Things Change

Life is funny, ya know?

A week ago, my life was fairly normal; laundry, dishes, cleaning up after cats and kids, reading posts on Facebook and the internet, watching the debacle of the election cycle, trying to finish some anchor replacement at the older crags in WV and making plans to hit the road for Colorado the day after tomorrow, to begin another season as staff in Pike National Forest's 11 Mile Canyon.

An hour later, I was in an ambulance with a wife who I did not know would live to see another day, holding her hand as EMTs worked on her, my heart in my throat and all plans for the future annihilated and scattered to the winds.

Late that night, the doctors at RMH told us their diagnosis; not the worst, but not the best, not by a long shot.

Cindy, a fourteen year stroke survivor and Multiple Sclerosis fighter, had suffered a brain aneurysm; a massive swelling in the carotid artery just inside her skull, like a loaded cannon pointed directly at the base of her brain. She was transferred to Richmond's Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center for more tests and scans, her condition analyzed by some of the leading neurosurgeons in the country.

On Saturday, her pain was minimal, her condition stable, and we came back to the Shenandoah Valley.

Eight years ago, I met a funny, beautiful lady with a heart of gold; taught her to climb, shared her battle with Multiple Sclerosis, supported her fight to stop using the medications that were killing her, and listened as she fought with the darkness that had been poured into her soul by demons in human form at such an early age.

In turn, she accepted me for the bipolar, sardonic, irascible, irreverent fool that I am; reached down into my well of isolation and self-pity and drew out the very best of me. If I have failed to live up to that ideal, the fault is mine; Cindy has always believed in me, no matter how badly or how often I have failed.

We have traveled the country from coast to coast, climbed and hiked, laughed and cried at the folly and loss of friends and family, celebrated victories and struggled to find a silver lining surrounding the storm clouds of our occasional defeats. We've learned more about friendship, hardship, love and life in the last few years than either of us suspected could be known in a lifetime.

Today, Cindy and I have a slightly clearer picture of a much different future, and in the light of that knowledge, we are living each day to the fullest, loving and appreciating each other, so thankful for the family and friends who have put aside their own burdens and reached out to support us in our darkest hours of need.

The Road ahead is uncertain; there are trials and storms on our horizons, without a doubt, as there are for every person living in this consensual illusion of reality that we share. But for now, we are holding each other in this safe haven, cherishing each touch, each kiss, each word, and together, we will get through whatever may come.

No matter what may transpire, each of us knows the other will be waiting, there in that forest meadow at the end of the Road; waiting and calling, "Come home".

You and me, kid; forever.

And, for now, that is more than enough.

Canna bureaucracy

Some thoughts on a snowy morning.

The cannabis question has been with us for over a century, now.  From the earliest days of the colonies, hemp was a prime crop, one which George Washington planted not only as a textile, but in hopes of supplanting tobacco as a recreational smoke. Extracts of hemp oils and flowers were used by physicians in the Royal Court and in the New World, its properties had been explored by the early rulers and scientists of China and one would have to have a completely unrealistic view of mankind to believe that no one on Earth had ever taken the time to select and crossbreed the frost and drought-resistant plants for stronger resin and larger flowers.   We’re curious little monkeys.  Gregor Mendel was just the first one to write notes about it.

Cannabis is relatively benign, but let us be honest, very little on this world is beyond abuse. No doubt over the centuries, people who have lacked motivation or fallen on hard times or suffered from underlying depression have taken to smoking too much hemp at too young an age for too long, and wound up roughly as smart as a football bat.

Fact is, people have ruined their lives with just about everything possible, cradle to the grave, since there were two of us here, according to most of the stories that have been going around since fire was new.  

None of those stories ever goes on to tell how making rules ever actually stopped people from doing those things.  The long list of punishments for breaking the rules suggests that, human nature being what it is, maybe the whole rule thing never worked out any better for them than it has for the United States and her once again tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free.

Prohibition, the bastard stepchild of conspiracy theory, corporate manipulation and racism, has wandered a strange and checkered road to the present, where it once again rises before us in all its complexity of ignored facts, generations of institutional prejudice and billions in federal salaries and private-sector profit, emerging scientific understanding  suppressed by the minority of sharply divided opinions for a variety of political agendas,  a struggle of cultures and values in which almost every voice of science, compassion and reason has been ignored.  Even with the example of one failure glaring from less than a century in the past, the United States Government continues to pursue a path of interdiction, instead of innovation.

