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approve medical marijuana, and call off the jackbooted federales. And I don't mean that sarcastically. It IS impressive, because if there is any force in this country more destructive and more dangerous than the war profiteers, it's the drug war profiteers. In Colombia, they are completely out of control, using billions in Bush-provided "war on drugs" money to slaughter thousands of union organizers, peasant farmers and leftists, and to engage in large scale drug trafficking. Here we have the "prison-industrial complex" and other police state lobbies, who feed off the "war on drugs" and bully office holders into maintaining an utterly insane drug policy, that is probably as destructive, as costly and as anti-democratic as the new "fatherland" security apparatus and the Iraq war itself.
Making medical use of marijuana legal again* is a step back toward sanity. We don't have to live in a police state. A good half the people in prison shouldn't be there. Some should be under a doctor's care and in rehab. Others--small time users and pushers--need social help, not punishment: education, decent-paying jobs, hope.
Our priorities and our society have been turned upside down by the "war on drugs." It's time to dismantle this lost "war" and start over.
It is often compared to the utterly failed experiment called "Prohibition"--which created a crime wave like no other we have seen in the country, until the Bushites took over. The current "war on drugs" is much worse. It is institutionalized crime, the crime of the state, in invading peoples' privacy, dictating their personal habits, harassing them, jailing them, confiscating their property, destroying their lives, often over the mere growing of a PLANT, which grows wild in nature and has been used for medicinal and other purposes for tens of thousands of years. And that isn't all. Cocaine imports from Colombia dramatically increased in 2005 and again in 2006. What is all this massive expenditure of our money, and cost in our civil rights, FOR, if our government is IN LEAGUE WITH the rightwing paramilitary drug traffickers in Colombia? They haven't stopped the flow of the stronger illegal drugs--they have made things worse!
In the Andes, the coca leaf is used much like the indigenous use of marijuana here (and in other places). It is a medicine. It is essential to survival in the high altitudes and icy climates of the Andes mountains. Its use for these purposes goes back millennia. It is considered the most sacred of plants. The winning candidate in the last Bolivian presidential election--Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia--campaigned with a wreath of coca leaves around his neck. Why? Not because he is a drug user or drug pusher, or supported by drug lords. He is most certainly not. He did it to illustrate its PROPER use--and to symbolize his support for a SANE drug policy, not one that EMPOWERS drug lords and rightwing paramilitaries, and not one in which huge scale pesticide spraying poisons the land, and drives poor peasant farmers off the land and into urban squalor. Not one that CREATES crime. A sane, balanced, fair, wise, helpful, humane policy in which small scale personal use of coca leaves is an individual right, in which the cost is minimal or non-existent, in which everybody has decent medical care, and a way to make a decent living, and in which predatory drug pushing and crime gangs gradually die out, starved of ungodly profits. Participatory democracy--which Morales, and also Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Rafael Correa, in Ecuador, strongly encourage--is also part of the remedy. When people have a say in their government, and feel personally empowered, and feel they are living in a just society, they are much less likely to fall prey to the easy money and criminal life of drug traffickers, and much less likely to tolerate a criminal element in their neighborhoods (or running their countries).
In short, it is alienation and hopelessness that is the chief cause of drug abuse, and devastating poverty that is the chief cause of criminal drug trafficking. We can all think of exceptions to these tenets, but they so in fact comprise the general picture, and the chief causes of the "drug problem." Instead of overreacting, and over-criminalizing, the problem, get at its roots, and undermine the economic conditions and structures that FOSTER drug crime. WE have overreacted--way, way overreacted--creating a rightwing COP culture that feeds the beast (the opposite of what we supposedly intend). These South American countries are trying to pull back from that--back toward sanity and common sense. It is very refreshing. And it helps us see OUR problem even more clearly: We have TWO problems--drug abuse AND the "war on drugs. The remedy (the "war") is killing the patient--the people.
Anyway, imagine a U.S. presidential candidate saying something SANE about drugs--that marijuana is a MEDICINE (or, at least, that democracy should prevail on this issue). That does indeed take courage in the present political context--although I think that context is far saner, at the people level, that anyone realizes. Our war profiteering corporate news & entertainment monopolies are no help on this issue either. They perpetuate all the rightwing myths. They promulgate the INSANE views of a minority, and exclude the views of the majority, on this and on many other matters.
For those who don't know it, our Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson on hemp paper, made from the marijuana plant. Both Washington and Jefferson grew the plant on their farms. All the rope in the all the seagoing ships, for thousands of years, was made from hemp. The sails were made from hemp. Clothes can be made from hemp. Use of hemp paper and other products would significantly reduce the stress on our vitally needed forests. (Think of all the trees that you have wiped your ass with! Hemp tissue would be a good substitute.) And many believe that marijuana is a much better crop for biofuels, than corn or soy. It is perfectly nuts that this plant is illegal. What the hell should the government care if people dry some of the leaves and smoke them, or sprinkle them on food?
Nuts. Insane. Obsessive. Cruel. And "prohibition" is one other thing: highly profitable to certain people, in the government and in the crime world (in so far as they can be distinguished from one another).
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