"Hello, I'm Donald Silberger, the Libertarian Party's candidate for Lieutenant Governor. We're trying for one per cent of the vote -- you won't be paying my salary in Albany, even if you vote for me, as I beg you to do."

"One per cent of the vote makes our Party official in New York State. People don't have to pay dues to join a Party which is really more a private club or debating society than it is a group the public will listen to.

"In fact, if we get one per cent of the vote then voters will have the right to register as Libertarians when they register or reregister to vote. Just in case they start coming to see themselves as Libertarians, the way I myself did ten years ago.

"Registering Libertarian is easy and permanent unless you go out of your way to change things. Right now, if I don't want to register Democratic or Republican, and I don't happen to agree with the other relatively principled parties which *are* already official, then I get classified as 'independent' -- meaning, in many minds, that I don't really have an opinion.

"However, I do have an opinion. It is strongly Libertarian.

"What does that mean? What do we Libertarians stand for?

"Why might it be important for you to support this possibility of a third real option in American politics?

"The reason for that importance is that we actually stand for something besides election to public money and to power -- to getting one's hands on the machinery of the spoils system, so that one can give jobs and contracts to one's loyal supporters.

"What then do we stand for?"

"We stand for the belief that a man owns himself. He owns his body and his mind. He is not a mere tool of the government.

"Since he owns himself, he has a right to put into his body what he chooses to put into his body. It is his body, after all.

"He has a right freely to exchange money for drugs or vice versa so long as no coercion or fraud is involved.

"We oppose the entire War on Drugs. That is what my campaign is principally about. The War on Drugs is fascism in a glass ball, to be pictured by us in the way that tiny white flakes can be pictured, in their swirling slowly through a viscous clear afternoon mimicing the slow motion of snow.

"Libertarians oppose fascism in all of its manifestations: the initiation of force or of menace towards other people in order to control their behavior in a way far beyond the just boundaries set upon the legitimate powers of the manipulators.

"We oppose the implicit mandate that some of us should hate and fear others among us. I dislike the doctrine that insists drug users or salespeople are wicked people and that everything they do is too evil to permit rational questions to be raised about it.

"The War on Drugs must be utterly stopped. Its machinery must be destroyed. It was destructive and corrosive from its, inception eighty four years ago in the Harrison Narcotics 'Tax' Act.

"The Harrison Act was billed as 'tax' legislation, as a revenue- raising measure. In this way, it is reminiscent of current efforts to increase the penalty tax on tobacco cigarettes.

"There was never public debate on the Harrison Act. It was passed swiftly, during one of Congress' lulls, at night.

"The subsequent increments of the rostrum of drug laws over the slow decades have been dishonest as well. There has never been any serious public debate about them. There have been pressure groups created as enclaves inside the community in the direction of fencing other people's legitimately self-determined behavior.

"This is convenient for a government that seeks, as governments usually do, to increase its own power, to listen to the voices that come from the groups in our populace that demand repression of other groups of citizens -- other groups like drug users, for example.

"Now the result sits on the body of our country like a weight made of lead embedded in soft fabric. Few of us can muster the will, the energy, even the desire, but mainly the understanding to shrug off from their souls as the unnecessary burden it is this dull and lugubrious imprisonment.

"My Party makes vivid the idea of self-ownership, of peaceful coexistence and voluntary cooperation, of responsibility to one's word (and legal responsibility to honor a contract), the idea, in two words, of INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY. My way of making this idea vivid is by lighting a fire around its abrogations.

"The chief abrogation of the Bill of Rights and of liberty in today's United States is the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is far more harmful to our way of life than drugs themselves have ever been.

"The turf wars in the ghettoes are almost entirely due to the economic pressures that result from unemployment coupled with the possibility of huge profits to be gained from the sale of a commodity whose price has been enormously inflated by the laws against that commodity's free production, transportation, sale, and possession. The energetic and daring entrepreneurs of the illegal-drug business cannot adjudicate their conflicts in courts of civil law. They cannot write mutually beneficial and enforceable contracts with one another. The only recourse to this hothouse-bred discord in the ghetto streets is gunfire.

"Suddenly the government thus grants itself an excuse to call for laws tending towards the elimination of the fundamental citizenly right to the tools to defend himself and his family.

"Those natural tools today are firearms. We have right to them. The only right we lack with respect to firearms is the right to misuse them and cause injury to the bodies of other people or to their property.

"The War on Drugs in fact *subsidizes* the business in illegal drugs. It corrupts not only the ghetto youth but also the police, the courts, our legislators hungry for approval and for increasing power, and all of the bureaucracies which feast on the Drug War, getting power through it fed to them by the purchased legislatures.

"It gets worse and worse. The matter is never debated. Now our federal government attempts to influence the United Nations to make it a punishable international crime even to discuss the War on Drugs in a seriously critical fashion, such as the way I am criticizing that war on the people now.

"The War on Drugs must be wiped out utterly. Yes, I am what the DEA's stooges sneeringly call a 'legalizer. I am that in spades. I see no time like now to end this vicious charade.

"We Americans simply have to rise up upon our hind legs, as if we were bipedal intelligent human beings instead of the cattle and sheep we've lately begun to seem to be. We must demand accountability from our government.

"The War on Drugs has never been justified. It has caused untold misery and injustice. It has jailed nearly half a generation of Black males, and thus verges towards genicide -- as Nixon's own words indicate he intended it to verge: Nixon introduced his escalation of the War on Drugs with a muttered incantation; to wit, 'It's the Blacks!'"

"The Drug War destroys the heart of our constitutional republic, and it is wrecking our country. Useful people wind up in jail, being supported there at great taxpayer expense. Conformity gets to be the prerequisite for survival in our economy and in our community. The premium on creativity or verve or energy dies of spiritual suffocation under the heel of the state.

"The War on Drugs has been supported on the thin legs of meretricious but continuous propaganda off and on for at least sixty years. This propaganda took off with the absurd movie, "Reefer Madness". It went through many incarnations afterwards, among which has been "your brains (pictured as frying eggs) on drugs".

"This propaganda has been embodied in the most sluggish forms of deception and endeavor to bully people into an unjustified belief. It survives its own destruction through ridicule only because of the threat that those who ridicule it will find themselves in prison, bereft of family and of worldly goods, and beyond the reach of friendship.

"The War on Drugs destroys our soul. People who are not free to sin are not equipped with the power to choose which is necessary for salvation.

"There is a way to be noted as among those who stand on their hind legs instead of remaining on all fours.

"That way is to support the Libertarian Party's slate with your vote and the vote of as many as possible of your friends on 03 November.

"If for the first time in history, with relative unknowns, Chris Garvey and me for our Party's Gov/LtGov candidates, our Party manages to gain that 50,000 votes then a reverberating message will be sent throughout the state.

"For, we can make an issue of it in the media that at long last the Libertarian Party has made the 'official' status, and that New Yorkers can at last change their voter registration, and can indicate that their philosophy is Libertarian.

"That will impact the consciousness in NYState. It will put some pressure upon the 'major parties'. They will begin looking back nervously over their shoulder at a now audible competitor and pursuer. That would be the Libertarian Party pursuing them.

"The Libertarians, who unlike the major parties actually do have something to say, will force the hitherto unchallenged major players in the power game to have to say something significant."