Pubdate: Wed, 28 Sep 2005
Source: Los Angeles City Beat (CA)
Copyright: 2005 Southland Publishing
Contact:  http://www.lacitybeat.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2972
Author: Ivan Smason
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v05/n1514/a07.html

FREEDOM OF CHOICES

Dean Kuipers's "The Strange Seedy Case of Marc Emery, Canadian" [Cover
story, Sept. 22] illustrates the inquisitorial quality of our
government's global crusade against God's cannabis plant and its users.

I recall another instance when a government similarly sought to render
its self-proclaimed "justice" upon persons outside its jurisdictional
bounds, and that was when a churchgoing German one did that to
non-German Jews. The Rome-based Inquisition was another extra-national
adjudicative effort conducted under the guises of "honorable" and
"legal" proceedings. Similar forces dispossessed and murdered our own
falsely maligned peace-pipe-sharing Native American forebears to
reservations, Indian gaming, riverboat casinos, multi-state lotteries,
and incessantly televised celebrity poker contests. The same
antinomians literally enslaved our similarly maligned American black
citizens, before subsequently "gracing" them (and us) with
segregation, lynching, disenfranchisement, unequal opportunity, and a
judicial swap of Clarence Thomas for the late and honorable Justice
Thurgood Marshall.

And the same proselytizing forces rehearsed for this cannabis
prohibition by falsely maligning and then prohibiting the moderate,
personal, and private cultivation and use of God's opium poppies. I'm
just saying that there was nothing wrong with grandma making you a
little homegrown opium tea when your pain, insomnia, or creative
whimsy required a little amelioration.

Such tender loving care enriched humanity and culture for millennia
before the Roosevelts, Bushes, and overwhelming Christianizing media
machines dictated that they and their pharmaceutical trust fund selves
knew better.

The prohibitionists disingenuously blur the notions of unreasonable
abuse and reasonable use in order to propagate the outrageous lie that
there is no difference between the use and abuse of cannabis. But,
there is a difference between the use and abuse of cannabis, just as
there is a difference between the use and abuse of discretion,
process, power, firearms, matches, forks and knives, solvents,
privilege, religion (including Christianity), alcohol, free time,
fatty foods, antibiotics, steroids, coffee and chocolate, opium
poppies, sweeteners, over-the-counter and prescription medications,
salt, and so on. Each of these entities can be abused. But that fact
does not justify prohibiting the use of any one of them.

History and reason, thus, also serve to illustrate that our "American"
government's unconstitutionally sought extradition of heroic Canadian
Marc Emery reflects the extent to which the cannabis prohibition is
immoderate, inherently wrong, and outright evil.

Ivan Smason, Ph.D., J.D.

Santa Monica
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