For What It's Worth...

So it comes down to this: Cannabis is not a drug. 

Oxycodone and Valium and Zanex and Zoloft are drugs. 

Cannabis is addictive. Like power and money and sex and chocolate, Assassin's Creed and Halo and Oprah, the Home Shopping Network and Jersey Shore and NCIS are addictive. Going through rehab is something thousands of juvenile cannabis consumers do each year, earning private rehab centers millions of dollars in the process and guaranteeing healthy bonuses for administrators and equally healthy stock dividends for investors, many of whom are judges and government officials.  

However, checking into a rehab center does NOT prove that anyone is actually "addicted", since the alternative is often to have uninvited conjugal visits from a your fellow inmates and the trustees during your year in state lock-up, the fist inside the glove of judicial compassion dispensed to those who fail to recognize their addiction to the evil weed.  

Ironically, one of the conditions of release is often rehab, so they get you coming or going, in the end.

Cannabis and its cousin hemp have probably been the subject of more government disinformation, more cultural frenzy, more religious hyperbole and more unjust persecution that any other plant in history, bar none.  To paraphrase a statement once made about Appalachia, there is more known about cannabis that is not true than any other plant on earth.

Cannabis is a plant, one with an incredibly long history that winds throughout most of the nations on earth, making it pretty distinctive in that one detail alone. Various parts of the cannabis plant have been used by people the world over, throughout history, to build houses, make paper, weave clothes and make rugs.  It has been smoked and eaten as an intoxicant, prescribed as an analgesic and has been included in hundreds if not thousands of herbal medicines for over seven thousand years- all without a single recorded fatality.

Right now, there are some incredibly important people in my life who could benefit from open, unrestricted, unprejudiced research into the medical properties and applications of this amazing, misunderstood plant. A man who admittedly used it strictly for recreational purposes, a man who still reached the highest office in this land, says that the Federal Government will not persecute the users and possessors of this plant in two out of the fifty United States, Colorado and Washington, as the Federal government waits to see how the will of the people plays out and reels back from grassroots efforts that have resoundingly rejected recent politically-expedient legislation.

But the rest of us are on our own. The former cannabis user on Pennsylvania Avenue refuses to order the DEA to reschedule a drug that is classified as having no medical benefits despite the paradox that the government he heads holds two medical patents on drugs incorporating elements of this plant. 

Despite the fact that even the most conservative polls show that well over 60% of the country wants a change in the dialogue and focus of the Drug War, the man elected to lead our government in interpreting and obeying our collective will instead refuses to shift the focus of the DEA to stopping the flow of methamphetamines and oxy-/hydrocodone along the East Coast and throughout the Southwest.  Between three and fifteen people die each day from each of these drugs, and the associated costs in terms of property destroyed and law enforcement is counted in the millions.  But well over half of the budget of the Drug Enforcement Agency still goes toward the harassment, arrest, and imprisonment of people who simply choose another system of healing, another perspective on life or another vector of recreation. 

Supported by a Congress whose integrity has long since been compromised by large contributions from major pharmaceutical companies and other special interests, former Choom Ganger Barack Obama refuses to restore the right of American farmers to grow hemp, the non-intoxicating cousin of cannabis indica that is a historic cornerstone of American agriculture, having grown on the farms of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln; a crop that turned the tide durring World War Two as farmers were urged to "Grow Hemp for Victory!"  

Hemp actually has as much if not more medical potential than its THC-rich cousin, due the high levels of cannabinoids and cannabidiols, compounds that are opening new doors to natural healing every day, as we recover knowledge long-lost to prejudice and ignorance.  Hemp is an incredibly hardy, versatile crop that could single-handedly reverse the fortunes of hundreds of small farming communities and thousands of small farms and farm families. In this continuing Prohibition, Obama is continuing a tradition established by both Democrat and Republican Presidents before him back to Richard Nixon... promising America freedom and liberty, and leaving her wrapped in chains.

We are less free than the colonists before the revolution, less free than the citizens of this nation before the Civil War.

How long do we watch our loved ones suffer and our nation decline because we cannot get past this one simple point? How long do we turn a blind eye to raids, beatings, and shootings right here on our own soil, while we are distracted with wars decades in the planning, misled from the pulpits and inundated with canned events carefully staged and in some cases even orchestrated by our intelligence communities, the media, the politicians and the puppet masters behind them who pull the strings of stock market and public opinion?