And the fault does not fall at any single doorstep.

Too many of the spokespeople for both sides have too much invested personally to truly see the big picture; ego, an addiction to the limelight, or a bulldog-vicious determination to win at all costs, even the loss of allies and friends and at the price of bloodshed and destruction.  Conversely, too many on both sides see and care solely about the big picture- at the cost of any awareness of the individuals involved, save a tactical awareness of their value as images, either for vilification or promotion, distraction or filler.

Let’s be clear from the start; like Samuel Clemens’ friend Mark Twain, I wouldn’t belong to any group that would have me.  A critical thinker in the tradition of Mister Twain, Cummings, Asimov, and Heinlein,  I find no contradiction between being an outspoken advocate of absolute freedom and equality for cannabis and hemp users, providers and growers, and my beliefs in maintaining a strong intelligent military, reducing the cost and intrusion of government, reforming campaign contributions , putting an end to the welfare-poverty treadmill, preserving the Second Amendment, enforcing the death penalty, and reducing taxes. 

I am an American with personal reasons for wanting this plant returned to our use above and beyond the simple fact that the Government has no right to prohibit it.

I am not some welfare daddy trying to score free government weed without losing any of my SNAP benefits or having to actually pay the rent in the apartment where I neglect my kids while dealing crack and bath salts.

Oops… sorry, did I drop a stereotype? 

Guess what?  They don’t exist without examples.

Sell your PC crap to someone who hasn’t slept in their vehicle inside the urban blight of a major metropolis for the better part of a month.

I am also not some “let’s all go save the planet” fan who has a signed copy of “An Inconvenient Truth”.  I personally think Algore is a full of shit as the rest of the talking heads pimping a cause.  He flew around in a huge jet and traveled in a limo, he lives in a mansion and his wife was the genius that decided outlawing Judas Priest would end teen suicide, remember? If George W. Bush did a decent thing in his career, it was keeping Gore out of the White House.  No one was ever delusional enough to think that Dubya was a genius, maybe because, for as many stupid things as he said, he never claimed to invent the Internet.

I know that cannabis oil doesn't cure cancer, although it has a devastating ffect on some cells and tumors some of the time.  And I know that it will take a lot more than this "seed-bearing plant" to aaccomplish the "healing of the nations" or even the restart of the American economy.

So I’m a contradiction.  In the end, the only thing I have in common with 95% of the people in the movement to end Prohibition is a desire to consume and possess the byproducts of a simple plant in a responsible fashion without fear of fine, citation, arrest, seizure or invasion of my property.  We share a common goal.  I don’t have to like them or invite them over for lunch. Many of them are zealots as bad as if not worse than the opposition.  

As a group, we have achieved some stumbling steps, in much the same fashion that the buffalo once migrated in vast numbers, traveling in a generally east-west direction across the Great Plains.  Calling it a concerted effort would have been stretching things a bit, indicating a directing will where there was only instinct and appetite.

I have watched as the “leaders” (really the spokespersons) have led this fight, mainly from the rear or the conference hall or the buffet line, in much the same way that the rutting bulls contested for dominance among those ancient wandering herds and steered their direction.  

I’ve seen them online, in pics and clips, seen podcasts and TV spots, watched hours of YouTube, seen them hobnob with famous musicians and actors, representatives and senators, film makers and glass blowers, hot chicks and tattoo artists and horticulture experts from across the globe.

I’ve seen pics of them at the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, at the Hard Rock Cafe and Colorado smoke shops, at festivals and gatherings, rallies and benefit concerts.

I haven’t seen any of them in handcuffs.

Maybe I expect too much.

Maybe I’ve read enough history to recall that very few people have ever managed a major shift in consciousness signing petitions, appearing on their own TV show online, or playing by the rules.

But in the end I am ronin.

I would like to say that I bow to no man, or creed, or banner, but I’m too cynical for that. I have folded down like an abject slave in the face of necessity and hunger and despair, surrendered courtesy and grace to anger and self-righteousness, and broken every vow of honor I ever took on my name.

I have no honor, nothing to lose, no shame left.

I stand to gain nothing by my honesty, except to reclaim maybe just a shadow of that honor.

Always a fair trade.

We are being led by fools.

On both sides.

While Moms for Marijuana walked the halls of Congress and retired LEOs LEAPed, the checks and balances system has been further dismantled around us amid the smoke and mirrors of market instabilities, the start-up of Obamacare, budget battles and disingenuously-manufactured terrorist attacks. 

