Consider now a few individual cases (described in Ford's and Robinson's books), showing the utter horror and inhumanity of the USA-DEA's war on Cannabis sativa:

I am an inmate in an Alabama prison, serving a life sentence without parole for possession of 10.9 pounds of the hemp that grows wild in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and several other states. This all started out as a joke because this stuff looked like marijuana. I brought some of it back from Missouri. It will not make you high no matter how much of it you smoke. The Alabama crime lab said it was marijuana, and the trial judge denied us permission to obtain a sample and have our own testing done to see if it had any drug in it. I feel like the only reason I am here is because I am a poor person and had to have an Alabama court-appointed attorney, He only talked to me two times for less than five minutes at a time before I went to trial.  — Vernon McEhay, Springville, Alabama

P.S.: There are several people in the Alabama Department of Corrections, serving life and life without parole sentences for marijuana. One man here got life for one joint.

My home was raided on September 27, 1991. It was „no-knock" search for marijuana cultivation. I have no left leg and my hips have been replaced, along with my knees, left shoulder and elbow. I have had a kidney transplant also, and smoke marijuana for nausea. These animals put me on the floor and tore my home apart. They found a bong (pot pipe). They gave me a citation and walked out. They left my home with no doors on it, and me on the floor. It took me about 40 minutes to find a way to get off the floor. I spent ten years in the service so that people could live free in this country, but I guess things don't work out that way in America. — Guy, Nebraska (a disabled war veteran).

James Cox, a cancer patient who grew hemp for use as an anti-emetic with his chemotherapy, was convicted for it in Missouri and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Orland Foster, an AIDS patient who also grew hemp for medical purpose in North Carolina, served fifteen months for the same offense. Foster's cellmate served less time — for murder. The case of paraplegic Jim Montgomerry, who smoked marijuana to relieve his muscle spasms, is even more inhuman. Sheriffs in Sayre, Oklahoma, found two ounces of marijuana in the pouch on his wheelchair. He was convicted by a jury that sentenced him to life imprisonment plus sixteen years. The judge later reduced the sentence to ten years. He was released on appeal bond after nearly a year in a prison hospital where he developed a life-threatening infection. The government also tried to forfeit Montgomery's home, which he shared with his widowed mother.

Such stories are not uncommon; they probably happen every day. They effectively demonstrate how low the U.S. government has fallen. If law enforcement agents for a government-imposed morality can invade your house in the middle of the night without a search warrant; if they can forfeit your cash, your car, your house, and whatever else you might own without any evidence other than hearsay; if you can be thrown in prison for the rest of your life (plus another 20 years or some other such sentencing nonsense) for growing or possessing marijuana or hemp, even if only for your personal use — then in what sense is the United States a democracy committed to protecting individual freedom? Excluding torture and outright executions, what is it that DEA's not-evil American boys and girls cannot do that fascists under Hitler, Mussolini or Franco could do?

Of the men responsible for trashing the Bill of Rights, particularly the 4th Amendment, in their attempt to eliminate drug use is President Ronald Reagan, who helped push the Omnibus Crime Bill, which gave the law enforcement the right to confiscate property of anyone suspected of drug violations. As Mike Gray points out in Drug Crazy, property could now be forfeited first, then „charges would be filed, then the evidence would be gathered-the exact reverse of due process." As a result, law enforcement agencies could now focus on asset forfeiture rather than crime suppression; „the cop on the beat now had a cash incentive to capture property instead of criminals," as Gray says. It was "a return to the halcyon days of medieval justice. Generations of property rights going back to the Magna Carta were set aside in the name of legal efficiency." It was the act of using seizures „to finance the king's army .. that led Hancock and Jefferson and Adams to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. If they were with us today, they would surely be at our throats."

In its current war on hemp and marijuana, the U.S. government has fallen even lower than during the McCarthy era or the Prohibition. It has now turned against an average American-and the planet itself-with an unprecedented irrationality and arrogance.