With the economy and public confidence still at an all-time slow, why are we attacking- sorry, "sending in advisers and training freedom fighters"- in yet another Middle Eastern country, setting the stage for incrreasing involvement and another decade or so of killing hundreds if not thousands of our sons and daughters, and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, spedning billions of dollars we don't have to defend rebels who mostly hate us and who admit to using the same weapons from which we are supposedly trying to defend them? 

If defending people from an unjust government is the goal of our military, they have work to do a lot closer to home.  As far as I know, Syria isn't selling meth, running guns and putting 12 year old hookers on the streets of America, unlike some of the people so recently armed by Eric Holder and his boss.  Maybe those are more worthy targets for an application of our military might.  

Wouldn't putting the family heads of the cartels and the officers and thugs of the dictatorships and regimes six feet under strengthen border security and stabilize the region directly attached to the United States?  Wouldn't encouraging democracy and improving economic conditions in Latin and South America increase literacy, reduce birth rates, decrease illegal immigration, reduce federal law and INS budget needs, reduce the flow of guns and drugs in both directions across the border, and encourage tourism and businesses on both sides?  

Why are we attacking old people, veterans, and sick people in this nation, killing seniors who refuse their medications and imprisoning patients who seek their own answers, rather than respecting their choices and giving them the tools to avoid a lifetime of addiction and half-measured treatments?

Why is cannabis the ONLY thing the American Cancer Society won't try to use in its "Fight for the Cure"?

Why allow research labs to try to find a way to CAUSE avian flue to cross over into humans, but deny researchers the right to investigate the properties of cannabis and hemp, and the ways in which THC, CBD, and CBN could be used to improve the quality of life, to heal and cure?

Why must cannabis users die so that corporations and police unions can live?

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.

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?

Foundations

So, here are the hard, cold facts.

95% of your world was created by people using cannabis.

Right now, if you are sitting at a computer, or holding an iPhone or a Kindle or in some other way interfacing with the Internet and the World Wide Web of data sharing, you are enjoying the fruits of the intellectual and physical labors of a group of cannabis-using scientists.

If you are enjoying some music with your surfing, starting your morning, during your commute or throughout your day, anything from classical to light jazz to country to, yes, even a few gospel tunes, you are listening to the work of folks who routinely used hemp, cannabis, and hemp flower extracts to deal with stress and pain.

(Quite of few of them also used laudanum, opium, morphine, absinth and cocaine, which were then accepted as natural remedies, just as citizens of voting age were considered mature enough to determine those remedies’ use in their lives.  There was, oddly enough, no drug problem, no multi-billion dollar prison and drug enforcement system.  My, how the times have changed…)

If you enjoy the paintings, sculptures, poetry, literature, or craftworks of 95% of the last three centuries, you are, in fact, enjoying the effects of cannabis and other mind-altering substances on the real world.

Have any number of these artists died of addiction or the diseases that come with it?  Yes, many if not most of the greats that we know did indeed succumb to their appetites and the dark inner flame that lit their world in the first place.

Not one of them died from cannabis.

In fact, in seven thousand years of recorded history, including the incredibly detailed records of the dynasties of Asia, not one person has ever died from the effects of cannabis; smoked, brewed into tea, eaten, or rubbed into the skin.  It is humanly impossible to consume the amount of cannabis it would take to deliver enough THC to disrupt bodily function.  Imagine trying to smoke a bail of marijuana in an hour.  That’s how much it would take.

But I digress.

If you live or have lived in a house, or a condo, or an apartment that you did not construct from ground to doorbell with your own two hands, there is a good chance that someone using marijuana created the materials, was involved in their shipping and/or delivery, and installed or assembled them into the structure that kept the rain and snow from your head. 

The streets you drive on, the shops you patronize, the restaurants you eat in, all built and staffed and possibly owned by cannabis users or their relatives or friends.  The town you live in, the state in which it is located, and the country in which that state exists, all discovered and founded by cannabis and hemp growers and users. 

For hundreds of years, cannabis users have been laying the foundation stones of your world.

Cannabis and hemp; twined branches of the same tree.  Useful for paper, cloth, a wide assortment of building applications, fuel, protein, and a thousand potential applications to replace and preserve our depleting fossil fuels, forests, drinking water and arable land.  Jobs for literally millions; farming, harvesting, processing, breeding strains for food, fuel, medical and textile applications, packaging, manufacturing, warehousing, transport, security, logistics, marketing, education, outreach, clinics, research… the list grows as rapidly as the reasons to rethink our long-held, misguided views on this beneficial plant.

