By Hoam Rogh | Â Published in ShadyHousePub.com
Imagine if tomorrow, for no good reason, Congress –or even better, the DEA–banned coffee like it did to Spice or K2 recently.
Coffee has no medical purpose, it is addictive, and unsafe. Â Caffeine even kills people! It makes them edgy and violent.
Due to the shocking facts of coffee, the DEA puts it into schedule 1 of the CSA.  Sure it’s a drink made from beans and not a drug, but neither is a flower from the hemp plant that is currently banned.
After the coffee ban how quickly will our society devolve into chaos? Â 8 minutes? Â Less?
Cops would stakeout the Dunkin Donuts drive-thrus and slap the bracelets on one driver after another.  Coffee would be pulled from grocery store shelves and incinerated.  Starbucks would try to stave off bankruptcy by switching to Yerba Mate but fail miserably except in South America.
Then there’s the horror, the horror.  Tens of millions of addicts all looking for their fix in the morning.  A shuffling horde of zombies going to work.  Quick to anger without their coffee, addicts would resort to violence in the streets.  The zombies would chant, “coffee” instead of “brains.”
The black market price of coffee would percolate into the stratosphere.  10 bucks a cup.  And it’s a crummy, expired cup of Folgers at that.  Cafes turn into speakeasies where hopped up professionals can get their steam-infused mocha latte fixes.  All brought to you by organized crime.
The government defends their law and launches the CUP program, which stands for Coffee Upends Patriotism.  Based on new evidence the government has found, coffee drinkers are 400% more likely to be familiar with the works of Marx, Alinsky, and Keynes.  Coffee drinkers are socialist threats to national security.
Millions of new criminals fill our courts.  Cops use their evidence locker for all their department’s coffee needs, since both coffee and its paraphernalia, the coffee maker, would both be contraband.  Politicians compete for federal grant money to build dozens of new privatized prisons that will be fully stocked with coffee criminals–at the taxpayer expense of course.
How could the government do this?  Simple, there’s a rational basis related to a legitimate government interest.  Congress may pass any law “necessary and proper” to execute their enumerated power of regulating interstate commerce.  Virtually all coffee is grown abroad, so Congress may regulate it.
The crime makes no sense, but that doesn’t matter.  It just needs to be rationally related to the regulation of commerce, and coffee can be lethal if you drink 90 cups of it in 5 minutes.  If marijuana prohibition is constitutional, so would coffee prohibition, or sugar prohibition, or cigarette prohibition, alcohol, fried foods, trans-fats, etc…  God bless America!
Think about it.  This is why our forefathers built this country, so that Congress can criminalize anything it wanted by mere fiat and do so constitutionally.  They were not worried about tyranny at all.  If our founders wanted a limited government, they would not have inserted the necessary and proper clause into the Constitution and would have more narrowly defined “commerce.
Hoam Rogh has written several books, including ‘The Case of US v. Yerbas’ in an effort to hasten the legalization of marijuana through greater understanding of our constitutional rights.
