Amsterdam.
The excellent reporting in the Metro Times by my colleagues Larry Gabriel and Curt Guyette has kept me up to date on the hope for a greener future in Michigan by means of the marijuana legalization initiative. I’m far away from home this month, trying to make sense of the repressive measures presently being championed and soon to be implemented by the Dutch government.
It’d be a beautiful thing if some of the rich people who back these petition drives — or even some of the millionaires among us who’ve never backed one before — would cough up some funds to help Matt Abel and the organizers of the citizens initiative take their battle against the forces of evil in this issue over the top this year in Michigan.
Whether or not someone gallops to the financial rescue of the struggle to end marijuana prohibition in 2012, however, it’s essential to remember that the issue will finally be decided not by money but by the majority of the citizens who support legalization and will sign the petition and go to the polls and cast their votes against prohibition once and for all.
Almost two-thirds of the voting population of Michigan favored the legalization of medical marijuana four years ago. Now there’s a bigger political base than ever in
support of the issue, starting with the 131,308 patient registrants certified by the state of Michigan by the end of 2011.
Even those medical marijuana patients who have little sympathy for recreational use per se will surely perceive the essential fact that the best way to get the police and the state’s attorney general out of their medical affairs is to get them out of the marijuana world altogether.
Once legalization is effected and marijuana prohibition joins alcohol prohibition on the fetid dust heap of history, anyone who uses marijuana for any reason will be free from state intervention in their personal lives — on that issue, at least.
Americans have been so brainwashed about weed by the authorities that have profited so immeasurably from marijuana prohibition for so long that it’s hard to grasp the immensity of the change in the life of the marijuana smoker when the police are no longer authorized to interfere with his or her activity — recreational, medicinal or otherwise.
Read complete article here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/20/battling-the-prohibitionists/