館長提言　ドラッグ戦争を終結せよ

written by
RICHARD M. DAVIS
CURATOR U.S.A. HEMP MUSEUM
1992.

Prohibition -States Given Concurrent Power to Enforce

And of course Amendment XXI (21) to the Constitution of the United States:

Repeal of Prohibition: Repeal of 18th Amendment

Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

My point here is that our right to be intoxicated by liquor is one of our freedoms, guaranteed by the Constitution, and not included in the Eighteenth Amendment. There was nothing included that said you couldn't drink, that clearly would have been unconstitutional. The concept of liberty implies choice; why is it so difficult for us to see that the freedom to be intoxicated by our own choice of drugs, might be implied here. Am I wrong or was the purpose of prohibition to control intoxication, not alcohol which has legitimate uses, medical uses, or grapes which make great jam and jelly.

I want you to look very closely at this paradox as seen from my perspective. Cannabis/hemp/marijuana as a drug is kinder and gentler than drugs that we are free to use by law or lack of it, as we will see below. This makes no sense. This makes NO sense! In my 25 years of smoking marijuana daily (somebody had to do it, except for a few months off to run for congress) and living where everyone smoked, I never saw a fight (physical) between two people who were only smoking pot. Think what this safe mild intoxicant/medicinal herb could do to reduce stress and tension in our prisons, thereby increasing the safety of prisoners, guards, and other prison personnel, and people in our streets, by replacing alcohol and other more dangerous or violent drugs, and in our homes by decreasing domestic violence. In this day and age we need to party (you, yes you, have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Use it or lose it.

We need drug peace and respect for diversity in ways of living. We need a consistent drug policy, one based on truth and compassion: So that the police who come to my home and pull my Cannabis/hemp/marijuana plants can see the hypocrisy in their having a few beers after work; So the newscaster condemning marijuana, can see the hypocrisy in advertising a coffee maker; So that the minister or housewife or president of a company who believes the drug lies, can see the hypocrisy in their use of Valium; and, so that the judges who rule to retain prohibition, see the hypocrisy in their 'eight-a-day' Placidyl habit (See The Emperor...p.88), and juries like Ed Rosenthal's will be better informed and vote their conscience on stupid laws.

Let's compare illegal Cannabis hemp/marijuana with legal alcohol, and believe me I don't favor another alcohol prohibition, from The Emperor...:

"There are many terrible drug habits. The worst of which is alcohol, in both numbers of users and the anti-social behavior associated with extreme use. Alcoholism is the leading cause of teenage deaths. About 8,000 American teenagers are killed each year and 40,000 are maimed from mixing alcohol and driving. (MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving; SADD, Students Against Drunk Driving; NIDA, National Institute on Drug Abuse). In fact, the U.S. government/police statistics confirm the following strange numbers:

The mortality figures for alcohol use are 100,000 annually compared with ZERO marijuana deaths in 10,000 years of consumption.

From 40% to 50% of all murders and highway fatalities are alcohol related.

In fact, highway fatalities that are alcohol related might be as high as 90%, according to the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Herald Examiner.

Alcohol is also indicated in the majority (69% to 80%) of all child rape/incest cases; wife beating incidents are in the great majority (60% to 80%) alcohol influenced.

Heroin is indicated in 35% of burglaries, robberies, armed robberies, bank robberies, grand theft auto, etc.

And there were 324,000 arrests for simple marijuana possession in the U.S. in 1988, according to the Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. (P.83.) Latest figures are about 700,000 arrests in 2002

If this is what the Bush-Quayle synthetic drug people push as consistent drug policy, spending five to ten billion dollars each year (for many years) to eradicate the most important plant on earth and to enforce the big lie, it is no wonder our nation is suffering. We need a plan to establish drug peace, take the crime out, use a public health model to supply and treat addictions without the crime, and educate us all to the reality of drug use.

