This famous 'brain on drugs' image used to propagate DARE's message has been relegated to the bottom of their rhetoric while the War on Drugs looks to re-load but with less ammo.
Now that the conversation of alternative healing has introduced cannabis to the general public in this country, more and more people will step out of the cannabis closet and admit, as President Obama so famously said, ‘yeah I smoked… and inhaled,’ and even took a dig at his Secretary of State’s husband’s response roughly 15 years ago suggesting Mr. Clinton must have inhaled as well.
Obama’s reply reveals how far we have come in the public rhetoric for cannabis as a topic of national conversation.
This conversation will still be met with resistance by the tea party right that don’t see this as a state’s rights issue, as well as some fringe conservative groups, but for the most part, resistance has been minimal and replaced with intrigue and interest.
One reason the idea of marijuana as a medicine is of interest to so many around the world, from doctors to drill sergeants, is because we all get sick. Period. It is not any more complicated than that. When one knows what it is like to be ill or care for a loved one who is, or see the damaging side-effects from what ‘traditional’ medicines can do, there is an overwhelming unifying message: If a quality of life can be improved during one’s moment of suffering, most reasonable people will not harm or hinder, but rather help to heal those who are asking to feel better.
Changing a law and having policy catch up to practice is another issue. Even those who are in a position of power can’t do much with it compared to the power in the law as it already stands or in the monumental power the allocated budgeting of line items has created in a drug war filled of badges with egos.
Creating an idea that an entire movement can support while pulling in those from outside a movement to support your cause is where the War on Drugs finds it’s adversary. Meanwhile the foot soldiers in the war are still snickering like a 5th grader who hears the word penis in sex education… not quite educated in the ways of sex yet, nor should a fifth grader, but the conversation is beginning and they are learning to understand something they had no concept of previously.
The drug war has spent far too much money and when a state needs more money, they know how to seize money and property as well. Legalized thievery has been a big part of the joke that has become the War on Drugs. It’s no laughing matter though, when those still fighting bully those who stopped fighting and are just in a corner smelling the flowers.
In this sense, the war on drugs has become a war on the people of this country, or any country that criminalizing the patient for possessing what they aren’t supposed to… and the seeking of what’s not to be found has a large enough budget to continue it, but with so many not fighting back, not resisting, but rather instilling the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King and using tools to change the climate for public debate, we have a clear lens into what the State will do.
Abbie Hoffman knew what they were capable of in Chicago in ’68, and while even Hunter S. Thompson couldn’t believe an America had it in her to commit herself to violent acts on her own citizens, the War on Drugs has been a smoke signal for a War on Me.
It’s your war, however, there have been a strong and vocal group that have said ‘Basta Ya!’, ‘Enough!’ and when that group becomes even larger and their voice becomes even louder and more unified then even the War on Drugs will see how ‘off drugs’ it has been, like a schizophrenic off their meds.
Any Questions?
