The Price of Prohibition

Check out the evolving cost of the Drug War at http://www.drugsense.org/cms/wodclock

All Else is Silence

Saw a news broadcast last night telling me that the Congressional "Gang of Eight" are working on a visa system to allow "thousands of low tech workers into America to fill labor demands."

Apparently, I missed the nationwide announcement and ensuing celebration when unemployment for our own citizens fell to 0%.  I definitely missed the call from whoever it is that has my new job and paycheck just waiting, from the housing authority with a ready apartment or home or even corner room in the barn that my wife and I can move into immediately, no background check or interview required.

We just released over one thousand detainees, some of them guilty or suspected of crimes far worse than illegal immigration, some of them linked to the cartels we are claiming to battle, some repeat offenders with a half dozen kids and thousands of dollars in unmade child support payments, children who will be taking grants and filling spaces in our universities as well as our job market, because apparently it the fault of American citizens, not their parents, that they were born here to illegal aliens.

And we just put those illegals right back into that job market, while Americans in that same store roam the aisles with empty carts, amid slim prospects, trying to mortgage their dreams with the worthless promises of a corrupt administration.

Eight states and the district of Columbia allow gay marriage, and most people really couldn't care less, would certainly never suggest that resolving the issue will stabilize the economy or unite the country.  The government is not currently spending a single thin dime to interdict gay marriage, prevent gay people from crossing the border, arrest gay pastors, seize the furniture and assets and buildings of churches where gay marriages are being performed, or using the RICO Act to prosecute people who have made a career of planning gay weddings.

But this topic dominated every newscast, every discussion panel and forum, on the internet, radio and television for the last week, as the SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES considered a question "newer than cell phones or the Internet", whether or not the "right to marry" and thus, gay marriage, was a human right, instead of merely a codified piece of civil registration and fee schedules that makes county and city governments a tidy little revenue from the happiness of couples in their jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, EIGHTEEN states have decriminalized medical uses of cannabis, Colorado and Washington State have legalized it entirely for recreational or medical use by responsible adults, the District of Columbia is getting ready to open its first dispensary and ten more states are discussing legislation to regulate, decriminalize, or legalize.  TRILLIONS of dollars have been spent, millions of man hours used, and the lives of tens of thousands of American citizens have been ruined.

But this same Supreme Court refused to even hear arguments for why the Federal Government should consider rescheduling or removing from the schedule an herb that has not caused a single fatality in the history of mankind.  There is no dialogue for differentiating between this herb and its cousin the industrious hemp plant.  There is no support or tolerance for an exchange of ideas that would let us rejuvenate our nation and end a war on our own people to protect corporate profit margins.

And while they continue the siege, these mountebanks, these autocratic, self-important, overfed, overweening fools have the audacity to come to the nation and say, with the emotionally-wrought pleas of an easily-manipulated crowd of idealists echoing behind them, that we must now give up our small arms because the United Nations, an organization to which we have not regularly paid dues or even attention in decades, now insists we do so, even as it insists that we continue the war on drugs and the failed racist policies of prohibition.

Free will cannot die in this deluge of irrational acts, no matter how deeply bowed by the anchor chains of regret, no matter how suffocated by the shroud of despair.  It can only catch fire, burning brightly, unafraid of the cost of speaking out, of speaking true.  If illegal immigrants need a "path to citizenship", if their children need a nation with opportunity and a future, then LET THEM GO HOME AND FREE THEIR OWN NATIONS!

And if the government of the United States is considering withdrawing troops from the Middle East, might I suggest that, instead of the Korean theater you have quite obviously been preparing ever since we chose to go to war with a country that "might" have Weapons of Mass Destruction (Iraq... oh, and Afghanistan????) instead of the one that had just proven their possession of the same by setting one off for the whole world to see, might I instead be bold enough, to have the crass audacity to suggest that we invade South America, kill the juntas and the tribunals and the narcolombians and CIA cash cows and that we wipe MS13 from the face of the world?

