The pharmacist was revered marijuana botanist and author, Ed Rosenthal, who was officially deputized by the City of Oakland, California to provide medical cannabis under California's Compassionate Use Act (Prop. 215). The busted operation was a nursery of small plants patients could take home for growing a personal medicine garden. For providing safe access to one of God's plants and a legal medicine, he was condemned to a Kafkaesque trial where none of the information about his official government duty was presented to the jury. Jurors were infuriated when they learned they had convicted a man who couldn't defend himself:
"It is the most horrible mistake I have ever made," said juror Marney Craig, a 58-year-old property manager who voted to convict. "I feel like we were sheep, we were manipulated."Marney's reaction would be everyone's if they understood the facts about marijuana. It's harm potential pales in comparison to alcohol. Death from teen binge drinking, bourbon-fueled domestic abuse and drunk driving are a few of the costs of this legal drug. Cannabis is non-toxic and has never caused an overdose.
Another public morality play posing as a criminal prosecution is the current imprisonment of Marc Emery in Saskatchewan, Canada. Emery was jailed with a trafficking charge for passing a joint after a speech he gave. Emery is a devoted legalization activist and entrepreneur from Vancouver, British Columbia. He's also a selfless philanthropist that plows most of the profits from his magazine, online tv station, and seed catalog into the BC Marijuana Party (includes Marc's prison blog), legal defense funds for persecuted medical patients, and one of the world's most innovative heroine rehab centers. A fiery but hopeful interview with Marc in prison can be found here.
Stop wasting tax dollars on making 700,000 arrests a year (one every 45 seconds) that only succeed in ruining the lives of citizens who choose to smoke and those who take the risks to serve them. Our farmers would be happy to grow medical and recreational marijuana. It's already one of the nation's top cash crops. A nation that produces artery clogging Big Macs can surely let struggling farmers grow an herb for laughter and health. Bring it into the open. No more gang killings in the street for territoy, put it in the grocery store, locked up next to the liquor and cigarettes.
We have to choose peace over war, knowledge over propaganda. Ask for the strength to be a peacemaker, to refuse silence, to open your mouth. Peace means that the free minds of responsible adults make decisions about what to put inside their bodies. Peace means depriving criminal syndicates of monopoly profits that prohibition gives them (Remember Al Capone?) and letting farmers, health clinics, and small business make an honest living.
Let the appropriate social strictures that we have for other legal drugs (e.g. "Don't drink alone.") promote safety for marijuana use. Don't let minors buy pot, but don't lie to them either. We have enough sons and daughters dying in a faraway desert, no more dead for drugs on the streets:
War - I despiseIt's time to stop trampling on human freedoms with ideologies of fear. It's time to legalize marijuana and end the War on Some Drugs.
'Cause it means destruction
Of innocent lives
War means tears
To thousands of mothers how
When their sons go off to fight
And lose their lives
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