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5 Years for Passing a Joint: Stop this Bill Now | 93 comments (93 topical)
Re: 5 Years for Passing a Joint: Stop this Bill No (none / 0) (#66)
by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Apr 16, 2005 at 09:47:32 AM EST
So you can fight this battle by yourself, and spare me the use of the famous Holocaust quote. The situations are not even in the same book, much less on the same page.
Well, PPJ, I'm not fighting this by myself. Wonder how you'd feel if one of your kids got thrown in prison for having a lid of pot in his car. "Well, son, that pot is corrosive to society, and you shouldn't have risked it. And don't drop the soap." FAMM was started by such non-drug users who felt the fed was out of control, who felt very personally not the destructive effects of drugs, but the destructive effects of criminalization. People take minimal risk to get ahold of marijuana. Many people do not lump it in with heroin. A moment's rational thinking yields such a conclusion, even to to bulk of moderate people in our country. It only seems that way because they have been apathetic about getting it redefined in law as separate from harder drugs, and the politicians are not doing much about it either. Marijuana travels in congenial circles. To define addiction as something people break the law to do or obtain is fallacious. We can quibble about what addiction is, but there's a far cry from someone who smokes a j every once in a while to someone who will sell every last scrap of their humanity for a fix of heroin every day. Nobody does that for marijuana. Maybe people break the law because they feel the law is unjust, the way our country was founded by people who felt the authority over them was unjust. The comparison to the holocaust is apt because non-violent people who are not stealing or destroying other's property or hurting anyone else are being thrown in prison. Lives are being destroyed, it doesn't matter how many or the nature of the mechanisms. It isn't that the right to use whatever substance is at stake, it is that it is a RIGHT that is being infringed. It is a reserved right, in my and many other's opinion, as described by the 10th amendment. You can't pick which right should be protected. They all need to be. No one is asking you to devote your life to the cause. We're just asking you to rethink your apathy and not stand in the way.

5 Years for Passing a Joint: Stop this Bill Now | 93 comments (93 topical)

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