[commonsense]

VXerick,
You're right on the money in much of your post, but you fell short of saying "should be" or "used to be" to the part about the U.S. govt BEING the people, as you did elsewhere.

Also, I never mentioned drug abuse in my post. You "accused" me of being a lawyer (joke intended)--- just as you refer to our founding principles being long forgotten and "usurped" by elitists, you sound pretty elitist yourself when you broadly paint drug users and sellers as a detriment to society.
Governmental actions to discourage this traditional, practically natural human pursuit (anthropologically speaking) create far greater sociological ills, --including ones not immediately recognizable-- than does sticking to our philosophical founding principles of the government's (sociological)role being nothing more than the preservation of individual rights.
While lawyers tend to be rabidly self-serving and often in a moral sense deserve much of the derision they receive, I take your suspicion that I may be one as a compliment, given the level of erudition the profession is presumed to demand.
It may interest you that I regularly partake in any number of illicit drugs, am not addicted, and apparently sufficiently impressed you to hopefully consider that I and many like me are no detriment to society.