|
For The Pot Smokers
What a lazy ass bunch of dopers you are. My God, have you all no balls (the guys, not the girls)? I mean, really, how many of you do you think there are? How many of you do you think is either in jail, prison, out on bail, out on parole or probation, or awaiting trial for having pot on them? I’m not even going to start with them. Just know it is somewhere like 40 million of you smoke pot, while probably half of the inmates in jail now are there for a nonviolent “drug” crime. There are millions more either awaiting trial or in some kind of punishment that takes federal reserve notes from them. “That’s the problem with y’all. You’re ignorant.” It is not pot that is illegal; it is your freedom to enjoy it that is.
Are you to believe that our government is so much smarter than God (if you believe in that nonsense), that they knew enough that God had fucked-up when he created the marijuana plant so much so that they had to outlaw and try to eradicate it? Look at what they have been doing. This plant has had a large history in this country and the world. I’m not going to go into it right now because most of you know exactly what I am writing about. But have you really any clue what would happen if you all where to demanded a jury trial?
I have been an activist for the marijuana cause for many years. I first started smoking pot in the 70s, during the ninth grade. It was really pear pressure from the other students in my class that really had me trying it. I was born without eyelid mussels and have had five ocular plastic surgeries to correct it. They really didn’t take too well. And after one operation, I woke up with a substantial cut on the top of my head. Maybe they implanted something. Anyway, the kids all called me names and all thought I was a pot smoker so one day when we were all on a field trip to an amusement park I partook in smoking some with them. No big deal and I didn’t get high. But the second time...
When I first landed at The Compound, in Atlanta, the folks there were a marijuana legalization group called the Green Panthers. They later dropped that and started an organization called Action Unlimited. We worked with other legalization organizations such as C.A.M.P., the Collation Against Marijuana Prohibition, and NORMAL, the National Organization for the Referral of Marijuana Lawyers….I’m sorry, I mean the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Either way. We even had one of the founders of CAN, the Cannabis Action Network, Thor, living and working with us. Back in 1994 I met and worked with Gatewood Galbraith, in a small county in Kentucky, where he and a friend of mine at the time, were both up for charges, marijuana I think, or it was tied to marijuana demonstrating. This little brother, named Little Goat, wanted to fight them using my courtroom methods and techniques. Gatewood, a lawyer, did not. I’ve met and talked with Jack Herer at the 1992 National Rainbow Gathering, in Colorado and hung out with Phil Grande, around that time at the Compound. He was dating one of the housemates there and had just gotten fired by Michael Lang as Joe Cocker’s lead guitarist. While at the Compound [(by pound), as we used to call it], we hosted a high school television news show called channel one or something like that. One of the housemates brought the film crew into the warehouse and with a ski mask on, showed them a pound of marijuana and talked about the problems of buying from Mexico. We organized pot festivals, and made a parity t-shirt of the Olympic rings and flame replaced with pot leaves. We sold them at the Olympics. The Compound by pound sold a lot of weed…and we had nothing to fear. I was teaching them the law as it is written and not practiced. Once they learned that it was their freedom to enjoy the plant and not the plant itself that was illegal, things started to click. Also while I was living there, I wrote the “Justification for the Fourth American Revolution”, with the help of the housemates. And we fought them hard in court…not for pot, but for other victimless crimes.
The marijuana fight I was not into. I had a different way of attacking the problem, only I faced stiff opposition whenever I bought it up. My plan was for mass arrests, followed by mass paperwork, followed by hundreds of trials to clog up the courts. Only problem was, as was pointed out to me each time I tried to bring this up, was that most people had to go to work on Monday. So to have everyone get arrested and keep most of them in jail not paying the ransom/bail, just wasn’t going to work. That was always the problem; people just too busy or too scared to go to jail or trial. Damn potheads and their damn jobs. I thought you guys were supposed to be all lazy. I still had a solider or two to get arrested for us and be the guinea pig while we fought the law in court. But during the cleansing, if any of you want to challenge the laws, then sign the defection form when it is available, and pair up with a defected lawyer and have fun with it. There will be many laws and many angles to fight from which you will be able to chose. You have to remember, the only thing you are guilty of is your pursuit of happiness.
Our founding fathers started a revolution because they got taxed on some tea - tea, a plant. Even committed a felony in showing their disapproval of it when they dressed up as Indians and threw a bunch of it overboard in a Boston harbor. I cannot believe that those people, of that time, had more gumption to stop the tyranny, then we do for what they do to the marijuana plant today. Because what I see today, being out on the west cost, is a tyranny over our favorite plant, more tyrannical then the folks who stamped the tea back then. Oh, yeah, by the way, tea contains caffeine and caffeine is a drug.
My first experience with buying legal weed was in Colorado. I had returned to the state after a 20-year hiatus. Only this time it was legal to buy pot there without a prescription (that’s another thing I’ll get into later). So I go to the store. First things first, you give your driver’s license to the armed rent a cop at the door where he runs it through some electronic gizmo, after which he hands it back to you and asks you to sit down in the waiting room. When it is your turn, they call you by name. Apparently that gizmo gives my information to the dispensary. Now, they have two sides to the store; one for medical and one for recreational. The difference is, the recreational pot is at twice the price of the medical and not as good. So you can buy medical grade pot for between 5 and 10 dollars, while the recreational pot began at 20 dollars per gram. But of that 20 bucks you’re paying, 33% of that is going to the state for TAXES. A tax rate of 33%! That is ridiculous! The medical side is taxed at like 3%. When the King taxed the tea plant on the colonists they went wild, but when our government taxes the pot plant the kids stand moot. Why? They are just as tyrannical as the King of those days. So getting back, they pull the buds out of a big jar with chopsticks, weigh it in front of you, place it in a pill bottle and put a sticker on it with the name of the strain, the weight of it and your name electronically printed on it. Now they claim that they take the I.D.s to know who came into their store in case there is a break in. But it seems like a great way of the government to track you and how much you use. I don’t get it. Could you imagine if they did that with alcohol purchases? Or if they taxed their beer at a higher rate then the rest of the state? I know some add taxes, but… One more thing, Colorado has collected so much in taxes that they now have to give a refund to its taxpayers because they have a law that says they can only collect so much in taxes. Even the ones who voted “no” on legalization will be getting a kickback from the pot smokers. This is just wrong.
