When DuPont tells you that they bring “Better Living Through Chemistry”, they don’t tell you that it’s only for 100 years, then the entire planet dies for their profit.

    England and Holland treat their substance abusers as human beings—keeping them supplied with enough affordable medicants so they don’t disrupt the activities of others. Such policies allow them to lead otherwise productive and normal lives. These policies are now firmly established, effective, and popular in those countries. In the mid-1900s, Switzerland began its own experiments in localized tolerance of public drug use.

    When the Swiss tried, in 1997, to recriminalize cannabis with a ballot initiative, it lost by 79% of the vote!

    So, why should otherwise peaceful hemp/marijuana growers and users be labeled and persecuted as lifetime criminals while 35% of all robberies and burglaries are committed by heroin and alcohol addicts, 40-55% of murders, rapes, and highway fatalities are alcohol related^* and heroin is more available in jail than on the streets? Yet cannabis users statistically have the same or lower incidents of crime and violence as the non-cannabis-using population as a whole.

    In fact, aside from cannabis usage, take the mob and the dealers out of heroin and other drugs and you reduce as much as 80% of non-alcohol related crime. As a direct example, throughout the “Roaring Twenties” era of alcohol prohibition, the murder rate rose consistently, then dropped every year for the next 10 following prohibition’s 1933 repeal.^*

    Let’s find another way to deal with drug usage or be prepared for continued exponential erosion of our freedoms, including the rigths of self-expression, public debate, and a free press, including books and songs.

    Accept the fact that all drug-related crime ends if you treat addicts and users instead of removing them from society. Help tem, educate and encourage them be financially productive.

    In 1998, the top priority of the U.S. government, Newt Gingrich and most of the Republican Party is to try to enact legislation that will automatically take away 100% of all citizens’ rights to privacy and freedom from unwarranted search—as if the drug war were a true state of emergency—in order to further their fascistic, police, and prison-state agenda.

the authorized on-line version of Jack Herer’s “The Emperor Wears No Clothes”

previous page	Chapter 16	next page