This will give him, and everyone, a chance to analyze the real facts and truths one at a time, so that they can't be swept under the rug of a religion wrapped as an ideology.

I will start with unmasking his "ideological" bias, and demonstrate how it creates an inaccurate prejudice and assumption in his own mind, in that he can't see who, historically, have done all the heavy lifting in the movement to legalize drugs, towering over the marginal contributions of the Libertarian Party and its acolytes.

It is important to begin here, because Baylen makes a very self-serving statement for his ideology: He says that his group, "libertarians," has been the "one" group that has carried the fight "consistently" and "always."

Baylen, please don't break your arm patting yourself and your ideology on the back. By taking credit for the hard work of others (a common "economic libertarian" trait, to ignore the delicate question of who really does the work, and "makes wealth," in our society), you are dishonoring the contributions, sacrifices, and, most importantly, the victories of another much larger tendency in American and world politics that has not only been as consistent as your misnamed "libertarians" but has been more effective and won us our only battles throughout the 90-year history of drug prohibition… and throughout the 2,000 year battle against authoritarianism and theocracy (religion being a major underpinning of the drug war says my old economic libertarian pal Thomas Szasz, according to his seminal book Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers… yes, Baylen, some of my best friends call themselves "libertarians!")

Baylen writes:

Al Giordano erroneously targets the one ideological group that has always consistently defended and fought for drug legalization: libertarians.

It is demonstrably false that this small, marginal, male-dominated with a few token Virgina Postrels always placed on stage, mercantile group of "economic libertarians" is the "one" group that has carried the legalization water.

Here's one important example to the contrary:

In 1987, two years before "economic libertarians" Milton Friedman or George Schultz had said squat in public about legalizing drugs, my best friend and mentor, the late Abbie Hoffman, wrote an entire book against the drug war, Steal This Urine Test (1987, Penguin Press), in which he called for legalization of all drugs. In fact, he had said it back in 1967 in his seminal work Revolution for the Hell of It, and in his 1971 bestseller Steal This Book, recently republished by Four Walls Eight Windows press, with, full disclosure, an introduction by yours truly.

Now, unless Baylen is including Abbie - who in one of whose final letters, penned to Dave Dellinger three months before Abbie's death, asserted, "I am of the Left" - in his so-called "one ideological group" of "libertarians" who have been consistent fighters for drug legalization, the existence of Abbie Hoffman - and millions of Americans who are closer to his political legacy than to that of the Libertarian Party - immediately disproves the first myth that Baylen has swallowed whole.

I'll agree that most "economic liberatarians," by and large, have consistently said that they favor drug legalization. But have they been the "one" group, or even the most effective?

What about the "social justice libertarians" of the American Civil Liberties Union who have fought against the drug war in Court and elsewhere since the Nixon years?

What about the decades-old National Organization for Reform of the Marijuana Laws (NORML) and its counter-cultural bases of support? Or the equally veteran High Times magazine?

Were these projects - consistent over decades in having "defended and fought for drug legalization" - created and supported by economic libertarians? Hell no! They came out of a distinct ideological tendency: Abbie's.

If Baylen doesn't acknowledge Abbie's as a real "ideology," well, that's because it was part of a much longer current for human freedom that was and is an "anti-ideology ideology."

It is the current of Giordano Bruno, Galileo and the original heretics who said the world was round in violation of religious doctrine.

It is the current of Proudhoun breaking with Marx, in the 1800s, against the bureaucratic tendencies of communism, who in his seminal work, "What Is Property?" opened his book by answering, "Property Is Theft."

It is the current of Nestor Makhno - see his The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays - the peasant leader of the Ukraine, who won that vast region for the Russian revolution only to be betrayed, persecuted, and exiled by Lenin after Makhno led the organization of the Ukraine into a stateless federation of workers' councils with no centralized government and no private property ownership.

It is the current of Emma Goldman who said "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution."

It is the current of Mohandas K. Gandhi - the greatest strategic leader of the 20th century! - who understood that "free" means you don't have to pay for basic human necessities…

This current in favor of human freedom from imposition has never embraced the silly idea that "the market" is inherently "good" or even positive. It recognizes that "the market" is itself a form of State Power over human beings and our freedom… and fights against both those impositions as one and the same…

It is not the devotees of a pro-market ideology that have carried the heavy water buckets for the antiprohibitionist cause (it wasn't in the 1920s and early 30s struggle against alcohol prohibition either, but, rather, the rough-and-tumble immigrant worker groups and women's organizations that carried the spear that forced that democratic socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt to enact its repeal in January 1933)…

And I, for one, am sick and tired of a grouposcule of privileged individuals taking credit for my tendency's labors and sacrifices, or, worse, trying to impose their ideological label upon it by claiming to be the "one" true antiprohibitionist religion. They sound like Christian and Islamic fundamentalists to me.

Before the 1980s, really, the word "libertarian," in most of the world, meant "libertarian communist" - the anarchists (more accurately the anarchosyndicalists)… We who have been persecuted by the centralized bureaucracies of the right and of the left, who have been marginalized and massacred by both the traditional State of governments and the new global state known as the Market and its occupying army that is the Commercial Media, because we have always done the hard work, and paid the greatest price, in the fight for human freedom.

Today's "economic libertarians" are imposters. The Authentic Libertarians are those who fight against all forms of State Power, and see through the snake-oil sales pitch that dishonestly claims that the only form of State Power comes from governments, or that the Market - top-down, hierarchical, un-elected, un-democratic, lifeless, cruel, inhuman, dictatorial and responsible for more death, carnage, starvation, illness, and human suffering than all governments combined throughout history - is like some benevolent god or "perfect order of nature."

To successfully remove the War on Drugs, we must remove its underpinnings, and that means that the un-elected "Market" that buys governments like commodities futures must be neutralized in this battle.

So, I'll begin with that: a reminder that there is a working class to all successful political struggles throughout history, and to rob us of credit for our labor and sacrifices on behalf of another damn "one true religion" merely replicates the same injustice inherent in the top-down prohibition of drugs.