Got Milk? You're Under Arrest

what on earth are we going to do with all of this freedom??? the terrorists must really hate us now!!!

Got Milk? You're Under Arrest
[align=left]Alan Scholl
JBS
Friday, March 16, 2007
In many states, you can possess it, but the law prohibits its sale. It is a violation of federal law to transport the substance across state lines with the intent to sell it. In many states, undercover investigators are at work trying to uncover the furtive networks that produce and distribute the stuff. Dealers have been pulled over and spectacular quantities of the contraband substance have been seized by triumphant investigators. Is this a tale from the War on Drugs?
Not exactly. But it is a tale from the war many states are conducting on those who sell raw milk.
That's right, there is a dangerous underground of dairy devotees who prefer to drink their milk straight from the cow, sans pasteurization and homogenization â?? and government is increasingly out to stop them. Some states, in fact, equate the sale of raw milk with the sale of drugs. Consider this from Washington Post reporter Thomas Bartlett:
The issue of selling raw milk is, legally speaking, dicey. To determine exactly how dicey, I call Ted Elkin, deputy director of the Office of Food Protection and Consumer Health Services at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Elkin is in charge of making sure the state's dairy laws are enforced.
"So," I begin carefully, "Maryland's position on raw milk is . . .?"
"Raw milk is illegal for sale," Elkin says. "Period."
"Huh," I reply.
To help drive this point home, he compares selling raw milk to selling pot.
"Interesting," I say. At that moment, I am standing in my kitchen with the fridge door open, staring at my gallon of possible contraband.
This seems positively surreal, like some parody of the war on drugs aired on Saturday Night Live.
Proof that the war on contraband milk is taken all too seriously by some state officials, Bartlett's conversation with Elkin next turned frighteningly serious. Noting that Maryland lacks the resources to track down all users of raw milk, Elkin suggested that the state might eventually catch them. "Using an analogy, Elkin explains that a small-time heroin dealer in Baltimore might be able to elude the authorities for quite a while," Bartlett wrote of his interview with Elkin. "So, during our conversation, raw milk was compared to marijuana and heroin. What's more, Hitler's secret police were mentioned â?? in passing, sure, but still."
Just like the War on Drugs, the War on Raw Milk is serious business. Just ask farmer Richard Hebron. According to Time magazine, in October of last year the Michigan man was pulled over by police near Ann Arbor. According to Time, when police pulled him over, they "ordered him to put his hands on the hood of his mud-splattered truck and seized its contents: 453 gal. of milk." Hebron had already been the subject of a large sting operation conducted by state Ag officials.
As Time reported, "An undercover agricultural investigator had infiltrated the co-op as part of a sting operation that resulted in the seizure of $7,000 worth of fresh-food items, including 35 lbs. of raw butter, 29 qt. of cream and all those gallons of the suspicious white liquid. Although Hebron's home office was searched and his computer seized, no charges have been filed. 'When they tested the milk, they couldn't find any problems with it,' says Hebron. 'It seems like they're just looking for some way to shut us down.'" Similar sting operations have been conducted in other states, including in Wisconsin, America's erstwhile "Dairy State," where one might expect officials to have a slightly more generous attitude toward the state's beleaguered dairy farmers.
Why the fuss over raw milk? Before the advent of pasteurization, raw milk was widely consumed and was implicated in disease outbreaks in during the 19th century that caused many deaths in American cities. But that milk, according to some, was often contaminated in ways that would be inconceivable today.
"Milk was commonly mixed with additives to gain profit," wrote author Laurie Winn Carlson in her book Cattle, a history of the cow. "Then, to make it look whole, additives were mixed in, such as carbonized carrots, grilled onions, caramel, marigold petals, chalk, plaster, white clay and starch. To replace the cream that had been removed, emulsions of almonds and animal brains were dissolved in the liquid to thicken it."
Today, raw milk supporters say, the product is safe. In California where the sale of raw milk is legal, Organic Pastures Dairy says it has sold more than 40 million servings of raw milk without complaint. Moreover, raw milk advocates say the product is part of a healthy diet. Pasteurization, they say, destroys important enzymes and beneficial bacteria that exist in milk. Drink raw milk, they say, and your arthritis pain will cease, your asthma will go away and you'll lose weight. Give it to young children and they will be less likely to get sick and suffer from allergies.
Are all such claims true? Who knows. But one thing is true: Selling raw milk should not be illegal.
"There are 65,000 child-porn websites," Nancy Sanders, a raw milk supporter, mother and pediatric nurse told Time. "Why doesn't the government go after those?"
With dangerous criminals like dairy farmer Richard Hebron on the loose peddling such dangerous stuff, those state governments don't have time. [/align]

I don't neccessarily agree with this (raw milk being illegal) but I can understand it. We have become a society that rewards idiots. Somebody does something stupid and then goes on to sue whomever happened to allow their stupidity to take fruit. All you would need is for some dipshit to buy raw milk, leave it in his car for 3-4 days, drink it and get sick. Now of course, anyone in their right mind wouldn't drink milk that had been left in their car for 3-4 days, but does society tell this guy "serves you right you fucking moron"? No. It says, "sue the dairy that produced it, sue the government for allowing the dairy to sell raw milk, sue sue sue".

Don't believe me, well what about:

"You ate 3 big macs and fries every day for the last 10 years and became a fatass? Poor baby, didn't MCD's warn you their food was fattening? No? Well then, sue sue sue sue"

"You poured hot coffe on your crotch and were burned? Wow, who would ever think that could happen? Sue sue sue sue"

Even though most of these cases never actually go to trial, and many would lose if they did, the costs of fighting these lawsuits is so high many companies just settle. Lawyers and society know this and take advantage of it. Shit, making raw milk illegal isn't all that bad. The way things are going it's a wonder the government doesn't demand we all wear full body armor 24hrs a day.

If you want to drink milk that will spoil in 7 days be my guest. Maybe if you live next to a dairy farm and you know its fresh, but how can one know how long it sits in tanks without more funding to the FDA and USDA.. But then again, it would give a new interesting story down the road about how we live in a police state with there added inspections.

More earth-shattering news from the JBS, AKA John Birch Society, those right-wing paranoid crazies from my youth. In the 50's & 60's they claimed that water floridation was a communist plot. Keep 'em coming!

"In the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, General Jack D. Ripper launches a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union to stop the Communist infiltration that he fears will 'sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.' In the 1960s, moviegoers instantly recognized that Ripper's character was a parody of a right-wing paranoid. It was a leftist highbrow swipe at the John Birch Society's (JBS) opposition to the campaign to fluoridate community water supplies in the 1950s. The JBS opposed the fluoridation of public water supplies on the grounds that it is an involuntary mass medical treatment that violates individual rights."
Reason Magazine - "Impurifying our precious bodily fluids"