Granite State affirms “live free or die” by one vote

“I just think it’s shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hard-core criminals because they had possession of a very small amount of controlled substance. . .It’s time we stop locking up people for possession of marijuana. We just can’t do it any more.”

Pat Robertson
Imagine the slow, rhythmic, grim, sarcastic clapping that greets a mediocre or half-hearted performance. That’s about the size of my applause for the New Hampshire House’s passing, by ONE vote, the decriminalization of possession of cannabis up to a half ounce.

They defeated by a resounding 228-91 a measure to legalize sale of marijuana by anyone over 21. What’s wrong with you people? What have you got against freedom? New Hampshire should be a leader in enlightened drug policy.

That puny approbation is well short of medical marijuana, and I will be writing to my state legislators about that. It is nowhere near legalization, which I doubt will happen in my lifetime. The state motto, in reality, refers mainly to firearms; all other freedoms are conventionally or, as in the case of pot, retrogressively administered. New Hampshire lags many other states. Vermont has medical marijuana. Massachusetts has decriminalized larger qualities.

What part of “live free or die” do our legislators not understand? I’ll tell you: the part where freedom begins with self-ownership. If you don’t own your body, who does? The state?

By now, nearly every un-brainwashed, literate adult knows the basic facts, which are that marijuana does not induce violent or psychotic behavior, that it is no more harmful than beer, that it has a large number of medical and practical users. BUT IT’S STILL ILLEGAL!!!

I suppose this should be no surprise, since the Abrahamic religions that dominate Western politics are abstemious. What if a drug-centered religion had gained worldwide popularity and power? If everybody smoked dope, would it be a more peaceful world? Just speculating.

I’m still a 60s hippie at heart: I’m all for women’s and minority rights, against foreign wars and the excesses of capitalism…and I was sure that if we didn’t have free love by now, at least we’d have legal weed.

But NOOOOOOOOO!

A large proportion of Boomers either never got on board with drug liberalization…or got all hypocritical and didn’t want their kids doing drugs the way they did. There are all kinds of rationales. Many more found the state-approved drugs, alcohol and nicotine, both far more toxic than pot, satisfactory for their mood control. Caffeine, the other state-approved psychoactive drug, is perfect for capitalism. Gives us lots of pep to accomplish our corporate mission.

Plus: laws and policies are made by each generation’s self-selected cohort of busybody/control freaks, otherwise known as politicians. They will absolutely lie about the relative harmlessness and many benefits of marijuana. They will take a vow of hypocrisy and keep the damned drug war going strong, because they get off on making moral rules for other people…and, as politicians, can’t admit they were wrong about something as big as this.

They’re followers, not leaders – spineless, gutless followers. Easier to keep the brainwashing in place. I didn’t know of such people in my generation until I saw them in government and law-enforcement positions, perpetuating the drug war.

But it’s not unanimous. Through LEAP and other organizations, law enforcement personnel can and do express their opposition to the drug war.

Still, I couldn’t believe my eyes. People younger than I are arresting 800,000 marijuana “offenders” every year. Even Pat Robertson disapproves of that.

In the Sentinel story (March 11, 2012), Rep. Mark Warden specifically linked pot freedom with the state motto. Yes!! But Rep. Tommy Soltani made the usual slippery-slope arguments: drug dealers will lead to more criminal activity like prostitutes.

The governor’s mouthpiece, Colin Manning, repeated the party line that we’re going to make the job of law enforcement harder by saying that “some marijuana use is acceptable.”

Well, of course, SOME is acceptable -- by ADULTS. People over 18 – we regulate cannabis the same as we enforce liquor and tobacco laws. It’ll be much easier to keep kids from pot if it’s controlled.

As for other so-called, “crimes,” look, I know I’m decades ahead here in this Puritan land of ours, but there is a way to make prostitution legal. Take a trip to Amsterdam. More important, Tommy, is that the reason WHY the drug trade brings in criminals is that pot IS ILLEGAL. Black markets lead to crime, always.

Make it legal and tax it, and crime goes away. Most of the drug war is about marijuana.  We no longer have gangs fighting over liquor distribution territory. I lived near Chicago, site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Real movie stuff: guys murdered in cold blood in a basement on Clark Street, the violence of another failed drug war. Brutal black-market territorial politics. But I will bet you that the same number of people die each week in Chicago because of the current drug war, which the government will not abandon.

This willful blindness, this insistence that the horrors of the drug war are caused by drugs themselves…is the lie politicians have been spinning for decades, ever since the LaGuardia Commission (1947) found that “marihuana” posed no threat to society, ever since a DEA Administrative Law Judge in 1989 found that cannabis had medical benefits and could properly be used as a treatment.

I recall many years ago reading of a drug activist who maintained that pot was the wedge issue, the linchpin issue: if the government would do this ONE thing, admit it had been wrong all along, and just legalize pot…well, then he would seriously consider anything they say, because there might be some truth in it.

But they will not tell this fundamental truth. If so blatant a lie can be kept in place decade after decade, what, if anything, is the government telling us that is not a lie? But if they told truth about cannabis (in tincture form, it was used, in the 19th century, as a remedy for “wedding night jitters” – sounds good to me)…well, then I might consider what they have to say, since there may be some honesty in it.

But not now. Not when they can keep this most obscene of lies in place.

If there’s a hero to this sordid story – sealing the victory and affirming the truth by one vote – it’s Speaker William O’Brien, who refused to vote and thus allowed the measure to pass.

Well done, Bill. We’ll have to share a joint and talk politics sometime.