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Plainsman1963

Lighten Up America: Don't Target Marijuana
06-28-06 | Chattanoogan.com | Naman Crowe

Yahoo! Good news!

I read where West Hollywood, Calif., has adopted a resolution calling for its law enforcement officers to leave peaceful adults alone, who smoke marijuana in private, and target more serious crimes.

I urge Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield and the City Council to do the same as soon as possible, and the Hamilton County mayor and County Commission as well.

I only regret that it took a city in California to come up with the idea rather than the Dynamo of Dixie, the cultural and intellectual star of the South, the small end of the funnel at the far end of the universe where all great thoughts must eventually converge.

What a brilliant idea and yet so simple. The nonbinding resolution, which the City Council passed 4-0, directs the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department to not "target adult marijuana users who consume this drug in private and pose no danger to the community."

The resolution goes on to state that smoking marijuana in public should still be prohibited and that minors and drug dealers should still be subject to arrest.

According to an AP account, John Duran, the resolution's sponsor, said that while the resolution is not legally enforceable, it sends a message to law enforcement officers that they should go after the more serious crimes and "leave the pot smokers alone."

What a wonderful breath of fresh air! What a beautiful message to send to law enforcement, that they should focus their efforts on the more serious crimes and leave the mature and harmless marijuana users alone.

I'd like to see this flicker of enlightenment grow into a beacon of inspiration that will remind America once again of that ancient idea of liberty and the pursuit of happiness that was promised by our forefathers.

Our founding fathers would never have imagined in their wildest dreams that their Constitution would someday be amended to outlaw the making and selling of alcoholic beverages, but it was.

We know what a terrible mess that turned out to be. There's something to be said about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It's not a good idea to restrict a man's liberty and his pursuit of happiness, especially when it's a reasonable liberty and a legitimate element within his pursuit of happiness.

Drinking and smoking and chewing and snorting snuff up the nostrils were most certainly considered natural liberties by our forefathers and just as much a part of their inalienable rights within the pursuit of happiness as eating and sleeping.

Somehow along the way we outsmarted ourselves and lost sight of what true personal liberty really means. What could be a more inalienable right than a person's own body, the life that it has in it and the mind that controls it?

How arrogant we've been while considering ourselves so good and wise. Us and our laws. We're so arrogant with our laws and making people do as they're told, we've even come up with a law that makes it a crime to commit suicide.

It's been illegal for as long as I can remember, to commit suicide. And yet, what could be a more inalienable right than the right to commit suicide?

Regardless of whether we agree or not with the person's decision to commit suicide, that's the one personal decision that no law can stop and for which the lawbreaker cannot be punished.

So why make a law against suicide if the person that breaks the law is beyond punishment and can never be tried? Because we love making laws.

As many laws as we can make against a person's personal liberty and pursuit of happiness the better, it would seem, even if we have to follow him into the grave and beyond.

Give us half a chance and we'll make laws about who gets to go to heaven and who gets to go to hell.

The churches already have that law on the books and have their hooks in taking control of American government and running their flag up in the name of the Lord.

Our motive, of course, they tell us, is to make better people out of us, for our own good.

People that don't smoke pot are better than people who do smoke pot because we have a law that makes it illegal to smoke pot; but also, and most importantly, they tell us, it is bad for a person to smoke pot because it turns their brain into an egg frying in a skillet and causes them to want even more dangerous drugs which would be bad for their health and probably kill them and ruin their lives.

Because of our great concern for our fellowman's health and well-being, we've crammed over a million drug violators into our prisons and spent who knows how many hundreds of billions tracking them down, trying them and locking them up.

I'm guessing that it's over a million drug violators, figuring that since we have over two million people locked up in our jails and prisons, at least half are probably there in connection with drug violations. But I could be wrong. If anyone can run down a more accurate number, let me know.

At any rate, we're still packing them in and seeing the need to build more prisons and spending hundreds of more billions on a War on Drugs that will never end.

The reason it will never end is because we're fighting the wind and forgetting those primeval rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I believe that the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness means, among other things, that an adult has the right to do anything with their own body that they want, including committing suicide.

The only way to win the War on Drugs will be to legalize all drugs and leave it up to the adult to take whatever drug they please, as their right under the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Any intelligent person who didn't just fall off the watermelon truck knows that marijuana is no where near as harmful to the human body as alcohol or tobacco; and is, in fact, beneficial because it allows the user a sense of relaxation or a momentary peace or high and does not really fry his brains like an egg in a skillet the way the government likes to lie to the children and have the great, grazing masses believe.

Marijuana is just a weed that grows from seeds. We would have a good start on winning the War on Drugs if we legalized it and allowed anyone to grow it and smoke it and sell it and buy it as they please.

If marijuana were legalized, there would be such a sharp drop in crime and the use of the harder and more dangerous drugs as to be astounding.

Why would a person want to fool with the more expensive and dangerous drugs when they could grow hemp on their own property for free, just like George Washington?

We're not so enlightened as that yet. But the City Council of West Hollywood has taken a small step in the right direction and struck a match that could eventually help lead us out of this dark and ignorant jungle that we've been slogging through all these years and which has wasted so many lives.

And all they've done is to suggest that law enforcement go after the more serious crimes and leave peaceful adults alone to enjoy their pursuit of happiness and the liberty to smoke their marijuana cigarettes privately as they please, just like any other inalienable right or freedom.

It's a brilliant idea. I'd like to see Chattanooga pick it up and run with it, like a torch held high for other cities to see.

It may not appear to be that great a flame at first glance but in these modern dark ages, even a flicker of light is a flicker of hope that one day we will, as a people, reclaim the promise of our forefathers and finally be allowed the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Lighten up America. If we have such rights as freedom of religion and the liberty to fatten ourselves and our children up like hogs to the detriment of our health and the endangerment of our lives, we have the inalienable right to light up and get high on our own time, so long as it doesn't endanger the public or take away from the rights of others.

That's what the drug laws are in essence. They are a means of taking away our natural right to make our own choices in the way we live our lives and force us to conform to the majority's belief that it should be a crime to get high on the marijuana weed and other plants that God has given us to do with as we please.

Naman Crowe
namancrowe@yahoo.com

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"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." - Claire Wolfe

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Buzzby

I wonder why he's "guessing"? The figure is readily available: 500,000.

When we present a pro-legalization argument on a public forum it makes it much more effective if we have the facts rather than "guessing". That kind of sloppiness activates the "pothead" stereotype in readers' minds and it takes away from the credibility of the rest of the statement.

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vladimir

yea i must say that i thought his point got off-track and was lost sometime around when he started talking about suicide...

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If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of, the human experiment.