A corrupt war to wage

Everything our government has told us about hemp and cannabis since the 1930s is a lie. Cannabis is not addictive. It does not cause violent behavior. It will not make your daughters promiscuous. Not one person has ever been shown to have died from using cannabis. The claim that more study is needed is a lie; we have numerous clinically valid studies from the last century. Cannabis does have a number of valid therapeutic uses, and hemp is one of the most valuable industrial fibers ever known.

Still, our government, corrupted by money and racism, has destroyed the lives of many hundreds of thousands of American citizens by putting them in prison and confiscating—stealing—their property and money for the supposed crimes of possession or cultivation. Recent studies show that we are still arresting around 2,000 people per day for pot “offenses.”

The fact is that prohibition itself has caused immense harm.

Compare all that to the auto industry. Motor vehicles brutally slaughter Americans by the hundreds of thousands, decade after decade. They maim and cripple Americans by the tens of millions, decade after decade. (Consider the resulting strain on American medical care.) They scatter terrible poisons throughout the world on a scale significant to continents and oceans. In any 10-year period in the last 60 years, more people have died in cars in this country than in all our foreign wars since 1846. All this is fully established.

Now observe who goes to jail. Is it those who constitute themselves enemies of our nation and our people through mass suffering and death (for the money), the poisoning and destruction of our lands and waters (for the money), and the corruption of government by the people (for the money), or is it the person with a joint in his or her pocket?

When we lay out the elements of this situation, it is so upside-down, so wrong, as to be simply intolerable. Looking at concrete, fully established results, we are forced to this conclusion: The war on drugs—and the prohibition of hemp and cannabis in particular—is one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against the nation and the people of the United States of America.