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Fight Terrorism...

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Volpex

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This is an essay I concocted one morning recently after a very infamous

anniversary. Having posted it elsewhere, I'm quite prepared for the fiery

backlash I may recieve. Flame on.

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Fight Terrorism. How? Free the weed.

There. I said it.

Recently, America had it's 68th anniversary of the prohibition against marijuana. It was only after a conscious, decade long drive to convince Americans that crazed immigrants and minorities were pushing jazz and reefer on good clean youth, turning them into raving murderers, that the government decided to act... The U.S. Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Stamp Act. Growing and selling marijuana were still legal, but only if you bought a $1 government stamp. And that stamp was not for sale.

On the day the Marijuana Tax Stamp Act was enacted -- Oct. 2, 1937 -- the FBI and Denver, Colo., police raided the Lexington Hotel and arrested Samuel R. Caldwell, 58, an unemployed laborer and Moses Baca, 26. On Oct. 5, Caldwell went into the history trivia books as the first marijuana seller convicted under U.S. federal law. His customer, Baca, was found guilty of possession. Caldwell's wares, two marijuana cigarettes, deeply offended Judge Foster Symes, who said: "I consider marijuana the worst of all narcotics, far worse than the use of morphine or cocaine. Under its influence men become beasts. Marijuana destroys life itself. I have no sympathy with those who sell this weed. The government is going to enforce this new law to the letter."

Caldwell was sentenced to four years of hard labor in Leavenworth Penitentiary, plus a $1,000 fine. Baca received 18 months incarceration. Both men served every day of their sentence. A year after Caldwell was released from prison, he died. Have conditions improved? Hardly. People get arrested by the federal government for growing marijuana at the request of their city and/or state for medical use or research. We have, with the conjunction of the Raich and Kelo rulings, created a police state that would make conspiracy junkies cream themselves.

In February of 2003, a California jury convicted marijuana activist Ed Rosenthal of growing marijuana, in violation of federal law. They were never told that Mr. Rosenthal had been given permission to do so by the city of Oakland to supply patients whose doctors had written them a prescription for it. So, despite the State of California's overwhelming approval of legalized medicinal marijuana, and a license to grow from the city of Oakland, Ed Rosenthal was sentenced to prison. For doing just as his state and city government approved him to do.

Forty-six year old paraplegic Richard Paey is serving a 25-year prison sentence in Florida for possessing an illegal amount of prescription pain medication. He had been crippled in a near-fatal car accident, and a failed surgery left him more damaged than before. The amount of pain medication needed to relieve his torment could not legally be prescribed to him. The prosecution had the jury charge him with felony distribution. They never contended the fact that he never, ever gave any medication to anyone else, let alone for money. But the state of Florida, like many others, mandates that once a person has in their possession a certain amount of a specific drug, they are automatically "distributing", whether or not anyone else ever touches the drug. The jury was never told that they could still send a "not-guilty" verdict in, and accordingly announced him guilty.

Now, don't get testy with me. I'm still the lovable right-leaning moderate you all know and love. But we as Americans have become so inundated by propaganda, junk science and spin that it seems simply a foregone conclusion that if the government says something is bad, it certainly must be just that. Well, it's not. It's not even really that the government is wrong; it has become an imminent danger to the very society it was created to protect. To understand the issue of marijuana as a recreational drug, you must understand its history before it was so controversial, and therefore, subject to heated and biased viewpoints. Marijuana laws (and similarly, laws for most other drugs) were nonexistent until the early 20th century. The United States (and most other countries) existed sans any laws regulating drug use for hundreds of years. You don't go through history and see wars, crisis or controversy regarding drugs - almost at all. This is all very, very recent. There was no actual prohibition on marijuana up until around sixty years ago.