In a 1970 New York Times editorial, Gore Vidal argued prophetically that the drug problem would only get worse, because the U.S. government has a vested interest in not solving the problem of drug abuse through legalization as there is lots of money to be made in waging war on drugs, marijuana in particular. The prospect of fighting sin and making money is the ultimate attraction to American politicians. DEA and ONDCP careerists need money to justify their loony jobs of suppressing hemp and marijuana and of invading medicinal marijuana dispensaries and brutalizing marijuana patients and anybody who, instead of drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco, prefers a joint to get a high, a much safer alternative. The idiocy of allowing alcohol and tobacco while banning natural THC is mind boggling. It is a story from the theatre of the absurd. To throw a suffering, non-violent person in prison just because he or she has smoked pot to relieve pain can only be done by a sub-human monster who has lost all capacity for reason and compassion. In its anti-Cannabis policy, the U.S. government seems to have become such a mindless and heartless monster.

Despite the 1st Amendment's legal provision for church-state separation, the U.S. government has never really abandoned the preposterous Puritan idea that the business of the government is to impose a Christian morality on the whole nation, to care for its „moral fiber," to eradicate sin as defined by the Bible or a Bible-reading politician. The war on marijuana and hemp is also motivated by a desire of the government to ensure moral standards according to the corporate and political interests of those who wield political power. Hemp was once considered very important for America, as for example in the "Grow Hemp for the War" campaign during the Second World War. Then the government reversed itself, once the military threat was over, and banned hemp cultivation.

Likewise, marijuana was first feared and banned because of its presumed ability to induce violence in its user. When this became transparently untrue, public policy shapers came up with another falsehood, that marijuana would induce indolence and pacifism, as if being a pacifist was some kind of crime. (Well, it may be a crime, because pacifism will be a threat to the glorification of the military in American culture and so a threat to established political and military interests.)

Whatever the causes of the USA-DEA cabal's war on American people, this much is clear: contrary to the endless talk about freedom, free market, and individual self-reliance-for which presumably the U.S. government stands-the beneficiaries of the established political order in the United States would be terrified if both individuals and states could actually become self-reliant, democratic, and free to compete honestly in a real free market economy. Here's why:

A self-reliant American could purchase a few good marijuana and hemp seeds, and this initial investment of a few bucks will provide a lifetime medication for pain, asthma, nausea and the several other uses mentioned above, as well as a variety of other benefits, including very nutritious food, a cleaner environment, and perhaps even artistic inspiration, as was documented by brilliant American jazz musicians who smoked pot in defiance of the inhuman American drug laws and that pathetic jazz hater, Anslinger.

But powerful pharmaceutical companies would not make much profit if marijuana became legal medicine. If it did, you could smoke a joint for medical reasons for perhaps 30 cents (or nothing if you grew your own marijuana), instead of swallowing a much more expensive capsule with synthetic Unimed-made THC (Marinol), incomparably less effective than smoking natural THC. And while drug companies patent a synthetic THC (or any synthetic medicine) and make millions of dollars, they cannot patent marijuana, which grows free for all. Interestingly, as Ford reports in his book, the U.S. government produces synthetic THC for only five cents a dose, while allowing Unimed Pharmaceuticals to market it for up to $8 a capsule. As a result, taking Marinol, Ford says, can cost a person thirteen thousand dollars a year, from which a nice profit can be made by a corporation in a lucrative, mutually supportive corporate cooperation with the U.S. government, which is what our government is particularly good at.

Marijuana being a better, cheaper, and, in particular, safer alternative, a self-reliant American may not be much interested any more in buying alcohol or tobacco (thus threatening other corporate interests). Individual freedom and self-reliance could be very cheap-and very dangerous to the government and big business. All this is really common sense, which-as we, rationalists, know very well-is extremely uncommon.

On the state level, real democracy, freedom, and free-market economy pose even worse threats to the established corporate, U.S.-dominated world order. As Stephen H. Kawamoto argues in „The Great Marijuana Conspiracy":

Cannabis … legalization could change the world economy drastically… Cannabis legalization is a threat to the New World Order because it represents a green industry that could help a nation abandon its dependence on a petroleum-based society that supplies the pharmaceutical and plastics industries… In fact, it could strengthen each nation, making each one sovereign. And this, more than anything is what the financial capitalists fear the most.

Po przeczytaniu tego tekstu, czytelnicy często wybierają też: Why We Need To Teach Secular Humanism From Dolan’s book: A Parade of Quotations

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