Or would that just get rid of too many boogeymen at one time, leaving virtually nothing to divide the United States, or the new United Hemisphere of Independent States?  No need for the prisons, the cops, the SWAT teams, no more material for COPS or candidates for American Midol, REAL lives to lead instead of a narcotic haze of vague fear and dissatisfaction?

Keep dreaming.

But this final word of promise, and all else is silence.

Keep sticking it to us, Washington, Wall Street, assorted state legislatures and police forces and extremists on the left and right.  Keep reaching through the bars with a long, sharp stick, poking at that vaguely-glimpsed shape that grumbles and stirs but still slumbers, slowly waking to rage, in the back corner of the golden cage you have built around mankind.

You will not rest, for you have sown the wind, and the wasteland in your heart hungers for that harvest.  You will not cease, until you wake the Dragon.

And on that day, in the hour when one burning eye finally opens and fixes you with its unwavering hunger, its unforgiving judgement and unquenchable rage, you will rest, this I promise you, for my hands will join the rising tide of millions who will put you to rest.

In peace, or in pieces.

The State of the Union: SSDD

Anyone else watch Backflip Obama's State of the Union speech? 

Can anyone name a single REAL issue Obama is going to confront in the next four years? 

With 18 states passing laws to legalize cultivation, distribution, and use of hemp and medical cannabis, and TEN more with pending legislation to do the same (that's twenty-eight, potentially), as well as two (Washington and Colorado) that have passed laws to tax and regulate recreational cannabis use just like tobacco and alcohol, our cutting-edge, will-of-the-people-minded lame duck president and game-playing Congress moved quickly to do... NOTHING about addressing the question of cannabis, or patient and states' rights.

No new ideas, no new information, and absolutely NO acknowledgement of the fact that there is only one bi-partisan, bi-gender, multiracial, multi-generational idea that is sweeping America: the end of racist-based Prohibition; a war on its own citizens that is ruining American lives and communities. 

How could hemp/cannabis legalization affect the issues the President did talk about?

We need better schools- which can be paid for, in part, with taxes from sales and certifications, application and permit fees from equipment sales, growers, dispensaries, teachers, doctors, training centers and clinics.

We need to reduce the strain on Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare.  I actually believe the answer to this is to start by cutting off everyone with an annual income or net worth over $250,000 who currently receives payments or benefits from these programs, as well as making sure we are only sending checks to real, living people and actual U.S. citizens.

But to return to the benefits and potentials of hemp and cannabis: it has been demonstrated, repeatedly, that the disabled and seniors benefit from interaction with growing things.  A healthy garden crop of cannabis will reduce the need for narcotics and experimental meds with their numerous side effects, allowing patients to produce their own medicines in a positive feedback loop as well as earning a tidy nest egg for both the grower and the state when sold to local dispensaries or at festivals, concerts, and seasonal tasting events.  And a co-op or senior center that produces an acre or ten of hemp will quickly find every bit of its product, root, leaf, and stem, in demand from a fiber-hungry public.

We need equal opportunity for women- Plants grow for anyone, regardless of gender, and most of the bud tenders and dispensary staffers I've met in the West were females who were quite well paid for providing informed choices and supporting the local economy. Cannabis and hemp technologies are cutting edge, with no limits on who can participate or how high they can rise, save for those draconian measures instituted by the federal government to limit profits on the herb to those lobbyists and corporations footing the bill for re-elections.

We need to help our school children compete on a global scale, preparing them for jobs before they leave high school by grounding them in advanced knowledge... but we fill their heads with outright lies regarding the properties of cannabis and actually obstruct investigation into the potentials of one of the most ancient of medical herbs, or the potential uses of its COMPLETELY NON-PSYCHOTROPIC cousin, hemp, a plant that once formed the backbone of agriculture and the textile industry and led ALL U.S. exports.

