042{0}
Potty Mouth
cursed control
God. Damn. Let’s back the hell up. Yet a-fucking-gain. I mean, shit.
Do you know why marijuana is illegal in the first place? If not, then you’ve come to the right place. Not surprisingly, it all comes down to power, money, control.
What a shocker, eh? (And not {necessarily} of the “St. Louis” variety.)
You okay? Onward.
William Randolph Hearst was a NYC-based politician in the early 1900s who built a newspaper business with a journalistic style that largely ignored the truth to focus on sensationalizing stories. By all accounts, he was a racist bigot who paved the way for the modern tabloid. His life was the inspiration for the main character in Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane.
Anyway, long story short, he used his trademark “yellow journalism” to claim that cannabis led to violent crime, exploiting and fueling fears of American citizens on the heels of the Mexican Revolution as immigration spiked.
Back then, cannabis was widely used by practitioners of herbal medicine.
Hearst’s papers renamed the “drug” marijuana and created the nonsensical myth that it turned Mexicans into rapists. His motivation, if one applies logic to the subtle art of deductive reasoning, was to hamstring the hemp industry because it yielded a more eco-friendly and altogether better form of paper than the trees Hearst grew so accustomed to cheaply bulldozing.
My takeaway: W.R. Hearst was a greedy asshat. A selfish shit-stain. A bona fide motherfucker.
Hush up; you’re fine.
Bitch.
Do you wonder whether that’s meant to be a noun or verb?
Me, too.
Fast forward to 1970.
The federal government classifies cannabis as a Schedule I drug—which, to me, at this point, reeks of a lie that verges on a crime against humanity.
For reference, heroin is also a Schedule I drug, and for even more startling comparison, fentanyl is Schedule II.
Got that?
The federal government is essentially telling us the marijuana is worse than fentanyl, a synthetic substance 50-100 times more potent than morphine.
(This will forever boggle the mind.)
Do you know how many people have ever died of a marijuana overdose? It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of zero. The only way to die from cannabis would be to eat several tons of it, and at that point it’s not the chemicals that spell demise, it’s the ruptured gut resulting from extreme hyper-indulgence.
How many people die every year of prescription drugs, heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine?
You don’t need to look it up to know it’s a lot more than zero.
Consider your opinion on marijuana. Did it come from personal experience? Did Nancy Reagan tell you it was “bad” in a commercial over three decades ago?
Have you ever thought about what would happen if marijuana became legal all over the world?
Let’s start with the States.
First, the pharmaceutical industry would incur a huge financial blow. No wonder they relentlessly lobby bribe politicians to keep it illegal.
Mexican drug cartels would also take a massive hit since the illegal sale of weed now constitutes one of their main cash cows.
This is not surprising.
When we tell people they can’t have something, guess what they want.
In theory, a decrease in cartel activity would mean a decrease in gun violence and, by extension, outright murder.
Also the increasingly glaring issue of overcrowding in “correctional” institutions would enjoy significant alleviation.
When it comes to drug “offenders,” prisons don’t correct a damn thing, let alone behavior.
Funny how momentum works.
Recidivism rates don’t lie.
Overwhelmingly, the rightful legalization of cannabis will generate positive ripples all around.
Why wait?
Do the money-making machines currently profiting off its illegality really need any more favors and capital?
Annually, the unwinnable war on drugs costs about 50 billion dollars.
The United States of America boasts the highest incarceration rate in the entire world ahead of El Salvador and Turkmenistan.
In recent years, about half of all drug-related arrests have been for the possession of a small amount of marijuana.
These are your tax dollars at work. Locking people up for adding heat to a plant awarded to us by Earth.
Have you ever met an angry, violent drunk?
What about a giggly, hungry pothead?
One of those certainly seems more agreeable than the other.
In the 80s, cocaine became popular among wealthy Wall Street types.
Guess what color their skin was.
Concurrently, crack became popular among poor inner city types.
Guess which skin color was represented by this demographic.
Guess which offense carried the stiffer prison sentence.
The difference between cocaine and crack is that cocaine is pure, whereas crack is processed with and diluted by baking soda, yielding smokable rocks.
Same drug, but one is not as pure.
The less pure version carries the more severe penalty.
Does that make sense to you??
Consider Portugal, where drugs have been decriminalized since 2001. Meanwhile, usage has seen no significant increase; whereas, occurrences of drug-related death and disease have plummeted.
In European countries each year on average, about 21 people per million die of a drug overdose.
In Portugal, that number is 6.
In the States, 200 looms.
The American prison system has become a loophole around the abolishment of slavery.
In other words, it’s a way for the rich white men to round up and lock down black people.
The only thing criminal about the plant we call cannabis is its lingering illegality anywhere on the planet.
