nacrypt

Colorado Campus Police 4/20 Photo Album

I commend the people who took part in this peaceful demonstration against the hypocrisy of marijuana prohibition.

I hope the fear of change and vindictiveness exhibited by the authorities is clear to everyone. What is really scary is that in this case Big Brother IS watching! Have you been "IDENTIFIED"?

These people are American citizens they deserve a legal framework in which they can use marijuana responsibly without fear of reprocussions.

The police have become an instrument that is suppressing our freedom. They should know when they need to look the other way... Shame on them!

troublemaker_42

There were clear warnings, and they chose to disregard them. While I again don't personally agree with the law, it doesn't mean one can break it and not expect to be punished.

MrIMStoned

They could have smoked up in a public place.

I wonder what kind of people would narc for 50 bucks?

__________________
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"

WNB

Probably the kind of people who think getting marijuana users arrested is a good thing to do. I know a guy who has a job that involves examing police activity logs, and he says calls for the "smell of burning marijuana" are quite common. It's sad, but some people are honestly so delluded and lead such empty lives that they do this kind of thing.

__________________
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

Little Nicky

It's called being a rat bastard.

MrIMStoned

Yeah, some people got nothing better to do than to sit and stare out their window waiting for some reason, any reason, to talk to another human being.

laxgirl83

Let me make sure I understand. A group of students decided to go outside and openly blaze while there were signs that said video monitoring would be going on? I have no sympathy. How did they expect to get away with it? If one doesn't like a law openly breaking it is not an effective way to go. Lets say I wanted lower taxes. I would not just not pay my taxes. Shame on them for making mj users look like idiots. Oh and furthermore if the same event took place where people were openly drinking it would have been busted at least at the college I attended (a large east coast public university). Now I am sure they would not have bothered with all of the pictures and rewards but still citations would have been given. Anyways i am rambling.

Toking Jedi

I must point out a flaw in your argument that openly breaking a law is not an effective way to change it. How, then, did the Civil Rights Movement become so effective? How did Mohatma Gandhi get rights for Indians in South Africa, and later get independence for India itself? Through civil disobedience. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, and the sit-ins at the Woolworths counters in the south by black and white protesters were all civil disobedience. Gandhi himself allowed himself to be beaten for burning identification cards for Indian residents, only to continue in the face of violence, and made the law look brutal. He got Indians to spin their own cloth and boycott English manufactured goods, and marched to the salt mines. Civil disobedience has proven itself time and again to be an effective mechanism for change. Likewise, these students saw the threats of retribution, and chose to disobey the law in defiance. So, while you shouldn't necessarily have "sympathy" for them per se, you should throw your full-throated support behind these people.

For those of you who are bound to respond with something along the lines that I cannot compare Marijuana legalization to the Civil Rights movement or the South African Indian Civil Rights movement, or even the independence movement in India, I must redeem myself. I am not comparing Marijuana legalization to these other movements; no, I will not romantically pretend that Marijuana civil disobedience is as crucial as the Civil Rights protests or Gandhi's nonviolent resistance. I am drawing parallels between different movements and the methods those movements largely entailed.

Even Mark Emery knows it. He compared himself to Martin Luther King and Mohatma Gandhi, because he is going to jail for his immense efforts at civil disobedience. He knows that if he is jailed, he is automatically a martyr for the cause of legalization, as is every marijuana toker who commits civil disobedience by toking up publicly. His ideology, to overgrow the government, should be translated to the masses of overtoke the government.

Remember Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.? People who flinched when I referred to the Civil Rights Movement above should avert their eyes, but when he was arrested and thrown in jail in Birmingham for civil disobedience, he wrote a letter in response to criticism from his peers. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he wrote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects on directly, affects all indirectly." Granted, he was refering to civil rights infringments against southern blacks in Birmingham, but one could just as easily apply the "injustice", to pot smokers. He later writes,
Martin Luther King knew it; Gandhi knew it; Heck, even Mark Emery, our celebrated "Prince of Pot" knows it: non-violent civil disobedience as a form of resistence of legal injustice is an effective confrontational method to change the law. We need defiance to resist Big Brother crack downs like the one in U Colorado, or wherever those pictures were taken. If the masses of pot tokers are mobilized, we'll be able to make marijuana legalization a crisis issue. Only then will it be legalized; we can't sneak in the back door.

__________________

laxgirl83

I think you made a good point but if what we really want is to be taken seriously then having an event where we all sit around and get stoned hardly seems like a good way to go about this. I think a protest would be a far more effective route. When I heard about the Colorado event and saw pictures it seems to me the people were more interested in having a good time than really making a point. Contrast this with the article on UMD and how they are attempting to change the marijuana policy at the school through a referendum. The UMD students seem intelligent and worth noting while the Colorado students seems like nothing more than some typical "pot heads". I believe mj should be legalized but I know that feeding people misconceptions about the drug and the people who use is not the way to go.

nacrypt

This was a protest, of sorts. The problems is: America is desensitized to traditional protests, hence the backlash to today's immigrant protest. By showing just how normal and happy pot users are and just how vindictive the police are with regards to marijuana (and aren't to the more potentially deadly act of underage drinking) it exposes the true face of hypocrisy regarding marijuana prohibition.