Medicinal Marijuana Advocate Group

For 73 years now the our government has been acting like the kid who has burned his hand in the waffle iron a couple of times before they realize; ”Huh….that kind of burns.”
If there is anything that this government needs to remember, it is what happened the last time they tried this policy; it gave way to organized crime. This involved some very violent, nasty people. Someone should have noticed this was not going to go well. Now, since they’ve decided to start another prohibition we’ve had a multitude of very violent boarder issues.
So now instead of dealing with the mafia, we are dealing with very dangerous Cartels; and for what? A plant that does less damage than the previously prohibited alcohol and is infinitely more valuable, socially, as a valid medication. How often have you seen headlines such as: “The man wrapped his car around a tree not only killing himself but three others in the car with him. The authorities say the man was under the influence of marijuana.”? I have yet to see many of those. Unfortunately they do exist, but they’re also testing for a substance that can show up in your system for weeks after the fact. However, there is a legal substance that kills by the tens of thousands every year: alcohol. Unfortunately cannabis is considered a lot more dangerous than alcohol. Is it worth it? I don’t think so.
Everything can be abused, but that doesn’t mean government can stop it, or should try to stop it. Government goes astray when it tries to protect us from ourselves.
Many people fear that if cannabis were legal, there would be much more room for abuse. Though possible, there is little evidence to support that assumption. Marijuana is legal in the Netherlands, yet the Dutch are statistically less likely to smoke marijuana than Americans. Thirty-eight percent of American adolescents have smoked pot, while only twenty percent of Dutch teens have. One Dutch official told me that “we’ve succeeded in making pot boring.”
By contrast, what good has the drug war done? It’s been 40 years since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. Since then, our government has spent trillions of taxpayer dollars and officials keep announcing their “successes.” They are always holding press conferences showing off big drug busts. So it’s not like authorities aren’t trying.
We’ve locked up 2.3 million people, a higher percentage than any other country. That allows China to criticize America’s human-rights record because our prisons are “packed with inmates.”
Yet drugs are still everywhere. The war on drugs has, in many cases, ruined far more lives than the actual drugs themselves!
Need more proof? Fox News runs stories about Mexican cocaine cartels and marijuana gangs that smuggle drugs into Arizona. Few stop to think that legalization would end the violence. There are no Corona beer smugglers. Beer sellers don’t smuggle. They simply ship their product, legally. Drug laws cause drug crime.
The drug trade moved to Mexico partly because our government funded narcotics police in Colombia and sprayed the growing fields with herbicides. We announced it was a success! We cut way back on the Colombian drug trade. But so what? All we did was squeeze the balloon. The drug trade moved across the border to Peru, and now it’s moved to Mexico. So the new president of Mexico is squeezing the balloon. The illegal trafficking and violence are spilling over the border into the United States.
That’s what I call progress. It is the kind of progress we don’t need.