 ( slightly modified presentation recently
given to the phi theta kappa honors at the University of Washington, on cannabis
reform.)
My name is Vivian McPeak, and I am the executive director of the Seattle Hempfest , attended by 170,000 people in 2003. I have been involved in marijuana law reform for 20 years, and am a legal medical marijuana patient in the state of Washington. The following is my heart-song about the laws against our sacred sacrament, the healing herb Cannabis.
I want to start off by stating that smoking pot is not good for you, even if you are a medical patient. It may relieve your symptoms, but inhaling smoke is generally not good for the lungs. Vaporizing is much preferred. I don't see the issue as being whether or not pot is harmful...even to a minute degree, and I'd like to make that clear up front.
The issue, to me, that adults in a free society should possess the right to make their own educated and informed choices about what they put in the sovereignty of their most sacred personal possession... their bodies. Their temple.
Those choices should be based upon truthful and accurate information, not lies, half truths, distortions and misinformation.
I think this is an easy issue to debate. I think the facts show that marijuana does not pose a risk to society that is equal to the harm that pot prohibition causes. That the act of being high on pot does not warrant incarcerating the user in a jail or prison.
Marijuana has been used as an agent to alter one's consciousness since ancient times. It was described in a Chinese compendium traditionally considered to date from 2737 BC. It's use spread from China to India, and then to N Africa and reached Europe at least as early as AD 500.
But it's been Since the Harrison Act of 1907 that, in America, these laws, fueled by racism, bigotry and greed, have been eroding the thin membrane that seeks to separate our society from that of a parental nanny state that imposes totalitarian laws against consensual victimless acts of sovereign adult citizens. And that to me is not a liberal issue, but an inherently conservative one. I am a hippie, so naturally I am ultra-liberal, but it seems like the conservatives should be all over this one, less government intrusion and whatnot.
More recently, marijuana remains the third most popular recreational drug of choice in the United States despite 60 years of criminal prohibition. According to government figures, nearly 70 million Americans have smoked marijuana at some time in their lives. Of these, 18 million have smoked marijuana within the last year, and ten million are regular marijuana smokers.
The vast majority of these individuals are otherwise law-abiding citizens who work hard, raise families, and contribute to their communities. They are not part of the crime problem and should not be treated as criminals.
The drug warriors would say it's the risk factor. Well, what is the risk? That there will be a bunch of people high on pot? I guess you could argue that in the US we have 700,000 cannabis users off the streets. But how does that make our society a safer place? They will argue that pot leads to other things. But in America we don't incarcerate people to prevent something from happening. There has to be a crime. Let's face it...the crime is that someone may get high on marijuana. Well, what does that mean? They will get relaxed, for maybe 30 minutes to a coupla of hours. They may giggle, if they are newbies to being stoned, and they may get really hungry a little while later. In extreme cases they may fall asleep on the couch in front of the cartoons with a bag of potato chips.
How many crimes do we have in America that have no victim other than the individual that is the criminal? It defies logic to imprison someone for 5 years for slightly relaxing themselves for 30 minutes, and committing no actual crime, other than that.
But because of harsh federal and state penalties, marijuana offenders today may be sentenced to lengthy jail terms. 5, 10, 30 years, even life, no chance of parole if it is a federal drug offense. Even those who avoid incarceration are subject to an array of additional punishments, including loss of driver's license (even where the offense is not driving related), loss of occupational license, loss of child custody, loss of federal benefits, and removal from public housing. For choosing to relax with pot instead of alcohol. Deadly, toxic, addictive alcohol.
Under state and federal forfeiture laws, many suspected marijuana offenders lose their cars, cash, boats, land, business equipment, and houses. Eighty percent of the individuals whose assets are seized are never charged with a crime.
One marijuana conviction can permanently render you ineligible, for the rest of your life, to receive welfare, student loan and public housing. What sense does it make to deny any Americans the ability to better themselves for the rest of their life, solely because they relaxed, or enabled someone else to relax on pot...And some deny that there is a culture-war component to America's pot laws! Then why are murderers, rapist and pedophiles not faced with the same harsh additional penalties if the Drugwar is not a culturally biased war effort against a particular cross section of Americans?
Ever seen a rapist have their car or house taken? or a thief?
Marijuana prohibition costs taxpayers at least $7.5 billion annually. This is an enormous waste of scarce federal dollars that should be used to target violent crime.
Have you ever heard this statement:
"I didn't mean to beat you honey, it was the pot!"
Or of someone robbing a bank to satisfy their pot addiction.
Or a marijuana related drive by shooting?
Or heard of someone pissing their pants clutching a brown paper bag of joints.
How's this one...a pot lab exploding and sending toxic gasses throughout the neighborhood?
But the laws in America outlawing cannabis use go way farther then any logic can support:
Imagine, if you will, having cancer ravaging your body. You are in unspeakable pain, you are facing your own mortality, imagine this being yourself. Indulge me and envision yourself wrought with cancer, or AIDS, or multiple sclerosis. Unbearable pain that you are forced to bear. Your doctors prescribe you powerful and dangerous narcotics that attack your immune system and fog the very light of life, glazing your eyes, obscuring your last moments with your family and friends, your last days with sunlight and blue skies. Your last days in your body with your name...for eternity.
