Stop the insanity over marijuana

Medical marijuana can bring relief to hundreds of thousands of people in pain.

 Please, please, please stop the insanity over marijuana. There is no reefer madness folks. No one is smoking pot and robbing liquor stores or raping victims because of pot alone. If they are perverts and criminals, they are going to do what they do regardless if they smoke pot or not.

There is not going to be an epidemic of zombie people because of weed. They already walk among us on cartel pot. In addition, we are already seeing this due to general cell phone usage.
The Democrats are using it as a tool to divide voters. Don't fall for it. Start with medical marijuana. Legalize, regulate, tax, and dispense to responsible buyers. Keep the tax rate low enough to avoid creating yet another vice-driven black market. Create an easy to use scale to reliably dictate the strength of the pot so buyers can safely use it, much like we do with alcohol proof and the heat scale of hot peppers.

First off, marijuana should not be a partisan political issue. Shame on the Democratic Party for pandering to voters over marijuana usage. How blatantly misleading and shallow! Instead of working with the Republican Party for medical marijuana decriminalization, they choose to divide the voters.
"Over the past couple years, more and more lawmakers, including people who’ll very likely run for president in 2020 like Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, have signed onto legislation that would legalize marijuana at the federal level. This is increasingly becoming a mainstream position for Democrats." Vox

In plain English, people will vote for or against marijuana reform because one party supports it over the other! This is by design and stupid in the extreme! I say stupid because of the obvious medical benefits if for no other reason. Why does marijuana continue to be in the same class as heroin and opiates? Why is a plant that has been safely used both medicinally and recreationally for thousands of years all across the planet, have such a stigma placed on it in the last hundred years?

This is why I try my best to openly educate people on a subject many my age (66) are hush-hush over. Read. Think. Sift. Repeat. I know there are some of my readers who shake their head and think I am pushing things too far. In their mind it seems perplexing that a historically logical writer would think marijuana was safe and okay to use recreationally. It is okay. It is not the demon we were told it was and the special interest groups who would and are competing against pot want it to stay taboo.
“The sweeping Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, H.R. 2 (115), — better known as the Farm Bill, and signed into law by President Donald Trump on Thursday — legalizes hemp production and with it, potential sales of cannabidiol or CBD, a component of marijuana and hemp plants that has no psychoactive properties to get people high. It’s said to have anti-inflammatory and calming benefits, but questions about medical effectiveness remain.” Politico 12-25-18

Hemp and marijuana are genetically linked and the recent farm bill allowing the production of hemp is very important and amazingly overdue. Look at it this way. “One acre of hemp can produce as much paper as 4 to 10 acres of trees over a 20-year cycle, but hemp stalks only take four months to mature, whereas trees take 20 to 80 years. This information was known in 1916, according to a USDA report.” Wiki

The product list of superior products made from hemp is incredible and a downright threat to business as usual from the medical, lumber, and petrochemical industries and understanding this makes it easy to see why it is an illegal substance. The tobacco industry is heavily investing in the marijuana industry and that should have been a no-brainer to anyone watching. I wrote 5 years ago that they were a marriage made in heaven. Anything we can do to keep organized crime out of the pot industry is a win in my book.

So, to review, what must take place is a general loosening of State marijuana laws AFTER the federal government changes the classification of the plant from a schedule 1 drug. “Schedule 1 drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined by the federal government as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule 1 drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence.” Wiki
Any rational person can see that marijuana does not fit as a schedule 1 drug.

Research by the government MUST loosen up the procurement laws for research facilities to actually conduct experiments. As it stands, private groups are miles ahead of the government and 99% of the reason is the tedious procurement and over-regulation between the DEA and the FDA. In their words, "A little-known research facility at the University of Mississippi is the only place in the country that is authorized to grow and test marijuana for medical research purposes. But this effort is stymied by a slow process for certifying scientists, a lack of funding and according to pot experts, an inferior product compared to what the booming cannabis sector has rolled out in recent years. “It’s brown, muddy garbage,” said Peter Grinspoon, a physician and board member of Doctors for Cannabis Regulation, describing the Mississippi stock." Politico 12-25-18

Education remains the key element here and it is every voter’s responsibility to get a true understanding of what is involved. Ignorance is a poor excuse when standing up to facts and experience.

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