So what happened? Well, after six decades of conscious, Judeo-Christian conservative warfare on all recreational drugs, marijuana included, we find ourselves at an impasse. People don't like to see it, but this crisis is alive and well. Looked at from a global perspective, after the prohibition of marijuana, America's jailed swelled to overflowing. Vast portions of a huge spike in the percentage of Americans incarcerated is due to an inhaled use of an aromatic herb widely originating in central Asia and now in many portions of the world, one used for this purpose for thousands of years, dating back to suspected use by the Christian figurehead, Jesus Christ. $7.5 billion dollars, payed by all working citizens of the country, are used in the enforcement of this prohibition, with billions more spent prosecuting offenders in the courts. Additional untold monies are payed in trade favors, treaties and foreign policies to promote and entice prohibition enforcement in numerous other countries. As a result, law enforcement agencies at the city, state and federal level are approaching a critical mass that might not be far off. Taxed to the brink in two foreign wars and not making any headway whatsoever into the preclusion of marijuana's use, how could we not expect intelligence failings? Not to mention that millions and millions of people, who would otherwise be working citizens paying into the tax burden, are imprisoned and not able to provide any input of any kind whatsoever to the economy.

The prohibition of marijuana, much like its failed predecessor heralded by the Temperance movement, has driven those who still choose to consume it into black markets; associated with the harder drugs and illicit lifestyle that critics say marijuana "causes" as a "gateway." This is based on animal studies alleging that marijuana "primed" the brain for other drug-taking behavior; these have not been replicated, nor are they supported by epidemiological human data. Statistically, for every 104 Americans who have tried marijuana, there is only one regular user of cocaine, and less than one user of heroin. Marijuana is clearly a "terminus" rather than a gateway for the overwhelming majority of marijuana smokers. The reason that harder drugs are brought into a cannabis users' perimeter is because the social elements associated with hard drugs is now the only available market for marijuana. Do you understand what this means? In addition to bringing otherwise solely cannabis users (nearly as common and normal as alcohol and nicotine users) in proximity to hard drugs, the prohibition of marijuana enables parasitic social elements to benefit to the tune of billions of dollars by providing the only marijuana in the nation. These elements are often linked, by marijuana opponents no less, with terrorist activity and governmental oppression all over the world. In a new century where majorities of global leaders agree terrorism to be the greatest threat to peace, why is this topic never discussed in a serious manner by our leaders? It garners barely passing notice by the most important political figures in the nation. And that needs to end.

Marijuana first earned recognition as an intoxicant in the 1920s and 1930s. During this time, exaggerated accounts of violent crimes allegedly committed by immigrants intoxicated by marijuana became popularized by tabloid newspapers and the newly formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Congress approved the "Marihuana Tax Act of 1937" based almost entirely on this propaganda and misinformation. Despite 60 years of criminal prohibition, nearly 70 million Americans have smoked marijuana at some time in their lives. Of these, 18 million have smoked marijuana within the last year, and ten million are regular marijuana smokers. Presently, law enforcement arrests a marijuana smoker every 45 seconds. Your tax dollars at work. Because of harsh federal and state penalties, marijuana offenders today may be sentenced to lengthy jail terms. In some instances (growing in frequency) possessors of certain amounts of marijuana receive longer, harsher penalties than those convicted of homicide, rape, assault and other violent crimes. When did the impetus of drug laws go from serving as deterrent to users to prevention of freedom to do so? Even those who avoid incarceration are subject to an array of additional punishments, including loss of driver's license (even where the offense is not driving related), loss of occupational license, loss of child custody, loss of federal benefits, and removal from public housing. Under state and federal forfeiture laws, many suspected marijuana offenders lose their cars, cash, boats, land, business equipment, and houses. Eighty percent of the individuals whose assets are seized are never charged with a crime. In addition, most Americans do not want to spend scarce public funds incarcerating nonviolent marijuana offenders, at a cost of $23,000 per year per person. Politicians must reconsider our country's priorities and attach more importance to combating violent crime and terrorism than targeting marijuana smokers.