And you find out that there is a majick plant. Like a miracle it grows wild, from the earth, and possesses some amazing properties. It can help you eat when your body rejects every bite of food you try to take to live. It can mask your pain, allowing the blue skies and flowers to re-enter your view. It can relax the spasms in your muscles that cripple you with agony.
That would be a nice end to this story, wouldn't it? But wait, there's more. Imagine an army of black clad faceless shielded troopers breaking down your doors and rushing into your sacred home. Laser dots cover your chest and head, and those of your family, children and friends. You are handcuffed and thrown down on the floor. They take you away and deposit you, like a an animal, into a cell, barren and cold. They persecute you for having some flowers from the majick plant. You are ridiculed and put before a jury. Not of your peers, not of sick dying people. A jury of people who have been misinformed, Of people good who fear for their children and their neighborhoods but who have been taught lies about your culture.
Like a Salem witch trial, everything you say to explain, to defend yourself, falls on deaf ears. You are convicted of a crime against humanity and taken away from your family to be housed with murders, common thieves, rapists and pedophiles.
This is a dramatic but accurate worse case scenario of what happens somewhere in America every day
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My dad died in my home of metastatic brain and lung cancer a year ago last January. When he showed up at my door after walking out on his radiation therapy, he looked like a skeleton. He was 6 feet tall and weighted 100 pounds. His hair was gone and he had radiation burns on the side of his head.
After watching him be unable to hold down even an egg for the first three days, I knew that he would be dead within a few weeks at best. I told my wife that we had to try giving my dad, a lifelong drinker and tobacco smoker, some marijuana in an attempt to get him to eat something he could hold down. My wife and I made a very strong batch of pot brownies with a thick green hue. I approached my dad, whom I had set up in his own room in our house with his cable TV, heater, and hide-a-bed. I told him, "Dad, this is medicine, not candy. You’re very thin and you need to take it very slow. I have to do some errands. Eat one of these and I’ll be back in an hour and see how you’re doing."
After a few hours I returned home. I went into my dad’s room and asked him how he was. He said, "Son, I’m a little tipsy. Could it be the brownies?" "I dunno dad, let’s take a look," I said as I lifted the foil off the pan containing the stony baked goods. "Jesus, dad!" I exclaimed. He had eaten four big honkin’ chunks of brownie.
"Take me to the store," he said. I took him, who now weighed around 95 pounds and walked on toothpick spindly legs, to the supermarket. He proceeded to buy a bag of pasta, some Paul Newman’s spaghetti sauce, a berry pie, and a quart of ice cream. That night he ate a heaping plate of pasta and had a slice of pie and two scoops of ice cream.
He went on to stay stable for three months at 85 pounds. His doctor had originally told me to "just keep him hydrated, he only has a matter of weeks left." They expected me to just let my father wither away and die, even though he was still totally coherent, full of life, humor, and talking up a storm.
The nurses were stunned at the fact that he was still alive after two months:
"Bill, you have weighed 85 pounds for two months. You are an anomaly. I don’t understand."
"My son gives me magic brownies," he said. I stood there horrified, motioning for him to shut up. "He puts marijuana in them." I was terrified. The response was always similar, as the nurses rotated and every week there was almost always someone new. "Really, how much does he put in them? Is it the flowers or the leaves?" They obviously saw the amazing power of the therapeutic herb. They never said a word to the authorities. But they grilled me on the amount and type of bud I was using.
My dad went on to live a full four moths longer than the doctors predicted possible. He remained alert and ambulatory and he retained his sense of humor up until the last two days, when he went into a coma. I was holding his hand when he drew his last breath. I am convinced that marijuana gave him a few precious months of life. A few months Is worth any price when you will never see the one you love for an eternity.
The fact that I could have gone to jail enraged my dad, a veteran of the Korea War and someone who had previously respected the laws of America. I will always be proud and thankful that I was able to help him. He was a very special man.
The first week he arrived I sat down on the couch and he said bluntly, "Son, you know when I’m gonna die?" Stunned at such a question I sheepishly asked, "No dad, when?" "The last fucking’ minute," he said. "Until then I’m gonna live!"
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Between 1978 and 1996, 34 states passed laws recognizing marijuana's therapeutic value. Most recently, voters in several states passed laws allowing for the medical use of marijuana under a physician's supervision. Yet, states are severely limited in their ability to implement their medical use laws because of the federal prohibition of marijuana
*If someone commits a crime under the influence prosecute them. But how logical is it to make feeling a certain way in your own mind and body itself a criminal act? Who is it hurting? Where does it stop? What's next, criminalizing orgasms? Or fatty foods? They're bad for your health too. It shouldn't be a crime to feel good, that is lunacy and not freedom.
America, and the world appears to be going through some kind of collective catharsis.