While Congressmen and gubernatorial candidates smiled and made promises, corporate patents on seed stock and genetic information have placed much of the potential benefit of legalization forever beyond our reach, without a word from advocacy groups or the Department charged with protecting your right to fair Commerce practices.  

Your President and mine took the occasion of his re-election to sign the Indefinite Detention and Detainment Act into law on New Year’s Eve of that same year, while continuing to raid dispensaries, seize property, arrest seniors and kill veterans, keeping the troops in the Middle East, detaining innocent people in Gitmo, losing diplomatic personnel in Benghazi.

While attempting by every means possible to separate Americans and especially patients from their right to keep and bear arms, the Attorney General’s office and assorted law enforcement agencies lost track of hundreds of weapons.  Almost fifty of then were later linked to shootings, in some cases the deaths of federal officers. Despite rallies following Newtown and Aurora, the National Rifle Association remains silent about Illinois legislation to remove the handgun rights of medical cannabis users.

They does this because supporters of legalization who are members allow them to, and because the leaders of the cannabis advocacy groups do not call for activists to speak out on their websites and at their rallies, to demand that they truly defend the rights of ALL gun owners.

The Supreme Court has been busy defending the rights of Monsanto (the folks with the patent rights to you future crops of cannabis and hemp) to grow and sell genetically manipulated organisms without labeling, with no idea what the long-term effects of consumption or environmental impact may be.  

During the same period, the SCOTUS continued to deny American citizens the right to grow and possess a plant with a proven history of over 5,000 years of nutritional and medicinal applications; denied simple cultivation and personal consumption to law-abiding U.S. citizens, including those with pressing medical needs and chronic or terminal ailments.  

Exemptions have been granted in the case of Washington State and Colorado, but how can there geographically-defined freedom or exclusion from those freedoms inside anything that can honestly be called The United States? And yet the advocates are happily, busily taking the longest possible path to challenge this absurdity; endlessly submitting petitions and chatting on live streaming podcasts, between demonstrations on the best way to clean your glassware and a showcase of that mad Tahoe Kush.

Our government will relent and allow experiments to crossbreed the avian flu virus into humans, a potential weapon and a contagion nightmare, but North American research into the uses and true effects of the multiple components of cannabis proceed at a snail’s pace, regaining lost information in microscopic steps, while advocates judge the best pot brownies in Denver.

The Federal government placed the plant and its byproducts in the Schedule of Control Substances as a dangerous narcotic with no medical value despite the findings and recommendations of a Presidential Commission, the same Federal Government that holds two medical patents on cannabis derivative medicines, Sativex and Marinol.

And while all this has happened, we have been endlessly distracted by polls and petitions, and the breathless reporting of yet another court case.  We have smiling statements made by people in Brooks Brothers suits but nothing about a rally on the Capitol Mall, or a serious, media-covered, large-scale protest outside a Supreme Court trial, led by the people who travel around the country assuring us we are making progress when down here on the ground, evidence of that progress is pretty thin.

Why does it seem as if NORML, the Marijuana Policy Project, the Campaign for the Restoration and Regulation of Hemp and most of the rest of the advocacy groups are competing with each other?  Why fight for the spotlight?  

What does it matter if Steve Elliott interviews someone on the other end of the country from the Capitol Building, the only place where anything that truly matters is going to happen now that Colorado and Washington have managed to vote in legal cannabis, albeit in much different forms?

We have half a dozen advocacy groups, most founded around and by lawyers, and yet no one in them seems able to read a government text, or sort out the legalese of the Acts in question. We are asked to ask congress to ask the President to sign an Executive Order in direct contravention to the checks and balances system, then asked to tell the President to tell a Congress (who should have been listening to we, the People for the last three decades and have clearly not been) that they need to ignore the short-term millions from pharmaceutical and faith-based super PACs and private prison contractors and vote for us, the folks who have no choice but to pay them for ignoring us.

We attack the office and person of the Attorney General, and alternately demand and plead for him to show us mercy, as soon as he is done firing the head of the DEA, changing the rules for the OCNDP, freeing the cannabis prisoners and expunging all their records, reforming immigration, arresting and charging his boss with treason and pulling monkeys out of his butt.

Really?

No, not really.  I made up the part about the monkeys.

We’ve had a Constitutional, bi-cameral, capitalist government for quite a while now.  It functions in a limited number of ways, when it comes to making and repealing laws, adding and removing things from lists, etc.  It is a maze, but it is a maze with a limited number of entrances and two possible exits, winners and losers. 

