We live amongst amongst law and order. No matter where you reside you are expected to obey the laws that we are told are in place to protect us. However, if you respect your individual liberty you resist the law that is painted in tyranny.
Throughout history all resistance movements ignored certain laws those leaders viewed as tyrannical. While sitting in his jail cell in Birmingham Alabama civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. had a newspaper slipped under his cell that included a story about eight religious leaders calling him an anarchist and ”law breaker”. In his famous response to such lunacy M.L.K wrote, “ One has the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”. It is that belief that drives revolution. It is the disregard for immoral laws that drives a person to fight back and challenge the strong arm of a government that preaches freedom, but practises tyranny.
I break an unjust law everyday when I consume marijuana. In my view and in the view of other pot smokers no one has the right to tell me what I can or can't put in my own body. I own my body, not the government. So what I decide to place inside my body is my choice, especially when the substance I take has not directly caused the death of one soul. The laws against marijuana consumption are tyrannical and based on racism, dishonesty and corruption. It is because of that I smoke marijuana with no shame or stutter and I do not feel the need to defend myself. I used to drink a lot of alcohol and did so to drown in my own sorrows. I was not an alcoholic, but I frequently took trips to the liquor store. Marijuana opened my eyes, calmed me down and changed my perspective on things. And unlike beer I don't get drunk and stab some guy outside a bar for looking at me funny. Marijuana prohibition is a front against liberty and it is a law that many people including myself see as an assault on our freedoms
In his new book Liberty Defined, Ron Paul brilliantly defines civil disobedience as an act of patriotism where we are “standing up to the government when the government is wrong”. The act of civil disobedience “is a process whereby the weak and defenseless can resist the violence perpetuated by the state”. That violence has invaded the sanctity of our homes and in one case that violence that has been forced onto us by our government and law enforcement killed a family's dog just because a man was ratted out for consuming marijuana.
Those who read that and think of me in an unsavoury light are those who base their lives on laws and not morals. They think you must obey every law, no matter how stupid the law is. They drive the exact speed limit on the highway, cross streets when the light is red and they walk their dogs on leashes. Those law abiding citizens may blame me for all the violence and death inside the drug trade, but it is not me who shall be blamed. The politicians, the lobbyists and the corporate media should get the flack.All you have to do is look in a history book and see how unjust laws drive industries into the black market where they thrive and spread blood.
Look at all the crazy violence that has spewed all across Mexico as drug cartels flex their muscles by killing innocent people in insane numbers. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006 more than 37,000 people have been killed in drug war related violence. Calderon thought if he amped up military presence in Mexico he could fight fire with fire and defeat the cartels. He was wrong. Mass graves are being found in towns all over Mexico and its citizens are fed up with the violence.
The brutality of the drug war hit home for a famous Mexican author and poet named Javier Sicilia whose son Juan Francisco body was left in a car along with some of his friends. A drug cartel was responsible for the murder that enraged his father. In a public letter Javier condemned the war on drugs by writing, “ In this badly planned, badly executed and badly led war you (politicians) have put the country into a state of emergency”. That is true beyond a doubt. The escalating violence that has inflicted Mexico is the fault of the failed policy of the drug war.
When a popular product or service is banned the consumer doesn't simply give up. If people want drugs, or guns they will get them. This causes an inflated price for the product that is controlled by criminals who have no option but to settle disputes with bloodshed. If you are shorted or if someone is trying to sell a drug you want to sell in your area you don't view that has competition, it is an attack on your wealth which causes you to respond with violence. Cocaine, marijuana and all other illegal drugs aren't regulated, nor are they sold by outstanding business owners. They are controlled by gangs and that is the fault not of the drug consumer. The cause of all of this is the prohibition of drugs.
Law enforcement has not learned from history and they are doomed to repeat it. When alcohol prohibition hit the United States in 1920 you heard the same things about alcohol you hear about drugs today. Alcohol was blamed for every societal ill and purest Christians responded by going to Washington to ban alcohol and solve every single problem in one swoop. Thirteen years later politicians and the public came to their senses and abolished prohibition. If only today's politicians weren't so stubborn and cowardly.
The failure of prohibition was succinctly expressed by a Cato Institute policy analysis written by Mark Thornton in 1991. In the report he noted all of the familiar failures that are shown daily in today's prohibition of drugs; escalating law enforcement costs, drugs controlled by cartels and extraordinary violence.
Thornton notes that alcohol consumption dropped at the start of prohibition, but increased frequently until the stupid law was squashed. In 1921 just over 0.2 gallons of alcohol was consumed. By 1929 that number increased to 1.3 gallons per capita. Prohibition did not stop people from buying booze. They just went underground and drank liquor that was not made properly. They handed Al Capone their money and he spread violence throughout Chicago. Prohibition reared its ugly head in 1929 when Al Capone's gang executed members of the North Side Irish Gang which was led by Bugs Moran. Six members of the gang and one other were killed in the murders known today as The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. That event showcased the failure of prohibition and it should serve as an example to present day law enforcement.
If drugs were legal and sold in stores we would not have gangs controlling the market. We would not have blood staining our streets. When marijuana is legalized the product would be sold it stores, taxed and regulated and legal marijuana would hurt drug cartels. Before medicinal marijuana laws all marijuana came from Mexico and Columbia. Now with medicinal marijuana laws allowing people to legally cultivate marijuana the cartels have been hurt. More than 60% the cartels 13.8 billion dollar revenue in 2006 came from marijuana. Just imagine how much money would be lost to the cartels if marijuana was legalized.
Making possession of marijuana has not worked, just like the prohibition on alcohol didn't work. If you live in a state that does not allow you to carry a gun you will go to the black market to buy that gun. It all makes perfect sense, but sense is not what law enforcement and our politicians use to enact laws. They use laws to control our decisions and non violent actions.
Henry D Thoreau once wrote that “ All men recognize the right to revolution: that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist the government when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable”. The Vietnam protestors who burned their draft cards and held anti war banners all over America in the 60's and 70's were not the “ anti-Americans” that the warmongers who supported the Vietnam war thought they were. They were more patriotic than the war supporters were. They new that the war in Vietnam was an unjust expansion of imperialism and they did not want to die for an empire who thought their lives were meaningless. The war protests have been remembered as a cultural bookmark of the 60's and is still thought of to this day.
With all of this talk about how Washington has failed America and how much power they wield civil disobedience must be practised by those who feel that the government has far outstretched its needs and powers. If government is “ of the people, by the people and for the people” it is about time that the people stand up and through civil disobedience the citizenry must act and hold the tyrants in government accountable.
It is the American government that has practised slow and precise tyranny which has made them incredibly inefficient. Their failure to stop drug use is a prime example of how laws against liberty are ignored and challenged. Politicians can use their objection to Obamacare as an example on how much they cherish liberty, but that is a blatant lie. We have come to expect that politicians decide which rights you can have and which liberties you can hold. It is not their choice to make those decisions. Those choices are to be made by us.
If politicians cared about our liberty like they claim they do the draconian drug laws would be abolished and they would allow us to consume what we want to consume. They must recognize that our bodies are ours and not theirs. We are adults who can make our own choices and as long as those choices don't harm another soul those choices are just. Whether it is health care, economics or business laws we the people have the right to make our own decisions and our government should be banished from policing us. It is time that policy makers drop the guns, and drop our pocket books and allow us to make our own individual decisions. If they don't the black market will continue to control the drug trade and the violence will increase to an insane level.
No comments:
Post a Comment