Another Life Ruined For Corporate Interests

Coming home from work, he was not high, but he had a small amount of marijuana in his possession.  Despite not being read his Miranda rights, he was arrested.  Since he had been raised by loving parents who never assumed he would get in trouble, he did not know to hire or ask for an attorney.  Those loving parents, who also raised him to be honest, cringed to discover he also pleaded guilty.  Thus doth ignorance make victims of us all.

Now he is a felon.  A mellow, benevolent, average boy-next-door felon sentenced for a crime that harmed no one.  What will his life be like in prison?   We’ve seen movies; we know, regardless of our desperate intent to ignore prison culture.  

When he gets out, what will his life be like, then?  Will he still be the beautiful soul ready to help out the needy with a smile on his face and his usual sweet refrain, Pay it Forward, Bro?  Or will he be hardened never to trust another soul, habituated to swapping favors because he has been trained in the ultimate school-of-hard-knocks to think ‘no one ever does anything out of the goodness of their heart, they always want something out of you’?  Will the physical traumas he undoubtedly garners in prison scar him soul-deep, to become a perpetrator of violence for the rest of his life?

He worked as a pizza delivery driver, pleasant to all, trustworthy, trying to make ends meet working a dead-end job, for he had barely earned his GED.  He is now in jail, a failure by everyone’s standards.  He failed civics twice in high school, he failed to get a lawyer because he could not afford one, he failed to know his Miranda rights to realize he needed a lawyer in the first place, and he failed to understand the Fifth Amendment.  He failed to comprehend that those policemen were not heroes protecting the public interest, that they were instead biological robots earning their own meager paychecks by enforcing ridiculous laws first enacted in 1937 by corporate special interests which to this day fight hemp and marijuana legalization against the vast majority of public opinion.

FOLLOW THE MONEY. 

What special corporate interests perpetrate this outrage?  At a minimum, pharmaceutical companies and private prisons, but undoubtedly other industrial manufacturers of many products such as oil, fabric, and paper, as well as the federal government.

The federal government, you say?  You can find their patent for cannabinoids here:  http://uspatent6630507.com/ 

Assignee:

The United States of America as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services

Private prisons, you say?  This page estimates how many people are in FOR-PROFIT private prisons for drug offenses:  http://www.infowars.com/imprisoned-u-s-drug-offenders-skyrockets-from-41000-to-507000-in-30-years/

                         

This graphic shows the increase in drug offenders between 1980 and 2010:

URL source:  http://www.sentencingproject.org/images/photo/People%20in%20Prison%20for%20Drugs.bmp

Pharmaceutical companies, you say?  They do not want marijuana legalized because it is a natural remedy.  The TITLE of Patent 6,630,507, dated October 7, 2003, as owned by the U. S. government’s own Department of Health and Human Services, is “Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants”.

How many people would welcome cheap, abundant antioxidants and neuroprotectants in their lives at this very moment?  Does the government criminalize marijuana because it does not want happy, healthy, neuroprotected citizens?  Does the greed of pharmaceutical companies and for-profit private prisons contribute to the maintenance of this outrageous law, the criminalization of marijuana and hemp?  Do rhetorical questions piss you off because they state facts and are not really questions, because they describe bitter, cynical offenses to your soul, or both?

The sheer idiocy of the criminalization of marijuana has been as much a clusterf*ck of ignorant, well-intentioned people as it has been the greedy and paranoid mentality of corporate interests.  One person put cannabis as a poison on a state list in 1905, and the rest of the states jumped on the bandwagon.  It did not even require the brainwashing of the masses, reminding me horribly of slavery laws where many good, well-intentioned people simply relied upon the government to make their decisions for them.   There has been plenty of brainwashing, however.  Wikipedia’s entry, “Legal history of cannabis in the United States” specifically mentions the demonization of marijuana via the ‘yellow journalism’ of William Randolph Hearst, ostensibly to protect his income generated by vast tracts of forests in his possession.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_history_of_cannabis_in_the_United_States