And why don't hear about this from civil liberties groups? Marijuana prohibition disproportionately impacts minorities. Blacks and Hispanics are over-represented both in the numbers of arrests and in the numbers of marijuana offenders incarcerated. Blacks and Hispanics make up 20 percent of the marijuana smokers in the United States, but comprise 58 percent of the marijuana offenders sentenced under federal law last year. Paging Reverend Sharpton.

But what about the public health risk, right? Wrong. Show me the proof. It doesn't exist. Some of the founding scientific "assumptions" about marijuana's danger to health stem from the belief that it causes cells to die. This is an outright lie. These beliefs are founded on unreplicated, dated tests performed in the mid '80s, where mice brains were exposed to large amounts of marijuana smoke. The tests were concluded as showing cell change in the mice brains. No actual cell death was recorded. Yet this is the kind science used to fuel this prohibition. No one here is advocating increased use of marijuana, merely the termination of outright hostility towards those who do. Feminists wrap themselves in the battle flag of "my body, my choice", but ask them sometime about drug laws. It's time for the War on Drugs to end - we've got more important ones to fight. In the end, marijuana prohibition burdens the American populace with unknown billions to hunt, capture, convict and imprison the millions of otherwise taxpaying American citizens. By doing so, it drives what would otherwise be a marginally profitable legal market to criminal social elements, who are known funnel money to the very terrorists that we are spending additional billions to combat, doing exactly what we're trying to do to marijuana users - hunt, capture, convict and imprison. One of these threats presents a clear and present danger to the lives and livelihoods of the whole world - the other possesses a threat only to the sensibilities of a minority of Americans. You do the math. Billions of dollars wasted by us. Billions of dollars given to terrorists. Hundreds of thousands of manhours spent hunting marijuana and not hunting terrorists. I think it's a rather simple equation, don't you?

Or, in the words of Justice Thomas, "...the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers. ... allowing Congress to regulate intrastate, noncommercial activity under the Commerce Clause would confer on Congress a general "police power" over the Nation. ... If the Federal Government can regulate growing a half-dozen cannabis plants for personal consumption ... then Congress' Article I powers ... have no meaningful limits. Whether Congress aims at the possession of drugs, guns, or any number of other items, it may continue to appropriate state police powers under the guise of regulating commerce."

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I don't think it is about money. Sadly, if it was legal, it would be taxed.

I think the criminalization of marijuana was simply a result of the pressure-group warfare caused by the democratization of the United States. Companies that competed with hemp products lobbied government for special favors, and religious zealots lobbied to enforce their morality. When government is about the "will of 'the people,'" and not about individual rights, stuff like this will happen.

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Excellent, Volpex. I disagree about marijuana being harmless -- I don't know about actual proof of brain cell death, but I believe escapist, mind-altering substances to be harmful to mental well-being -- but I don't believe this should make marijuana illegal, when potentially more harmful substances (alcohol, tobacco, hard pain-killers) are legal.

Whatever the effect of marijuana, I believe in a person's right to do what he wishes to himself, if it is harmless to others. It can be argued that a person who is high could harm others, but I'll refer back to my previous statement that worse things are already legal (alcohol) to answer that. If a worse substance can remain legal, it's illogical that a lesser harm is illegal. Ideally, no one would use any mind-altering substance outside of controlled conditions, but that is not a matter the government can enforce. That is a matter of mankind learning personal responsibility.

The bottom line is that the war on drugs is a failure. It is too costly, and it's not stopping the trafficing or use of drugs. It's reaping no benefits for our country as a whole.

A better solution would be to stop drug trafficing by terrorists by allowing Americans to grow and distribute their own marijuana. The economic and social benefits of this would be enormous. I am doubtful that this would increase drug use. In my personal experience, anyone who wants weed has no trouble finding it, as things are today. We would just be assuring that tax money formerly spent on the war on drugs would be freed up for more valuable purposes, and that our current drug users would be buying American more often. ;)

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