From the Marijuana Policy Project:
On his way home from the hospital where he had received treatment for a severe intestinal blockage, 63-year-old cancer patient Jerome Schaffer was arrested by police, who placed handcuffs over his hospital ID bracelet and took him to jail. He was held overnight and charged with using marijuana to relieve the debilitating side effects of chemotherapy.
Last Tuesday, a Minnesota Senate committee held a hearing on the Marijuana Policy Project’s bill to protect medical marijuana patients like Schaffer from arrest and imprisonment … and Schaffer himself was there to testify.
Coincidence? I think not. Someone in law enforcement is trying to send a chilling message with this arrest.
This insane War On (SACWCNP) Drugs must end, especially when it comes to medicinal marijuana. How can anyone support the arrest of senior citizen cancer patients who are merely trying to find some quality of life?
There are just so many powerful interests with a stake in keeping the Drug War alive. Big Pharma, to name one, can’t have freely-growing plants which, when used in their raw, unprocessed, unpackaged, unpatentable form, will compete with their mood-altering, anti-nausea, or analgesic medicines priced at exhorbitant markup. Neither can Anheuser Busch, Miller, or Coors have a free plant competing with their recreational drug. So some old cancer patients might just have to go to jail.
Then there’s the police unions, the prison guard unions, the government agencies, prison construction companies, the textile industry, the fuel industry, the food industry, the paper industry, and a whole host of others who’d face some serious competition if the most useful plant known to mankind were allowed to grow freely*.
Marijuana is the lynchpin that holds the entire Drug War together. Tens of millions of Americans use marijuana, a rate a hundred to a thousand times more than users of the more lethal illicit drugs. Without “demon weed”, there’s just not enough druggies to justify the enormous budgets. Without the ganja that lasts in the urine for a month, there’s nothing left to drug-test for that can’t be flushed in 72 hours.
So the medical marijuana movement terrifies the drug warriors. They need to conflate this relatively benign herb with the dangerous manufactured drugs like heroin, cocaine, and most recently, meth. They need you to believe that all illegal drugs are bad because they are illegal because they are bad because they are illegal. If you start to see the cancer patient, the AIDS patient, or the spastic patient gain relief from marijuana with no side effects, you might begin to think that marijuana is more akin to aspirin than amphetamines.
They’ll frighten you with fake statistics like “today’s pot is not your father’s marijuana”, where they state that the potency of THC in weed has risen dramatically since the 1960’s. It’s not true, of course; there have always been many varieties of pot with varying potencies. In fact, the higher the potency the better it is for you, because you smoke less of it to attain the same result. Less smoke in the lungs is a good thing!
Despite the full force of the federal propaganda, though, a solid majority of Americans approve of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Ten states have laws on the books approving such use and four more stand poised to join them. And even when it comes to recreational use, most Americans realize that pot use is nothing to be afraid of. Who would you rather have living next door: some potheads or some meth cooks? Who would you want your daughter dating: a pothead or some raging alcoholic? Who would you rather have working in the cubicle next door: a pothead or a coke fiend?
Time is on our side. In the meantime, though, our government is going to continue to arrest and lock up sick people for the crime of getting relief from their illness. This insanity must stop!
*I’ve always wondered why Frito-Lay and other snack food makers don’t get involved with the marijuana policy reform movement? C’mon, who would benefit more from legal weed than the makers of Cheetos and Twinkies?
