LEGALIZE MARIJUANA

Why is marijuana illegal?

Ever since Eve fed Adam an illegal apple, people have been looking for ways to alter their consciousness. Religious rituals, rites of passage, rites of celebration and even the pause at the end of a busy day are all centered around something designed to wind ourselves up or wind ourselves down.

Half a million Americans will die in 2009 directly from the effects of alcohol and tobacco use. Zero people will die from the effects of marijuana use. Tobacco use alone is directly responsible for an overwhelming percentage of the cost of hospital stays, surgeries, and in-home long term care. Marijuana use has never, in the history of human civilization, ever been tied to any debilitating health care costs.

Why is marijuana illegal? As with any question, follow the money to get your answer. The alcohol and tobacco lobbies spend billions of dollars a year to influence the votes of governments worldwide on marijuana legislation. The social costs of these lobbyists and legislators conspiring to keep people drunk & tired & cancer ridden are enormous.

None of us can look at the world with clear eyes anymore; all of us are so indoctrinated into a world of hypocrisy that we accept clergy members sworn to celibacy raping our children. We accept police officers and city officials and congressmen and senators and governors and even Presidents who lie to us and wink at us at the same time.

It's only fitting, then, in this world of hypocrisy, that the half breed son of a black African deadbeat father and a white Kansan mother be the one faced with the conundrum we're face with.

The Current Occupant of the White House bragged in a book about his audacious use of marijuana during his high school and college years. He wrote about a few of his exploits with cocaine. Now he's faced with a worldwide economic collapse, and a growing majority of people who are saying that legalizing marijuana and freeing nonviolent drug offenders from prison are logical steps in the economic recovery.

There's no reason it had to come to this. The labor unions, alcohol & tobacco lobbies, church groups who preach intolerance and ignorance, and the fearful sheep that hide behind too many of our homes & institutions have all conspired to bring us to this day.

Gays believe that by behaving like freaks and dressing like clowns at so-called "Pride Parades", they're advancing their cause of achieving equal rights. Nothing could possibly be further from reality. "Headly People", as Dead Heads and other advocates of marijuana legalization call themselves, are sometimes guilty of marginalizing themselves as well.

It's always easy to wave off the freaks.

It's never as easy to wave off reality. Reality is screaming at us, and here's what it's saying: Legalize marijuana. Find a way to institute the same type of packaging, marketing, taxation and regulation already in place for booze & cigarettes. Find a way to test for operating vehicles and other equipment that's as effective as those in place for alcohol. Make the penalties for abuse severe in severe cases, but in most cases, make the penalties for abuse be education & treatment, not incarceration.

We have a real drug war to fight in Afghanistan; the Taliban and al-Qaeda use opium & heroin as their cash crops to fund their war against the United States. Most marijuana used in the USA is grown locally and in Mexico. Most people who smoke pot or use it in recipes or for medicinal use are the furthest thing away from drug cartel criminals as one can get.

And nobody's ever confused a hippie Dead Head for a terrorist.

In order for the world to change, we have to change. Before we can change, we have to change the way we think.

I hope I live to see the moment of clarity come thru the foggy thinking of marijuana prohibition.