But why give a damn about the laws if it really is a "free country"? If "democracy" [means] doing what Congress/the Executives/the Supreme Court tells you until they tell you otherwise, I DON'T WANT A DEMOCRACY!


No one is suggesting that everyone simply follow the law (or every law) until the law changes. Personally, I choose not to risk my livelyhood by partaking of MJ. Others may choose differently and I support them in their choice, though it may ultimately be a foolish one. However, that does not mean simply rolling over or giving up on democracy all together. I am willing to take smaller risks, such as helping with Free Radio or suggesting to my friends that it would be ok for them to widely distribute an e-mail (using my name and PO box as the CAN-SPAM required mailing address) that I sent to them about the Marajuana Policy Project's position on HR 1528. I think that HR 1528 will probably die in committee if enough pressure is applied. Call Sam Farr at 429-1976 for starters. Before you can reverse a trend, you need to slow it down.


The Supreme Court decision seemed to suggest that at some point in the future the people's voice would be heard in Congress (by what means? by a national referendum, the mechanism for which does not currently exist in the US?). They questioned the administration's position concerning MJ's effectiveness as a medicine, but let stand its classification as a schedule 1 controlled substance. The Supreme court sometimes takes into account popular opinion (including international opinion and the legal trends in other countires) when it makes its decisions. Apparently the Medical MJ movement is not far enough along in this process to generate a favorable decision.


Sometimes laws are changed only after the situation on the ground is radically improved from
the way the law was written, such as the progress that has been made (before the last few laws were changed) concerning gay marriage. How to get the Feds (and the local cops) to stop enforcing their own drug laws when so much money is to be made prosecuting people and building prisons is a tough question to answer. But getting people to stop being paranoid about drug users would be one place to start. For instance, I was at a forum at UCSC recently where it was suggested that the data that drug war mongers were attempting to use to show a correlation between rates of drug use and rates of delinquency (such as robbing people to support a drug habit) was unreliable at best. Working on this perception that people have and changing it for the better may be one way to go. Medical MJ already has the support of 70% of the American public. But decriminalizing MJ for personal use only has the support of 40% or so. This is partly due to the perception of who the users are. Are they percieved to be young, husky criminals likely to steal your wife's purse to support their habit, or are they percieved to be either middle class down on their luck with a case of cancer or otherwise so differently-abled that they are not seen as being a threat to anyone.

I have heard one other person suggest that democracy and freedom are responsible for all the trouble in the world and that if we would just give that up in favor of a totalitarian communist state, things would be much better. While I embrace communism as an economic model, its political decision making process (including its tendency to limit freedom of speech) leaves something to be desired. If we did not have the Gerorge W Bush (or the John Kerry equivalent) brainwashing scheme afoot which calls blatant proffiteering and exploitation of labor "democracy" (as they do in Iraq), THEN things might be a whole lot better.