Inexplicable is the fact that it has so thoroughly baffled the people who claim to be “working for change from the inside”, who have been admired and celebrated for “fighting the good fight” since the day Nixon’s ink dried, but none of whom seem to have a clue how to get from Point A (Prohibition) to Point B (Legalization) without creating a mountain of paper, a mass of online traffic, and a massive top-heavy lobbying machine with twelve million drivers and no clear map.

Why is this?

Marx had a simple way of breaking down most social questions, and it was a fairly valid one.

Who profits?

What happens if government simply surrenders?

Yes, we all know that it won’t happen, but what if?

What if tomorrow you were free to walk out on your front porch and light up the fattest joint you could roll? 

What would happen if you could walk over to your girlfriend’s house and spend the afternoon watching “Bones” completely baked on brownies?

What would really change in the world if you could grow your own tomatoes and cucumbers and cannabis right there in your garden, for yourself, or to trade to your 18-yr-old-or older neighbor for some cucumbers or melons or carrots?  What if you paid for a simple vendors’ license and a spot at the farmer’s market and sold it as-is, let the buyer beware, and if caught, let the illegitimate seller beware as well?  What if big growers could sell and ship their products under the same tax codes as alcohol and tobacco, or, in the case of hemp, the same rules and protections as corn and soybeans?  What if every insurance company agreed to accept cannabis as a legit medicine?  If bars could once again offer smoking sections that for the first time included a tasteful selection of cannabis?

What if the intoxication levels and penalties for cannabis DUI were the same as alcohol?  If bars, convenience and liquor stores, tobacco sales and adult novelty sales all had to be 1,000 feet from schools just like bud bars and dispensaries?

What would the people who spend their days and nights making speeches and standing in front of cameras and making up the news any way they want do for a living then?  What would they be without the identity of advocates?

What benefit is it to them if the rest of the world is free?

Free to forget them?

Because face it, we aren’t talking about inspiring people here.  Mason Tvert is a smart guy, he writes good copy, but he looks like one of his favorite lines is “Super-size it!” Mister T wasn’t exactly leading the charge, nor was Steve Elliott bellowing a call to war while waving a copy of Hemp News and a slice of pepperoni  at his side, when Obama failed to even mention cannabis in the State of the Union Address, despite early predictions and broad hints on the MPP page and Hemp News that the Choom Boss would do so.

Let’s face it, once the big bang of legalization is over, working through the smaller stuff like how we are going to regulate quality and chemicals and certify organic is going to be B-O-R-I-N-G. No one is going to read the last Weedblog post about how determined delegates hammered out acceptable levels of nitrogen in shake, loose, outdoor grown, Kush (to be used for baking only) or which company failed to win an organic certification, except the kind of people who still read Mother Jones or the Christian Science Monitor.

Not the people who are going to invite you to smoke some badass Lebanese with their stripper girlfriend, or get you kick-ass seats to a game or concert.

So things get dragged out, just a little longer than they might necessarily need to be.

More petitions, more rallies, more fundraisers and podcasts.

Just a little more of that sweet fame, the most addictive and ephemeral rush of all, made all the more sweet by how little most of the bigger names truly deserve to be famous or admired.  They may have shaken a lot of hands and kissed a lot of ass, raised a lot of money, and hosted a lot of dinners, but who are they, and where have they been?

Even those who have done great things tend to lose sight of the goal, to begin mistaking themselves for the cause.  Maybe because they have nothing truly invested. 

I bet less than a hundred members of NORML could name the President, or CEO, or whatever it is you have over there… I don’t pay much attention myself, in truth.  But he looks good in a polo shirt and sweater.  Bet he plays a mean game of golf, or tennis…

Bet he never met arranged to meet someone from a bulletin board business card and a phone call, with his heart in his mouth and a fistful of wrinkled twenties in hand for a bag of unknown buds.

Or wondered if his truck was being broken into by the crack whores outside as he watched his wife walk through a door into another room with a guy carrying two Glocks and a handful of prison tats that said bad things about his past, with two more guys who could have been his brothers riding shotgun (literally) at the bullet-scarred street door to the dispensary, while a meth head muttered and raved to your left and a tinfoiler on your right tried to explain the connection between fluoride, HAARP, chemtrails, 9/11, the Jews, the Vatican, the Borgias and the World Health Organization.

