. The prosecutor never claimed that Ms. Smith aided her son in any way with his drug business. She was simply charged with "conspiracy" to distribute drugs with her son because he bought her a new car while he was a drug dealer. However, in 1989 she began serving a sentence that was cut short in 1996 only because of two stokes she suffered in prison. She is now on home release. There are tens of thousands of cases just like hers. [Frontline, "Snitches": www.pbs.org]

These are the extreme measures that we in America are willing to take in order to stop drugs. In this climate, then, it seems absurd that Mr. Bush could run for president and hope to leave legitimate questions about past drug use unanswered.

Bush is not taking drugs as seriously as the rest of America. It was often said that Clinton had degraded the criminal justice system by getting away with perjury while 114 people are serving time for that crime. That's clearly true--justice did suffer. And now what irreparable damage will be done by a president coming into office with hard drugs in his past? In this case there are hundreds of thousands serving time for the crimes of a potential president.

Gwbush.com, was born by accident. It was made famous by Bush's own hotheaded attacks against it. Now, with hundreds of thousands of readers per month, it is one of the voices in the presidential race. We would like to use that voice to alert people to this massive human rights violation being carried out by our government against our own people, and to force former drug user candidates to justify their support for this human rights violation in light of their own past drug crimes.