It seems the core of reality has gone haywire somewhere . The unprecedented murderous attacks on our sovereign soil that occurred on Sept. 11, and the gripping fear and carnage that has rippled like a stack of dominos ever since.
And the treasonous corruption that has infiltrated the highest levels of the corporate world, shaking the financial foundations of our society. The cooked books and the outsourcing of American jobs.
The epidemic snatching, rape and murder of young women, and even children, unthinkable evil. Is there a war on rape? Is there a war on murder? No...just a war on drugs. And now a war on terrorism. The Orwellian governmental response to terrorism that threatens not the freedom of those who wish to destroy us, but threatens the very freedom of every single American under the Patriot and Rave Acts. More potentially dangerous to our freedoms than the terrorism itself. And this environment just fuels the war against cannabis users.
The phrase "due process of law" refers to the course of legal proceedings established by a nation or state to protect individual rights and liberties. In America, the structure of due process is enshrined in the Bill of Rights...the 1st 10 amendments to the Constitution. Statutory laws enacted by the elected legislative bodies must comply with the Constitution.
Due process and the courts are our ultimate defense against injustice and bad laws. Sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum penalties tie judge's hands to prevent them from using any discretion in drug cases. They must only look at the type and quantity of pot involved and the defendants criminal history, rather than consider the mitigating circumstances and individual characteristics of the person charged.
Pleas bargains and the Rico act (1970)
www.ricoact.com (federal conspiracy)
Plea bargains
paid confidential informants up to $250,000
convicted on hearsay evidence
Moral Hypocrisy
When one thinks of the War On Drugs, one usually thinks about hard drugs, cartels and violence. In reality, most of the War On Drugs focuses on Marijuana.
In 2000, there were 1,579,566 drug arrests in the US. Of those, 46.5 percent -- 734,497 arrests -- were for marijuana. There were 646,042 arrests for simple possession of marijuana in 2000. So of the 734,000 pot arrests, less than 100,000 were for selling or growing. More Americans are incarcerated for marijuana crimes than rape, robbery, aggravated assault and murder combined.
Prohibition Creates the Black Market
The very act of prohibition forces drugs onto the street, inflates prices, making profits for organized crime and creates impurities.. and as we have seen...doesn't curb drug use.
Moral Question
The question that faces anyone considering the moral standing of America's current policies called the War On Drugs is this: Do adults in a free society...
The War On Drugs budget of $16 Billion is more than the combined budgets of the commerce, state and interior departments. The urinalysis industry So, in the final urinalysis...a lot of money is spent looking into the private spaces of our bodies.
Renee Boje is an American professional graphic artist who was hired to work on a book by the late best selling author Peter McWilliams and Todd McCormick, a bone cancer patient who is currently incarcerated in a federal prison at Terminal Island California. McWilliams and McCormick responded to the passing of California's medical marijuana law Proposition 215 by growing a large amount of marijuana in a Bel Aire mansion where they held actual clinical trials looking at the differences in particular strains in effectiveness for treating things such as wasting syndrome from AIDS and chemotherapy, inter-ocular pressure from glaucoma, Spasticity disorders such as MS and grand mall epilepsy, chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis and migraines, and even PMS and clinical depression.
In July of 1997 Renee Boje was leaving the premises of Todd McCormick's home when she was intercepted during a DEA raid on the building. McCormick, McWilliams and Boje were all charged with possession, possession with intent to deliver, and manufacture of a control 1 substance. In addition, under the Rico Drug Kingpin Act, all the three were charged with felony conspiracy.
In an affidavit an agent said he saw a blond woman watering and moving some plants. McWilliams and McCormick testified that Renee had no part in the operation. She was a hired artist, and had become a friend.
She knew there was marijuana growing there. She admits that. Peter and Todd both got 5year minimum mandatory sentences. Peter died, suffocating on his own vomit in the bathtub after being denied his herbal appetite because he didn't want to fail a pee test or his mom and brother would lose their houses that they put up for his bail, he died before his sentencing. Peter McWilliams got a death sentence. The same Peter McWilliams who wrote 'Ain't.....Life 101. Todd, who has had bone cancer since he was 2, and you'll hear about Todd today from November Coalition's national vigil coordinator Kevin Black later, Todd has already been in prison almost two years. And Renee stands to spend 10yrs to life for refusing to testify against Peter and Todd.
Because the charges were federal California's law was meaningless, and worse that, that the three were prohibited to even mention to the court that Peter was dying and Todd was chronically and terribly ill. They had no defense.
I stand here today ashamed that Canada is a freer nation than ours, but thankful that they have given Renee shelter and protection from our country's marijuana laws. Since the Canada, please let Renee Boje stay put until we can make our country the freest in the world.
This mother earth is the living Gaia, and we are merely extensions of her radiant beauty. We are closer to victory in the struggle for fair marijuana policies than we3 have ever been, and someday soon the air will be thick with the billowing smokestacks of freedom blazin' as we come together responsibly, in peace, to bust out the serious nug session!
Toke it easy!
Vivian McPeak
Seattle Hemp Fest
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