The Real Potheads
– by David Matthews 2
They say that folks here in Georgia are not the sharpest tacks in the box. Research, sadly, continually confirms this. Georgia always ranks near the bottom in terms of education. Our academic institutions will spend ten times more for athletes than they will for regular students. School boards and teachers continually complain that their budgets are getting slashed to the core, and sometimes even through that. The only good thing Georgia educators can say about the quality of education is that they’re not in Alabama.
This is a state that will spend more for sports stadiums than on learning. But, hey, at least we know how to play football, right? Not like those “elite intellectuals” up north.
Now in case you have a hard time connecting the dots between this subject and the main subject of this article, understand that we elect the politicians that think like we do. We don’t care for those “uppity elite intellectuals”, because we’re told they’re useless in society. Hell, we won’t even buy salsa made in “New York City” (New York City!) because some commercial told us that it was wrong. That is how extreme we get with this institutionalized anti-intellectual stance.
So there’s this bill up for consideration in the Georgia legislature. It concerns the use of medicinal mari--… whoops, scratch that… cannabis oil to treat people, most notably children, that suffer from certain conditions, such as severe seizures.
It seems that the “acceptable” methods of dealing with these problems – in other words, all of the drugs by Big Pharma – just don’t seem to work. What a shock, right? But apparently cannabis oil does work.
There’s just one problem: cannabis oil comes from cannabis… a.k.a. marijuana. Marijuana has been declared illegal by the federal government, not to mention the State of Georgia and every other state with the exception of Colorado. For almost a century, we’ve been inundated with the continual script that says that marijuana is bad, wrong, illegal, immoral, destructive, and leads to death, destruction, destitution, immorality, post-nasal drip, that “not-so-fresh feeling”, not to mention a severe case of the munchies. It’s a “gateway drug”, don’t-cha-know? It leads to much stronger things… like late-night runs to Taco Bell. (Hey, someone’s keeping them open and busy at those times of the night.)
And the script is so damnably strong and so damnably all-encompassing that anything associated with marijuana is tarred with the same brush. Marijuana paraphernalia is wrong. Flags and stickers featuring the marijuana leaf are supposedly “red flags” to denote use. Even hemp, a cousin of the marijuana plant that has no drug effects whatsoever, has been outlawed even though all of our earlier flags and America’s founding documents were all made with hemp.
Not only does this automatic guilt-by-association part of the script include cannabis oil, but it also includes any kind of research that would validate legitimate use of cannabis oil.
Okay, so what government first made illegal, it can make legal again. The bill proposed sets up an oversight board, regulations as to how this would be used and who would use it, and immunity from arrest for people who use it. It doesn’t legalize marijuana itself. It doesn’t allow the creation of “grow houses” or “pot shops”. It only legalizes cannabis oil under certain conditions and only for certain people; and those people cannot get high off cannabis oil any more than they could get high off hemp.
The Georgia House saw no problem with it. They passed it overwhelmingly.
The Georgia Senate, however, has been taking their sweet time getting to a vote. In fact, with just four legislative days left (as of this column) before they adjourn for 2014, there is a possibility that they may just let the clock run out and let the whole thing die.
I’m sure you’re asking “why”, right? Well there is some talk about a dispute concerning which company makes the cannabis oil and how much money they would make off it.
But this commentator suspects there is something a little more primal behind the reluctance to pass this otherwise no-brainer of a bill. And that reason can be summed up in an equally primal sentence:
“Well, duh, War on Drugs!”
That’s right, boys and girls, it’s the script! It’s that damnable script from the cult of perpetual warfare that says that the government cannot give one inch of ground when it comes to their self-serving “War on Drugs”. No retreat! No surrender! No negotiations! No compromise! Starve the babies! Suffer the little children! Better to have the sick die in agony than to have their precious “drug warriors” give up the high ground!
We’re being forced to pay millions in tax money to pay for the state to go after marijuana plants and even what they call “synthetic marijuana”… which is a category that they can never legally define but “they know it when they see it”. They’ve already given law enforcement unlimited power to void the Constitution in order to go after this stuff! And now we’re turning around and asking legislators to allow cannabis oil – taken from the actual plant – to be used to treat certain medical conditions?
I’m actually surprised the legislation even got this far!
And if you thought that was bad enough, then try this: the actual bill doesn’t even authorize the distribution and sale of the cannabis oil! It’s only for research into it! Research!
There are parents that are petitioning legislators to pass this bill, hoping that it would give them access to this cannabis oil for their children who need it, and it turns out that all it does is it authorizes research for possible future distribution.
Go ahead and read the bill if you think I’m kidding. I have read it – all thirteen pages, twice – just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. It’s all for “continued research”!
And yet Georgia legislators are still hesitant about passing it, because doing to apparently would violate their extremist cultist stance on the “War on Drugs”!
Let’s get brutally honest here… this is the depth of stupidity we have reached when it comes to politics. We have a no-brainer legislation that would potentially help people – children – that need it to help get through life, and that legislation is being stymied and possibly even brought to a halt because doing so goes against some asinine political script!
These are the people we elect, folks! These are the legislators we send to the Gold Dome in our name and with our tax monies! If they’re siding with a script over actual taxpayers over something like this, then they’re fools. But if we continue to send them back to the Gold Dome, then they’re really not the idiots… we are. And it’s high time (no pun intended) that we wise up and realize this.
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