Cannabis won’t poison your blood or make your heart forget to beat.
The war on drugs is a joke, a moneymaking scheme, an inane charade that has gone on for quite long enough.
It has never worked.
In other words, it does not work.
(This is the part where I realize I’m trying to come alive through pixels because there’s no telling how many sentences will be completely different if you read them again in the future.
Perhaps you typically blow past this kind of stuff in your daily life.
Then again, perhaps it blows by you.)
The “war on drugs” will never work. It has got to be a mathematical impossibility by now.
Drugs are a solution in that they provide an escape from the incessant grind of the “real world.”
Inequality is the real issue in need of a good swarming tackle.
And to think that this all stems from the fact that some people have ancestors who absorbed more sunlight than others.
We all came from the same place.
Our species is remarkably resilient, as evidenced, among other ways, by the fact that we come in so many different sizes, shapes, and colors.
I know this isn’t difficult to understand. Why is it so hard to accept?
We are all running the same race.
We are all (at least partly) human.
Think any of that seems like a stretch?
Think slashing the frequency of illicit drug movement and distribution wouldn’t mean a significant decrease in gun violence?
Think the pharmaceutical industry, which spends more money [25.4 million in 2017] on political lobbying than all but two other entities, vigorously opposes the legalization of marijuana for any reason other than that they know it’ll dip into their astronomically deep pockets?
Remember back when the United States was a country by the people, for the people?
Me neither.
More people addicted to more pills means more money for Big Pharma.
Processed that yet? It equates with profit off misery.
| Top 5 Groups Lobbying Against Legalization of Marijuana 1.) Police 2.) Private Prisons 3.) Alcohol Industry 4.) Pharmaceutical Companies 5.) Prison Guards |
Could that list be any less surprising?
We need to realize that everyone knows the easy road does not yield an easy life.
This is simple science, and most of us are incredibly familiar.
When something comes easy, how much value can the reward possibly hold?
You’re aware of the sense of accomplishment earned by overcoming obstacles and improving yourself in order to complete a difficult task; however, by and large, we’re hypnotized, living one repetitive day at a time on a weekly loop, going through the motions, existing but not really living. Nothing good can come of it.
Merely to exist, light is not required.
That’s the difference. There are places in the universe where light isn’t.
For too long, we have taken what we can most easily get.
In other words, it’s harder to farm your own food than it is to swing by a drive-thru window.
Ease of access stirs up competing energies while availability of sedative fuel inspires a downward spiral into sedentary lifestyles.
In other words, the type of food readily available to the masses puts us in a sluggish fog.
In other words, it’s just a lot easier to sit around all day and eat shit.
Sedentary lifestyles breed inspired contempt.
Connections will ensue as ties sever.
Work a dead end job, feel stuck, get depressed, lose hope, choose death over life.
Whether good, bad or neutral, every thing that happens must have done so for a reason.
In other words, caused effects cause a different effect.
Bad things happen to good people.
Good stuff comes to bad people.
Neutrality leads to more of the same.
If something is bad, neutral usually means more bad.
If something is good, neutral yields more good.
In other words, today, we’re not doing so hot.
Most people don’t try to do anything about it.
Most people are stuck in neutral gear.
We need to undo a lot of bad stuff in order to tilt the balance back toward the greater good. Only then can we enjoy a neutral state to its fullest potential.
Imagine.
A positively charged state of universal wisdom balancing the deeply unparalleled wealth afforded by an expansive history of knowledge.
Even distribution of weight, time, resources. All within the friendly confines of light’s warmth.
Fairness.
The mental health plague stems from global inequality.
Weight is the only thing that we all must carry.
Why aren’t we sharing?
It’s maddening (as possibly, maybe, proven by the existence of this site).
I have to assume that healthy birds would rather die than remain caged, stuck, hopeless.
Mental health is not a disease; it’s a symptom of a greedy appetite for power that man got to taste after ages of enduring loneliness, starvation, and bitter cold.
We made it out of an Ice Age.
Over generations, desperation was the effect, hunger was the cause, greed was the result. Or something like that. Mix and match the pairs; it’ll probably make sense.
Still, I bring good news.
We humans are nothing if not adaptable.
(Have you started wondering which one of us is actually crazy yet?)
This should make it easier for us to all reunite, then fan back out and begin anew, taking our rightful place as shepherds upon Earth in a matter of time.
Our collective sense of adventure is a fire we’d do well to stoke.
Planet Earth is a ship that could use righting.
What are we waiting for?
What are you waiting for?
You may not know it—and if you do know it, then you may not care—but, technically, it is your move.
Don’t get me wrong.
We don’t have to share.
But look what happens when we don’t.
Better yet, would you look at what happens when we do?
We never knew what we were missing, did we?