Why, out of so many useful plants, is this one demonized?  I’m not talking about opium poppies or cocoa leaves or psychedelic mushrooms, although medical science has found uses for all three- morphine and cocaine have been accepted as legitimate painkillers for hundreds of years, and new research into the use of psilocybin for post-traumatic stress and hospice care as well as a host of other mental disorders, is yielding amazing results.

No, I’m talking about a plant that our government has not once but twice encouraged all citizens who could do so to produce in bulk quantity.  During colonial times, it was a mandate that “every household plant at least one teaspoon of good Indian hemp seed”, and hemp formed one of the principle exports of the colonies. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp. Ben Franklin owned a mill that made hemp paper. Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper , and most of our early money was printed on fine hemp paper.

Somehow, a century and a half later, this foundation stone of American life and agriculture suddenly became the demon weed.  There are any number of reasons why one can see this happening; a racist reaction to white teens mixing with other races to listen to jazz, a response to the continuing influx of laborers from countries with long cannabis associations, and of course the well-documented government manipulation by corporate interests to ensure proper development of their investments.  

Yet our government and the corporations that increasingly control it are adept, if nothing else, at reversing themselves without batting an eye.  During the Second World War, when our supply of hemp from the Philippines was cut off, American farmers were exhorted by the US government to grow “Hemp for Victory!” 

But when soldiers in Korea seemed disinclined to rush out and kill the enemy after discovering cannabis, and with the burgeoning music scene in London and Germany on the rise, American authorities once again labeled cannabis the “gateway drug” and filled schools and theaters with propaganda, little if any of it based in fact.

Such as the fact that NOT ONE Presidential research committee into cannabis/marijuana has ever uncovered ANY permanent, negative side effects from its use.

Right now it is costing American taxpayers 5 billion dollars every year just to fund the DEA.  Well over 80% of that money is for cannabis interdiction.  95% of the victims of that interdiction are NOT criminals.  They are parents and young people, seniors and veterans, patients and mechanics, carpenters and plumbers and roofers and electricians, teachers and writers, painters and musicians and mentors, foster parents and cab drivers, shopkeepers and janitors.  They are the thousands of people who hold this society upright and together.

We have so many battles ahead.  Worthy battles; to restart our economy, to clothe and feed and house and employ our people, to bring hope to the downtrodden and redemption to the broken and lost right here in our own homeland.   

Together, we have come so far, and accomplished so much.

Isn’t it time to end the war on our own people?

No value

A recent Kentucky Drug Task Force raid netted 250 cannabis plants.  High-potency marijuana, according to the Sheriff's Department.  Estimate of value was 1.9 million dollars.

Almost 2 million dollars for 250 plants.  Plants that will grow in the ditch, and do in more than a few places in America.  Plants the Federal government has denied have any medicinal value or practical application.  What makes this plant so valuable... so valuable that the government that has classified this herb as a dangerous drug and of no use to medical science, that same government holds patents on the medical applications of cannabis extracts.

What  could make this plant so valuable?

Is it that addictive?

The government doesn't think so.  Not one government study of the effects of cannabis has ever proven that it is addictive or has any negative long term health effects.  The results that have been reported by the government were skewed to fit administration policy, every time.

So why this war on drugs?  Let's go back to that raid, the one that seized 250 cannabis plants worth 1.9 million.

First, that's a ridiculous sum, pricing each plant at almost $8,000 dollars.  Cannabis, on the black market, sells for $400-560 per ounce. Pounds generally go for $2,400-3200, so the estimate was based on the premium ounce price  and the expectation that each plant would produce about 2.5 pounds.

Most plants produce between one and three pounds, usually closer to one.

Black market cannabis may have been soaked in perfumes to hide the scent, shipped cross-country inside spare tires, dusted with powdered rubber and industrial solvents and lubricants, or recovered from a law-enforcement burn, rinsed but still laced with kerosene and petrochemicals. On the black market, inferior cannabis can be treated with the same substances that make "spice" so potent and potentially dangerous.

Under Prohibition, there is no competition.  Under Prohibition, there is no incentive to produce a superior product, just one that will get you more stoned.

