Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [84]
As Terry finishes reading that passage aloud, she adds, “Reminds me of somebody.”
“Yeah, I’m still seething, but it hasn’t been that long!”
I think back to a headline I saw on a Mexican newspaper when we stopped for gas. In the U.S., the Virginia Tech shooting spree had just occurred. “USA 33, Mexico 20,” the headline read.
“That’s because Mexico had twenty people killed in the drug war that day,” I tell Terry. “People are being gunned down, even governments in Latin American are being bought out and overthrown because the drug cartels have more money and more firepower. It’s all because of our war on drugs—because of the high prices they’re getting are coming from us.”
“I remember you telling me what your mom said right before she died,” Terry says.
“She was coherent until the very end. ‘You know, this war on drugs is identical to prohibition of alcohol in the twenties,’ she told me. I said, ‘Why is that, Mom?’ And she said, ‘Because when something is prohibited, the gangsters get rich. In the twenties, it was Al Capone and all those guys. Now it’s the same thing with the big drug dealers.’”
It’s long been another pet peeve of mine. I wish that Canada and Mexico would legalize marijuana, because that would put the United States on an island. You’d have two countries proving, like the city of Amsterdam has, that making drugs legal is not a negative formula, but the best way to deal with the problem. Making something illegal doesn’t mean it goes away, it just means criminals are going to run it.
Why not treat marijuana in the same way as alcohol and tobacco? It’s so widely used, and it has medical purposes that are denied by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Numerous doctors and private studies have clearly shown that medicinal marijuana is a painkiller that can help cancer and AIDS patients, and can also be used to treat glaucoma. The latest breakthrough is that it helps Alzheimer’s patients. The hippie generation used to be warned that, if you smoke pot, pretty soon you won’t be able to remember what happened two days ago. Well, turns out it does something to protect a chromosome in the Alzheimer’s patient’s head to allow them to keep their memory. Since this has now been proven, I wonder what the next excuse will be for not legalizing it. (And yes, I have inhaled. Very few didn’t who came of age in the sixties.)
On the Internet, I read that if you factor in the price per ounce of marijuana, it’s now the largest cash crop in America. It’s passed corn, wheat, and soybeans. But you have to look at how things are skewed by keeping marijuana illegal. Roughly an ounce of top-grade marijuana today costs around four hundred bucks. Well, how much is an ounce of corn, wheat, or soybeans? You’re lucky if it’s two cents! They don’t even bother to measure these in less than bushels. What would a bushel of marijuana be worth, going at $400 an ounce? That’s why it brings in more revenue than all those other crops.
The fact is, growing hemp for industrial purposes would make it a very useful plant. It can be a fiber for clothing, a source of paper, even an alternative fuel. Canada is already using hemp this way. I simply don’t see that cannabis grows wild on earth just so humans can eradicate it.
Of course, the work of eradicating marijuana creates jobs within law enforcement. If we made it legal, and taxed it like we do tobacco and alcohol, maybe those law enforcement people could start paying more attention to murders and terrorism. I also think it’s time for people to rise up against the prescription drug industry, the biggest opponent of legalization. You have to remember that they don’t want anything out there that they can’t make a profit from. Marijuana is a weed,