American farmers like myself all over this nation know how to produce and are producing a safe (zero deaths), non-toxic alternative to whatever drug might be causing you harm -legal or illegal. Indeed, Cannabis/hemp/marijuana is such a great stress reducer, etc., it will be highlighted in the section on our health crisis.

I am convinced that we have won the drug war; we have the truth on our side, George Bush (the first one) just won't admit it. Let's just vote him out! (We did and it didn't help, Clinton was just as bad). Again from The Emperor...(In case you were wondering why Dan Quayle is Vice President) we give you:

THE BUSH-QUAYLE-LILLY PHARMACEUTICAL SELL OUT

"In America, marijuana's most outspoken opponent is none other than President George Bush, former Director of the CIA, under Gerald Ford (1975 to January, 1977) and past director of President Reagan's "Drug Task Force" (1981 - 1988).

It is a little known fact that, after leaving the CIA in 1977, Bush was made director of Eli Lilly (drug company) by none other than Dan Quayle's father and family who owned controlling interest in the Lilly company and the Indianapolis Star.

The entire Bush family were large stockholders in Lilly, Abbott, Bristol and Pfizer, etc.

After Bush's disclosure of assets in 1979, it became public that Bush's family still has a large interest in Pfizer and substantial amounts of stock in the other aforementioned drug companies.

In fact, Bush actively lobbied illegally both within and without the Administration as Vice President in 1981 to permit drug companies to dump more unwanted, obsolete, or especially domestically-banned substances on unsuspecting Third World countries.

While Vice President, Bush continued to illegally act on behalf of pharmaceutical companies manufacturing in Puerto Rico. In 1981, Vice President Bush was personally ordered to stop lobbying the I.R.S. on behalf of the drug companies by the U.S. Supreme Court itself.

He did --but they (the pharmaceutical companies) still received a 23% additional tax break for their companies in Puerto Rico who make these American outlawed drugs for sale to Third World countries. OUTRAGEOUS!!"

We must plan to stop the madness, bring us all back to the natural cycles of Cannabis hemp/marijuana. This is one truth in natural cycles, that with nature life can go on and on. We must ask the Food and Drug Administration to produce a list ranking all drugs, legal and illegal, prescription and non-prescription according to their danger to us in deaths, overdoses, addictive power, complications, side effects, accidents, and so on. The legal-illegal designation is just part of the big lie. "Alcohol is more devastating to the human body than heroin," according to Dr. Dean Edell, KGO Radio, San Francisco, CA(7/20/1990, 1:30 p.m.).

We need a brand new approach to drugs. Repression to the tune of $10 billion each year ($5 billion for a harmless drug like hemp), will never work. We can cut the U.S. crime rate by 80% if we change our focus from that of illegality and repression to that of education, treatment, maintenance, and rehabilitation. According to Arlo Smith, District Attorney of San Francisco, 80% of crime is drug related. Fifty percent of crime is directly related to drugs -users, sellers, and thirty percent as burglary, theft, etc., for drug money. We can do better.

The President, should swiftly remove Cannabis sativa from its Schedule I designation (dangerous substance with no known medical value) where it was placed by Nixon and retained by Bush in 1989, despite all the evidence to the contrary. I'm sorry you two, Cannabis hemp/marijuana is medicine, and we the people are going to use it. And the other remarkable uses of this plant that have been held hostage by bogus marijuana laws.

One of the corporate men who worked to outlaw Cannabis hemp/marijuana was William Randolph Hearst. His main fear about hemp in the 1920's and 1930's was competition with Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division whose raw material was timber. Hemp lost, and since 1937, 70% of our forest that were cut were for paper. From The Emperor...:

"In the 1920's and 30's, Hearst newspaper chain led the deliberate new yellow journalism campaign to have hemp outlawed. From 1916 to 1937, as an example, the story of a car accident in which a marijuana cigarette was found would dominate the headlines for weeks, while alcohol-related car accidents (which outnumbered marijuana-connected accidents by more than 1,000 to 1) made only the back pages."

I will close this section with the following editorial by the grandson of Hearst.
"The solution is worse", and the United States is in denial.