Please don't take the blah blahs wrong. I'm just cutting the quotation short. Thanks for the reply. But I have a question.
I want the same thing as you. And I want more in that I want total legalization of all drugs and let the police handle people that are doing things that are out of line, such as driving intoxicated or stealing things. Most people that use drugs just want to get high or are medical users. Only a few become addicts. Addiction is a medical problem and not a police matter.
What I question in your response is the total rejection of any movement away from treating MJ as a class 1 drug OTHER than absolute cannabis freedom. In my mind, absolute freedom is the goal but the resistance to this is too high right now. I feel that a gradual approach is working. First, medical MJ, then decriminalization (as in OR law), then gradually expanding cannabis freedom until it is as accepted as alcohol.
For you, is it total cannabis freedom or no changes to our laws?
For the moment i'm struggling with your question.
I absolutely DO NOT want the laws to remain as they are. And honestly, i don't think addiction
to cannabis is a problem at all. Humans always repeat enjoyable activities, and cannabis is one of those things that you can do pretty much perpetually, and if you care about your own body, you'll figure out how to minimize the potential risks. Humans always have to figure out how to minimize risks in the activities they prefer (or otherwise necessary activities).
I think you're referencing my seeming "all or nothing" stance... but that's not quite accurate, because "nothing" is the least acceptable option of all, because that means no changes.
What i mean by that position, is that "all" is the ONLY acceptable outcome. Anything else is a waste of time and effort, and is only reinforcing the false justifications required to prohibit cannabis in the first place. Anything other than the absolute end of prohibition is failure on the most important part of the issue (at least for cannabis, preferably pretty much everything else too, but i wouldn't be upset if meth remained highly illegal, because it's destructive, and there are, and would become, far better alternatives; i doubt anyone would even want meth, if they didn't have to worry about state-sponsored violence over cannabis and shrooms).
To allow the prohibitionists to manipulate the movement in such a way that people are duped into an unacceptable compromise, "better than nothing," is to allow them to retain control, and partly justify enforcement of injustice. It would also, IMO, partly justify all the millions of innocent deaths caused by the state and its agents disregarding all contrary evidence, while manufacturing propaganda in order to keep it stigmatized. People often use emotions to decide. If they're allowed to believe cannabis needs to remain scheduled AT ALL, they'll continue claiming "it's dangerous," and it will be extremely difficult to get them to finally acknowledge their transgressions, which i think is the only way to end this: they have to be cornered and admit they're wrong, and that they're wrong to defend their wrongness, and etc.
We cannot allow them to falsely justify any part of their inexcusable genocide against people who want to use a plant to feel better, without harming anyone in the process.
We cannot allow them any wiggle room, because they have already unjustifiably terminated millions of people, just for cannabis. And that's not even including all the other unjustifiable actions against non-violent, non-cannabis drug users, aka "psychonauts."
IMO, we have already thoroughly and utterly invalidated their ONLY possible claim to attempt justification for cannabis prohibition, which is: "dangerous and no medicinal value."
Both have been proven wildly false, beyond any shadow of doubt.
They no longer have a single iota of validity for what they demand to continue imposing, which means it should end, completely, entirely, yesterday.
And they're still trying to act like it's justified. It's surreal. We cannot allow them to coerce an inappropriate compromise.
I'd vote for "legal everything but business" before i'd accept "schedule 2." Schedule 2 is just as bullshit as schedule 1. Neither are justifiable classifications.
Cannabis must be ranked below both alcohol and tobacco, and treated as the allegedly 114 TIMES LESS DANGEROUS than alcohol.
Not only can it not be schedule 1, with any validity (which means all enforcement is invalid... and they already know this, making it a deliberate abuse of power they do not actually get, which is treason!), it cannot be scheduled at all. That is the only acceptable outcome: unscheduled, no intervention at all, unless someone is somehow harming or depriving another in the process (which is a shift to punishing dangerous BEHAVIOR, rather than creating a legal fiction that assumes all cannabis use is somehow harmful to everyone, because it isn't, and can't be.
With the enforcement practices configured as they currently are, jaywalking can escalate to police murdering an innocent person. That cannot be allowed to be legally justified, because it cannot be logically or reasonably justified, and certainly cannot remain compatible with the parts of the constitution which should have prevented these unjust laws from being manufactured to begin with.
The fact is: they've claimed powers they don't actually legitimately own, and used them to destroy millions of people, without any possibility of sufficient justification.
The only way i'll ever even consider letting them off the hook for any of that, is if they do the right thing here, and admit what they did, that they understand they should have never begun, and should have stopped long ago, and then lay themselves on the mercy of the public, and beg to be spared from what they truly deserve.
They must come clean and publicly admit they are not entitled to use the powers they've been abusing, for the purposes they've contrived.
I mean, if just growing a plant was actually inherently harmful to others, they'd have a leg to stand on. Just one.
But they don't.
So as long as this continues, we should be LIVID about it.
But yeah, people have legitimate fears in that regard, and it's just exhausting to live in fear and tyranny. I understand why people don't rise up so readily, and i can't always blame them.
But we shouldn't have to do any of this. None of this should even be necessary. They're fabricating and perpetuating a hugely wasteful squandering of countless lives.
Even if they don't kill us directly, they've used violent coercion to set the scenarios, and have ruined too many lives by now.
No compromise.
They won't, i won't.
After they cease and desist the injustices against innocents, THEN we should worry about appropriate regulations. But until then, they have no excuse to continue doing what we've already proved is utterly not acceptable at all, in any way, shape, or form.
They stop the abuse first. That's how it has to be.
Anything else allows the unqualified crooks to retain control of what they do not have legitimate authority to control in the first place. They must be deprived of any possible legitimacy of imposing destruction on a cannabis user for only that purpose.
If someone does something reckless or destructive, fine, punish that. That's what laws and enforcement are supposed to be for. That's the only type of law enforcement anyone should be endorsing: the kind that PREVENTS undue harm, not the kind designed to cause it for profit.
People are finite. I don't have time to wait, and lots of others don't either. Each passing moment in which this abhorrent injustice is continued, is another stolen part of our lives. If we just play their 'gradual' game, most of us never end up benefiting from the effort. Many more will be destroyed in the meantime. That shit has GOT to stop. If it doesn't, they're still winning.