Washington State is another story. The pot stores are separated. They either sell to the medical patients or to the recreational buyers, not both. Now each recreational store is different. However, they all sell the same way, in prepackaged sealed bags or jars. This is a nice business they are putting together in Washington. The bags are all packaged to be marketable. Stores are nice and some sell a variety of products whereas others just sell pot. The shops are cool. They sell everything from edibles, to wax, to shatter, to flowers, pipe, shirts, etc. They display the different strains and products inside glass display cases. The bag and jars hang on a shelf behind them. But the prices would make you go back to the black market regs in a second if given the choice. One owner told me his tax liability is 46%. Their prices are on average $15 a gram, were you might find 2-gram packages form 20 to 25 bucks or some of the top shelf at 25 or 28 dollars a gram. Doesn’t matter. What do they tax beer at? If I purchase a six-pack of beer, drink it and try to drive - look out. But if we take that same 10 bucks, get a gram of weed, smoke it and get behind the wheel, as long as it is sativa, we’re okay. It’s when we’re smoking indica that we do 20 in 45 mile an hour zone. And what about the growers? What rate do they tax them at? I’d really like to know how much the shopkeeper gets out each gram they sell. I’d bet they’d be lucky if it were a buck or two. I’m sorry, but the “government” is taking way too much from a plant that is enjoyed by way too high a percentage of people. And why, because they let us have it? Probably. “Would you rather go to jail, or would you rather pay out the ass not to go to jail? We’ve put millions people in cages for this, most states still do.” And for that reason and that reason alone, us potheads should be leading the revolution against our tyrannical government.
Then there is Oregon, what a great state. They just started selling to recreational buyers. With them, it is similar to Colorado with one exception, NO TAXES! In Oregon, the medical stores are handing the recreational sales. This just started October 1, 2015. So you walk into their places of business and sign up to get weed. They enter your id into a database as well. I forget what it was in Colorado, but in Washington, you can buy one ounce at a time, while in Oregon, they only allow you to buy a quarter ounce (seven grams) per day. That really sucks for someone who smokes a lot and hates to shop. Right now, you can get a gram anywhere from 7 to 12 dollars. On January 1, 2016, they will start to tax at a rate of 17%. This is a state with no sales tax, yet it is placing a sales tax of 17% with the cities allowed to tax another 3%. That’s just wrong and tyrannical. And that rate was based on raising so much in tax revenues, only, the plant is selling at 3 times the rate they considered they would sell and it was that amount they settled on for that rate. So again…
After moving out to the west cost, my nerves have calmed down a lot. I can pretty much move around the states, with a bag of weed on me, and not have to feel the paranoia of being terrorized brought on by prohibition laws. I was at a hemp festival in Eugene, where they threw out joints to the crowd. How times are a changing. Knowing now, that even though I look like the stereotypical pothead, I will not be pulled over (for DWH) for no other reason than the cop wanting to do some fishing, is the greatest feeling to come out of these states’ growing up. I have a counter top now, where I place my marijuana, many strains, and no matter what my condition, I have the meds to handle it. It is peace.
So these are the problems we face. First, pot is legal and there were laws compelling farmers to grow it, until it was illegal, back to being legal for the war effort, back to being illegal. All of this is explained in Jack Herer’s “The Emperor Wears No Cloths”. All done by the government, all done for nefarious reasons. They made it illegal, but tell us if we want to change the law we all have to vote on it. What? We didn’t vote to make it illegal, so we shouldn’t have to fight the sheeple, who blindly follow your government, for our right to enjoy life. Let them overturn it, if they’re not tyrannical. The federal government tells us that it is as dangerous as heroin, yet tells us we can have it if we can change the law. Can we do that with heroin as well? Sure it’s dangerous. And even once we have gotten rid of their tyrannical law, they continue to rape us with the extra “fun” or “be glad you have it” tax they add on. We used to hear for years that “they” would never legalize it because they don’t know how to tax it. That was a lie. They told us it was as dangerous as PCP - it’s not even as dangerous as alcohol. All they have done is turn the rest of America against us so that they may keep it illegal. They have them so brainwashed it is really disgusting.
The war on marijuana has come to an end my brothers and sisters. From now on, under the New World, marijuana will be treated just like the common daisy. When you see the defector’s database ready, sign it. In the mean time, you could step up the fight against the tyranny. You could organize large numbers of people to do light-ups at your local police departments and FBI field offices. You could take the arrests and challenge them in court on all aspects of the plant not being illegal, but your freedom to enjoy it that has you before that jury. Just talk sense into them. Let them understand the fact that by voting guilty for you, they would be saying that they approve of the tyrannical law that punishes you for hurting no one in the world. How many trials do you think they will have to hold before they tell the police to stop arresting you? Get it. COY are ya? Now go do the right thing.
|