We need to ensure that our returning veterans will have not only jobs but adequate medical and psychological resources to deal with their traumas. Only cannabis can treat PTSD with NO CHANCE of addiction or overdose, two things that have claimed so many of our returning veterans. Dealing with growing things has been demonstrated to be invaluable in PTSD therapy, as well, so let's put some of our returning heroes into grow operations, tending the plants they also use, and patrolling the National Forests for illicit grow-ops.

Veterans uniquely solve the security issues of dispensaries and delivery services... who is going to attempt a hold-up with a pair of armed veterans behind the counter or the wheel? No one with a high chance of surviving the first ten seconds of that encounter... thus reducing the mostly-wasted cost of processing, jailing, then rehabilitating the perpetrators.

Let us return to those illicit grow-ops. 

How is it that our government leases vast tracts of public land to ranchers whose cattle create massive erosion, devour scarce native vegetation, and foul the waterways, to private corporate recreation interests who hunt the baited game inside their boundaries with 4WDs and dogs, spotlights and sniper rifles, to timber companies that buy hundred-year-old trees for a dollar apiece and to mines that level our mountains and erase historic landmarks as they export our mineral wealth right out of the country, and yet that same government does NOT allow its poorer citizens to use land managed by the Department of Agriculture to grow useful and marketable crops?  If hemp and cannabis were legalized and regulated, thousands of acres of fallow land could be planted and made useful, small farmers would once again have a guaranteed cash crop (if we are smart enough to stop subsidizing farming operations whose clear profit is over $100,000/yr or who are corporate or foreign owned).

We need to rejuvenate our cities. To do this, the Federal Government needs only do what it is so good at: NOTHING. 

As in NOT raiding self-supporting education centers where caregivers and patients are taught how to grow and utilize hemp for fiber and cannabis to produce their own medicines, small business owners are educated in the process of setting up dispensaries, smoke shops, and hemp clothing stores, and MILLIONS of dollars pour into the surrounding communities as a result.

As in not arresting and destroying the business efforts of a man whose only crime was that he was more successful than Lilly-Squibb because he was selling natural remedies instead of narcotics, or breaking down the doors of seniors and families and veterans to kill their pets and ransack their homes for a false tip or a half-ounce of a plant that has never killed anyone... unlike the police. 

Our President has threatened to use Executive Order to enact gun controls, against the will of the majority, which would cost this country jobs and tax revenues, closing businesses and driving away industry, all while dividing the electorate.  Obama has already used this power to invade another country and kill a dangerous terrorist without due process.  He signed the Indefinite Detention Act into law in a secret move at midnight of New Years, something America did NOT need.

But Obama"cannot" use this same power to stop imprisoning and killing American citizens for having cancer, MS, or PTSD.

Cannot... or will not?

When will this black-and-liberal-as-he-needs-to-be tool of multinationals corporations finally admit he is just a puppet?  Will he ever acknowledge the fact that more people want an end to Cannabis Prohibition than the number who favor gun control, immigration reform, or the re-election of Barack Obama?

One good thing did come out of last night's speech and the previous weeks. Joe Biden is in charge of the effort to implement gun control. Does anyone else remember that "Happy Hour" Joe was also put in charge of the original War on America... sorry... War on Drugs, back in the Reagan/Bush heyday?

Let's look at the progress that particular effort has made:

We have spent several billion dollars, incarcerated any number of non-violent patients, veterans, music lovers and teens, destroyed families and communities, shut down tax-paying, local law abiding businesses small and large, created a corporate rehabilitation industry, log-jammed our courts and filled our prisons.

We have oxy- and hydrocodone clinics in Florida that dispense narcotics like breath mints, killing 17 people every day and filling the jails and hospitals of the surrounding states with addicts. We have meth labs that no longer require even a single room... the cartels can cook up a batch in a 2 liter soda bottle in a half hour that will ruin the lives of hundreds of people, with commonly-available materials.