Bet he’s never assumed the position.

No, most of these guys look like the guys who acquired Microsoft stock about the time it got to be worth something, who couldn’t or didn’t get a foot in the door with lobbies and PACs, who wanted something a little edgy, a little different from a stint as a public defender, with all the legalese but with no real risk. Like one day, fresh back from Cancun or South Padre, they looked around and said “Hey, the trust fund is running a little low… but I hear advocacy pays pretty well!”  With that decided, they probably put the game on the flat screen, cracked another microbrew and called their escort service to have her deliver a quarter of whatever sounded funky and cost the most, that week.

I know that’s judging by appearances, but that’s the impression these guys give; a little hipper, a little smoother, with a little more on the ball than you and me, and in no particular hurry to take the fight to the wall.

Players. 

Insiders.

Imagine what working-class Joe thinks, watching people who don’t have the conviction to actually put themselves on the line, preaching to him about rights he sees slipping away every day as he tries to earn enough to eat and pay the bills, while they fly from convention to interviews to TV spot.

Think of the curious people who surf through our discussions and comment sections online, who read the illiterate frenzy and fantastic stream-of-consciousness ravings, the scam or sting ads to order drugs through the mail or internet, the profanity and the posing thug-lovers and the hundred other forms of human trash on display.  Why do these things stay up on websites for days?  The users no longer care about the integrity of the movement, because the leaders have no true personal involvement, and integrity is a luxury in the age of the backroom deal. 

How can we be accepted as being any better, when so little of what we show the world is any better?

Try to see us through the eyes of a church-going grandparent, living in what was once a small town now overrun by spoiled college kids and arrogant money, filled with lies but confronted again and again by people who seem bent on becoming the embodiment of every drug stereotype.

 What of the veteran, on the fence, living on a pittance from a government that would rather forget, just another forgotten face who sees just how little the talking heads at the top actually give a damn, be it the top of the Veterans’ Administration or of the reform movement, about the brothers and sisters in arms slain and incarcerated in this lost war.  Once the rally ends and the petition is signed, how many legalization crowds give a thought to the plight of those same veterans?  How many offer a word, a meal or a ride? 

Think of the hundreds of thousands who have not spoken, yet.

There are so many applications for hemp, and so many uses for cannabis and its extracts.  Let us not allow those potentials to be stolen by blind trust in our representatives, or by ignoring the eternal greed and treachery of Prohibition’s offspring, the pills-punishment-incarceration-and-rehabilitation complex.

The polls predict success and increasing acceptance, among people who cared to respond. 

That headline was true a week before Reagan won the election.  Two years later, Nancy and her celluloid cowboy rode into history by restarting a billion dollar drug war, while Oliver North was arming twelve-year-olds and establishing coke routes into the United States from South America. 

Victory is a certainty when it is written into both law and history books.  Until then, it is just a convenience of perspective.

Look at how the herd moves.  Decide if the direction we are headed is correct, and if the speed at which we move is satisfactory.

If not, do something. 

Yourself.

Write a real email, not a form letter, to your state and federal representatives.  If you are in D.C., go look up your congressman or woman and tell them what you care about.

Emotional social media posts change nothing in the real world, and waiting for someone else to look after your best interests is accepting that someone else will decide what those best interests are and where they lay.

For every victory, there is a cost.  Count on it. Your enemy does.  

Time to grow up and accept the terms of this fight, even if the smiling faces online don’t want to see the storm ahead.

The tide is turning, according to the people who get paid to tell you exactly that.

I still say, Question authority.  Any authority. 

Even the cannabureaucracy.

Even mine.

But remember who has been there, on the line, and who has not.

Tides go in and out, and a wise person does not build too close to the sea on the advice of those who have never sailed deep waters.

1 Picture = 1,000 words

Cannabis cures cancer.  Any questions?

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 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.

Inconsistency

Over the past four years, Mexicans have been locked up and deported in record numbers, while young black men and Negro veterans have been imprisoned and/or killed for doing exactly what the black man currently in the Oval Office laughed about having done as a youth, while cancer, PTSD, and MS patients and seniors have been forced back into the black market, had their homes raided and their children held at gunpoint while their pets were killed, despite that black man in the Oval Office's implied promise, during his last campaign, NOT to target medical cannabis users and suppliers.