Under Prohibition, sick people and people in pain must risk their lives in order to use the best quality of herb they can find, depending on their location.  Often, many of the medicinal properties of the cannabis have so degraded from heat, oxygen and sunlight that it is worth next to nothing for actual medical use.

Prohibition has failed for the last 40 years.  Its only claim for success is to have made otherwise law-abiding citizens into felons for a victimless crime, and to have put billins of dollars into the pockets of private prison contractors, police unions, rehabilitation programs, and an army of DEA agents, INS agents, as well as providing meaninless high-profile headlines for state, county and local law enforcement.  Yet murder, rape, theft, child pornography, narcotics, and a host of new "designer drugs" are still sweeping the nation.

But I digress...

One thousand pounds at $3,200/lb is $3,200,000 on the black market. Because of prohibition, that money creates zero taxes, no by-products, zero economic growth.  Because of Prohibition, that money can go toward buying guns to funnel into South America to the cartels, and leads to turf wars between rival dealers, rarely upstanding pillars of the community, who sell cocaine, crack, oxycodone, ecstacy, weapons and prostitutes to "round out" their portfolio, so to speak.  Because of Prohibition, bud from the west coast makes it to Florida where it is often traded for cocaine that then spreads out across America.

Now, let's look at the medical marijuana market.

Here, an ounce of carefully trimmed and scientifically-bred cannabis costs $280-480.  Very high quality, no fertilizers, clearly labelled for specific complaints like stress, pain, nerve spasm, etc.

Dispensaries are legitimate businesses, licensed by the state and subject to a number of conditions.  Dispensary owners pay business taxes, and if they own the building, property taxes.  The owners make every effort to operate within the law, and do not dispense any other substance than cannabis. 

Dispensaries create jobs for growers, trimmers, counterpeople, clothing, poster and paraphenalia manufacturers, delivery drivers, glass blowers, and cooks to bake the brownies and make the butter.  Each one of those jobs creates tax revenue.  Dispensaries charge taxes on clothing, paraphenalia, posters, edibles, and premium bud cannabis. 

So in a legalized market, 1,000 pounds of cannabis is worth an average of $3,200,000 if sold in ounces. That is another difference in markets.  on the black market, you can buy as much cannabis as you can afford, setting the stage for distribution.  In a regulated system, patients can only possess 2 ounces of cannabis at any time.  So that's 8,000 patients who could have benefitted from that amount of cannabis, which was instead destroyed.

In a regulated system, that 1,000 pounds will generate $4800 or more, just in sales taxes.  

It will generate zero in law enforcement costs.  

It can provide employment and supplemental income for seniors, veterans and the disabled; growing, trimming, rolling into cigarettes.  

It can be woven into cloth much more durable than cotton.

It can be mixed into concrete as as a superstrong fibrous mesh, and used in the place of old-growth forests that take a hundred years or more to mature (as opposed to 9 MONTHS for hemp) to make the finest paper.  

It can be used to make fuel for America and the world's growing energy needs, without the hazard of poisoning the entire Gulf of Mexico or turning Japan into a radioactive wasteland.  

It absorbs greenhouse gases and gives off oxygen.

More importantly, and much more relevant to this inquiry, 1,000 pounds of cannabis can replace $36,000 worth of prescription meds each year for each one of 1,000 patients with chronic pain or diseases like MS and cancer.

$36,000 x 1000 = $36,000,000 in potential reduced costs for every thousand people on Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security Disability.  There are over 61,000 people living on a fixed income from Social Security Disability Insurance, most of them also on Medicaid and Medicare.

$36,000,000 x 61 = $2,196,000,000 in savings for the American taxpayer and the Federal Government.

In the current economy, why wouldn't the Federal Government want to save almost 2.2 trillion dollars annually?  The current Drug Enforcement Agency budget is $2,130,100 which is spent on 8,399 positions; 4,146 of which are actually agents.


Approximately 75-80% of that budget is for the interdiction of cannabis.  That's over $1,600,000,000 spent on destroying a harmless herb with numerous medical applications proven in peer-reviewed studies around the globe and not a single fatality from use in the recorded history of mankind.

Why wouldn't our government want almost $3,600,000,000 in additional budget revenues every year?

Perhaps the answer is one of perspective, and a focus on profits, rather than the good of all mankind.

Because viewed another way, that 1,000 pounds of cannabis represents a potential $2 Million loss for the pharmaceutical companies, every year.