We have a host of "potpourris" and "bath salts" (artificial cannabis and cocaine substitutes), both of which can lead to psychosis and death, available in convenience stores across the country to anyone, regardless of age, because as fast as the DEA makes up special laws to interdict them, the formula is changed enough to make them legal again and a whole new round of emergency room visits and psychotic reactions begin, with the government chasing its tail like a rabid dog.

Ecstasy and blue moly are as easy to get as a cold, and college students are consuming both, along with a sea of booze (oh, but that's Joe's drug of choice, so no problem), as well as carrying on a thriving trade in pharmaceutical speed, street-quality meth, and good old heroin.

Given this level of success for Joe's past efforts, I predict that his participation in gun control will mean that, in the next decade, MS13 and the cartels will have streetcorner sales points for automatic weapons (likely purchased from Fast and Furious Eric Holder), and 95% of North America, Mexico, Central and South America will have either a fully-automatic weapon, body armor, an armored vehicle, or their own weapon-bearing drone, if not ALL OF THE ABOVE.  

Which will be the only thing protecting us from whichever tyrants replace the one currently languishing in the Oval Office.

Don't Let Go, and You Won't Fall Off of The Fiscal Cliff, either.

Posting this again, because given Washington State and Colorado's recent VOTER initiatives to legalize cannabis and regulate it in the same fashion as alcohol and tobacco, I think it is a crime that NONE of the major news outlets on the right or left has shown much interest in a historical moment in American politics. Focusing on immigration due to Latino turnout? Millions of white, black, brow

n and red voters turned out , and in November, and a significant number of them spoke far more loudly to the issue of a trillion-dollar war on our own people than the rapidly-diminishing illegal immigrant problem, which is down to 10% of 2000 levels.

How about you focus on the issues, Congress and Mister Obama, and stop trying to win the next state elections before you deal with the current problems?

AVOID THE FISCAL CLIFF.

One simple step: Executive Order (like the one for Bin Ladin's execution) decriminalizing hemp and cannabis, releasing all non-violent offenders, dismissing all pending cases for simple possession with or without intent, legalizing personal production and growing co-ops.

Results: compassion and dignity for patients and caregivers, reduced stress for the same, lower Medicaid and Medicare doctor and prescription costs, lower infrastructure costs (hospitals and clinics), lower enforcement and incarceration budgets, no new prison costs, increased jobs and tax revenues across the country (Washington estimates 2 billion in the next 5 years just from new taxes, stores, patients, clinics, and dispensaries. I've estimated a savings of almost 2 million PER YEAR for Medicaid and Medicare; http://roninsroad.blogspot.com/2012/06/no-value.html).

Decriminalization also means exponential reduction of the profit margin of the cartels and black markets, reduction of inner city crime levels, revitalization of urban and farm communities, and an increasingly competitive America.

So how 'bout instead of partisan politics and special interest accomodation as usual, we all join in on a solution that offers immediate relief and forward momentum?  Or is that too much to ask from a group of lifelong bureaucrats?

The fight goes on...

And I am tired.

Tired of causes, of interests, of hobbies.  Tired of the endless Internet chatter of affirmations and discoveries, secret plots and sunny family photos of nothing.  I am tired of writing hundreds of diatribes to idiots and slackers and stoners who all want to legalize cannabis but have not one single clue of how to get off their asses and get something done in a unified fashion.

I am deathly tired of lazy liberals who want to post about the revolution and call for Change but still cling to the same fake badges that wanted to cut them up for bait.  People who aren't ready to sacrifice and expect an easy path to revolution and victory.

The only thing guaranteed in a revolution is casualties.

Where does it start, and where does it end?  Do we rise up, and revolt, join the idiots at Occupy and immediately launch a coup to seize that movement before it is giving away useless college loans to univesities without the government support to offer decent classes or teachers? 

Do we re-invent the wheel and begin our own movement, or do we rely on the folks at NORML to finally end their comfortable rearguard action of polls and meetings and endless verbal jousting with the Federal government and actually call for a general strike?