Nonetheless, in the wake of a huge Latino turnout in November and the tragedy at Sandy Hook, gun control and immigration reform have become the primary focus of the second term, despite the fact that the Oval Office itself lost guns that later killed Federal agents, that dozens of Sandy Hooks have happened all over this country in the last decade without a meaningful peep from the press or the Prez, and despite the fact that immigration, legal and otherwise, is at 10% of the levels we had in 2000.

Ignore the fact that armed thugs in body armor are smashing in front doors and holding children of the exact same ages at gunpoint, so long as THOSE criminals have a badge.

Pay no mind to the fact that a far higher percentage of people than EVER voted for Obama think that cannabis and its cousin hemp should be taken off of the Federal Drug Schedule and regulated like alcohol and tobacco, a truly bipartisan moment that every facet of the press on the left and right is doing its very best to ignore; 

How do you talk meaningfully about "growing the economy" when, due to your actions and those of your Attorney General, the once prosperous city of "Oaksterdam" and the state of California have both lost millions in tax revenues due to Federal disruption of state-certified businesses and trade, while other states with cannabis legislation waste months in which they could be generating tax revenue, jobs, and new businesses, awaiting a Federal interpretation of intent regarding respect of their laws?

How do you justify Federal silence and inaction when almost half the states in the Union currently allow medical use of cannabis or have decriminalized personal possession? 

How can you talk about immigration reform and border violence and still not act to reduce the profitability of cannabis smuggling for the cartels, thus reducing their ability to buy guns, bribe politicians and cops or maintain a strong enough presence to dominate a region?

Latinos are voting in record numbers BECAUSE THEY ARE BEING DEPORTED and the crime cartels are losing all their money laundering and courier connections, all their operation fronts.  Want to reform immigration?  The Federal Investigation into Joe Arpaio's criminal activities might have been a good start, followed by Eric Holder's indictment and Barack Obama's impeachment for the Fast and Furious debacle.

Isn't it great that the Progressive Obama Government decided that, while promising our veterans jobs on their return and spending trillions to restart our economy, playing games with the fiscal cliff and the budget crisis, there were 50,000 children of illegal immigrants (you know, criminals?) could have jobs and/or get a college education?  I can't tell you how glad I am that a college education and a decent job aren't burdens I'll have to shoulder in the near future.

Illegal immigration is fixing itself... Latinos are going south in record numbers, here in the southwest. This is a smoke-and-mirrors issue.... Ignore the absence of the little brown man behind the curtain, we are Oz, the Great and Terrible...

Why are we fighting to free the Middle East, when the nations south of the Rio Grande are controlled by one of the largest criminal organizations in history?  How can we claim to combat terrorism and border violence and the growth of the cartels when MS13 has a cell in every city in America, while they make billions on the illegal import of low-grade cannabis?

See the bigger picture... look for the connections.

Gun Control, the other topic sure to unite America, means hitting your target as many times as you pull the trigger. Guns made our nation free, guns, not talk, stopped global tyranny, and the responsible use and ownership of guns will keep our nation and our world free, from outside influences as well as the forces, corporate, private, conservative and liberal, attempting to subvert our government from the inside. Retention of background check data in a LEO eyes-only database, with required state and federal input of felony and mental data to the NICS, and uniform enforcement of the current laws, with no loopholes, no special cases, and no privileged class would remove the need for any new legislation regarding guns. 

No gun has ever simply pointed itself at someone and killed them. 

And NO ONE, EVER, IN ALL OF RECORDED HUMAN HISTORY, DIED FROM THE USE OF CANNABIS. 

We have enough laws about humans and guns... we need clarity and reason, we need enforcement, and we need consistency between our scientific knowledge, our laws, and our actions. Cognitive independence is a term that is getting thrown around a lot.  In an age of increasing government invasion, shrinking freedoms, genetic research and scientific advances in artificial intelligence, it may be long past time to start considering jujst where a competent, thinking individual draws the line between external and internal authority and autonomy.

When the government holds medical patents on a plant that same government defines as a drug with no medicinal value, when the courts refuse to hear evidence to the contrary, the same old answers and issues will not continue to distract or dissuade a public too well informed and personally experienced to accept  those tired clumsy shenanigans.  

When SWAT and RUSH task forces are raiding family homes, killing pets, holding children and seniors at gunpoint, destroying any notion of freedom and justice, when entire cities are reduced to slums and empty storefronts by Federal contempt for states' and citizens' rights, how can we continue the meaningless charade of talking about high-capacity magazines or border fences as a solution or source of our problems?

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?

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.

.