The true crime is the wholesale demonization of a FIVE THOUSAND YEAR-OLD NATURAL REMEDY for devastating diseases such as cancer, HIV, Alzheimer’s, RA, MS, epilepsy, chronic pain like fibromyalgia, and a host of other health problems like diabetes, glaucoma, autism, PTSD, and depression.  Putting sick people in jail because they are trying to get well is one of the most heinous crimes I can imagine, up there with vivisection and genocide.  Since cannabis also provides food, clothing, construction materials, industrial and hygiene/beauty products, and can be grown on minimal land with virtually no cultivation while also controlling erosion and suppressing weeds, we could all profit by reinstating it as a viable industrial alternative to imported products and grotesquely expensive medications with more side effects than benefits.

MAKE THE MONEY HAPPEN.

What is the value of cannabis now, besides its mere street value?  Consider how much money in the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ has been spent on marijuana alone.  Delete that money from the budget of every country, state, and city, including apprehension, court costs, and prison housing.

Where would we find the real wealth of cannabis?  King James I ordered colonists to grow 100 cannabis plants each for export.  Our founding fathers wrote drafts of the Constitution on cheap, durable hemp paper, and George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams advocated its use.  And otherwise, the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act was written to tax the medical and industrial uses of cannabis. 

That vast potential alone demonstrates our current politicians have no clue whatsoever how to build a sustainable economy that generates true income!  They plod along under unjustified precedents and outmoded moral codes because they fear the average, everyday person might enjoy the wealth of a few home-grown cannabis products.  Yet look at how few people grow food in their own gardens!  The potential industrial production overwhelmingly outweighs any local production by several orders of magnitude.

Politicians, here’s a clue.  Enormous farms and factories producing a plethora of cannabis products?  Tax them.  Happy people who can now work despite their illnesses?  Tax them.  Industrially-produced and controlled smokes?  Tax them.  More cured people than dying people dependent upon outrageously expensive medical treatments that kill them faster than if they died naturally at home?  Tax them.  Formerly-disabled people now back in the work force and no longer dependent on Social Security or Medicare?  Tax them. 

We all understand taxes; we do not understand a legal system that criminalizes a natural product with so many benefits.

END THE TYRANNY!

What is the definition of criminal, anyway?  From Thesaurus.com:

Main Entry:	criminal  [krim-uh-nl]
Part of Speech:	adjective
Definition:	lawless, felonious
Synonyms:	bent, caught, corrupt, crooked, culpable, deplorable, dirty, heavy, hung up, illegal, illegitimate, illicit, immoral, indictable, iniquitous, nefarious, off base, out of line, peccant, racket, scandalous, senseless, shady, smoking gun, unlawful, unrighteous, vicious, villainous, wicked, wildcat, wrong

Tell me, with the exception of breaking a ridiculous law, how many of those adjectives accurately refer to a working-class man or woman coming home from work to relax with a joint, giggling over TV shows while eating brownies for dessert?  Marijuana users don’t need other drugs, so it’s not a gateway drug.  They are not addicts, so they do not perform acts of desperation to get huge sums of money to afford a habit.  At the worst, a modern marijuana user hopes to relax from the stresses of their workday.  A natural remedy, to be sure, as much as using honey or garlic, both of which can be produced locally.  If cannabis were easily available and controlled as much as alcohol, which IS an actual poison that is much more dangerous and can also be produced at home, why would the cannabis user need to break any other crime whatsoever?

A young man as described above, barely 20 years old, can now look to one of these futures: either he is victimized by an archaic, hypocritical, and fact-rejecting government’s criminal justice system, or he productively works his way through the day, paying taxes left and right, yet knowing he can enjoy a little smoke to relax at night.  Citizens of the United States of America, WHICH DO YOU PREFER?

Eva Caye

P. S.  I predict the first presidential candidate who promises to legalize marijuana will be voted in by a landslide. 

A simple online search will provide you with thousands of documents.  Please, do your research!


Update:  http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie.html  shows over 300,000 people in various prisons for drug violations (237,000 state, 94,600 federal, 4,986 drugs).  About 336,600 people who are trying their best to medicate themselves; although some of the drugs are undoubtedly dangerous, how many are 'just' marijuana?