Do we face armed Guardsmen and police with non-violence as we are teargassed and beaten and forced off of our own public parks and public lands? 

I have loved and defended this land, right and wrong, for most of my life, inside its borders and beyond.  I have accepted that the corrupt men in high places who sell poison to our children and old people have a right to make laws controlling my use of an herb. Instead of speaking out, or acting, I simply participated in the black market and reveled, to some degree, at my participation in the game that keeps such men in power.  I danced on my strings, grazed with the herd, and wished someone else would do something about legalizing cannabis.

Then I fell in love with an MS patient, and saw firsthand what prescription drugs were doing to her, and saw as well the heroic spirit fighting inside the pain and disability for just a little space to breath.  I saw the immediate relief when she tried cannabis, and I watched the fear she went through at the prospect of blood tests; tests that would reveal the damage the 'scripts had done to her organs; tests with the potential for positive THC results that would disqualify her for housing and grocery assistance, Medicaid, Medicare, and her SSDI monthly income.  It didn't matter that for $400 each month she could replace $2,500-3000 in prescriptions and the inevitable cost of damaged liver, spleen and kidneys. 

Or perhaps it did matter, to the very corporations that fund the Drug War while applying for (and getting) patents for cannabis-derived medicines.  Perhaps it is for this reason, and not any "gateway drug" propaganda, that the same Federal government which arrests MS, cancer, and PTSD patients for possession and production of cannabis has reserved for itself a patent on cannabis-derived medical pain and nerve applications.

I find myself at the point where Malcolm X once stood; I would seriously advise the leaders of this nation to heed those who would only see change come non-violently.   You have made non-violent change increasingly impossible, and you would seem to wish violent change to become inevitable, to justify the killings and beatings, the arrests and lives destroyed, the riot police, the teargas, the dogs and barricades, the FEAR and LIES used to destroy the textile industries and farmers of the south and the freedoms of a nation.

How can you expect men and women of honor to stand unresisting after such a long history of abuses and injustice from their fellow countrymen and the government which was formed to serve all citizens, without respect to economic or social standing?  After a decades-long war of  physical and spritiual assaults against our homes, families and selves, seizure of our properties and destruction of our state-licensed and approved businesses and thus our very means of earning a living; of public slander and distortion, of suppression of scientific facts and denial of succor to those in pain, how can you expect us to simply hold hands and sing as you wade into our midst, jackboots and nightsticks swinging in a fog of mace?

For too long have we remained silent.  For too long have we danced to the tune of a malicious piper.

Do not place your faith in the Vote.  All those vying for the Throne would wear the crown, not thrust it back into the hands of the People. 

Men will talk of States' rights when States are all that they can control.  But when a man stands in the highest office in the land and rules the destiny of ALL states, that appreciation for autonomy fades rapidly before the headiest drug of all: POWER.

The Vote is simply the Carrot, with which the forces of corruption and Tyranny will lead you on toward the unattainable goal of Change From Within the System.  It is a tragic comedy in which the masks change but the true players remain the same.  There can be no change in the system when there is no opportunity for outsiders to enter the system.  Those who have been bred and groomed to survive in the Political and Corporate jungle have closed the gates against outside interference or change.  The police, public opinion, your church, your place in the community, arrest, discomfort, imprisonment, public infamy and slander, these are all the Stick, used without compassion against those who would point out the fallacies, the Illusion of the Will of the People, and stand up rather than meekly bow before the show of force.

We stand at a crux, at a time of important decisions and great actions.  In flight navigation, in climbing mountains, in piloting uncertain seas, and at certain points in history, there comes a time of final choices, a Point of No Return.

The question is simple.

Is peace so dear and life so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?

ALMIGHTY GOD FORBID IT!!!

I know not what others may do, but as for me, GIVE ME LIBERTY, OR GIVE ME DEATH!