Pharmaceutical companies that routinely churn out drugs with side effects such as addiction, psychosis, hallucinations, thoughts of murder or suicide, blisters on your eyeballs, mouth, tongue, or throat, red or peeling skin, deadly viral infections, arrhythmic heartbeat, unstoppable bleeding, tumors, stomach cancer, and the list goes on and on.

And yet these substances are considered to be medicines and are accepted as such by a public that will flock to accept all those side effects even while decrying the "gateway drug", cannabis. How have these poisons become medicine while cannabis is classified as a drug?

 Because companies like Pfizer and Lilly-Squibb  pour millions of dollars into sustaining the War on Cannabis, all while selling their panaceas with images of bright, happy families, running playful dogs and hard-working Americans who NEED these blessed powders and potions to truly enjoy the American Dream.  Cannabis is demonized, as it ever has been, as the province of seedy characters and loose women in smoky dives and crack houses.  It is portrayed as the domain of criminals and societal failures, a gateway drug with no redeeming medical applications, no value.

Pharmaceutical companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.  For which, they get a return of hundreds of thousands of dollars on each and every dollar of those contributions by keeping cannabis illegal and forcing seniors, soldiers, and sick people to continue consuming narcotics that destroy their organs, drain their happiness, and fail to address the underlying causes of the symptoms they are made to treat.

Isn't it odd, then, that those same companies that deny the rest of the world the free, regulated use of cannabis have a medicine derived from cannabis?  Odder yet, the DEA website acts as a salesite to pitch the product.  Below is a quote from the DEA website concerning Marinol, the "synthetic" THC derivative.

"A pharmaceutical product, Marinol, is widely available through prescription. It comes in the form of a pill and is also being studied by researchers for suitability via other delivery methods, such as an inhaler or patch. The active ingredient of Marinol is synthetic THC, which has been found to relieve the nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy for cancer patients and to assist with loss of appetite with AIDS patients."

So THC has been found to help with nausea and vomiting and loss of appetite?  But, only if it has been packaged and processed by a giant corporation.  Forget about that THC you could grow in your closet for a few dollars a month, that stuff is bad for you, the report goes on to explain;

"Unlike smoked marijuana--which contains more than 400 different chemicals, including most of the hazardous chemicals found in tobacco smoke-Marinol has been studied and approved by the medical community and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the nation's watchdog over unsafe and harmful food and drug products. Since the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, any drug that is marketed in the United States must undergo rigorous scientific testing. The approval process mandated by this act ensures that claims of safety and therapeutic value are supported by clinical evidence and keeps unsafe, ineffective and dangerous drugs off the market."

Now, let's back up to the beginning of that quote.  One, Marinol is unlike smoked cannabis in that it does not deliver 400 different chemicals to users. 

Of course not.  Most of those chemicals are also potential medicines for development.  Why would they let you have them all at once, in the same way Nature did?  Nature doesn't have a bottom line to consider.  It's not about a cure... it's about developing a market and keeping a share.

Next the DEA rather breathlessly contends that cannabis, when smoked, is ALMOST as dangerous as tobacco.

No government finding has ever said so.  No independent study has ever supported that claim.  And every single study has shown nicotine to be the most powerful, addictive central nervous stimulant on the planet.

So why is it that you can buy this incredibly destructive drug at any convenience store, but possessing cannabis will get you 15 years in prison in some states... predominantly those in which tobacco is a major cash crop.

Because Tobacco also pours millions into the campaign coffers and Drug War rallies of those who stand to profit from the continued use of cotton, trees, petroleum, and pharmaceuticals. 


But surely good Christians could not believe that the Almightly, in His Wisdom, made a mistake?  Sadly pastors and preachers and politico-religious tyrants still blast this herb from the pulpit, weaned on 75 years of lies and terrified of the closeness to the spiritual that so many attain with a single puff, after years of searching in vain through the churches and synagogues for that link to the Eternal.

We have lost the will to Question Authority, to think critically about the information we are offered, to act on our convictions, to stand for what is Right even if it means inconvenience, loss of standing in the community or even jail. 

We are a nation of people who want change... as long as someone else makes it happen, preferably before the next reality TV show comes on and we are forced to miss an episode of The Biggest Loser. 

We cannot see that, in today's corporate government machine, it is We, the People, who are The Biggest Losers of all.

That is why cannabis is still illegal.

.