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Last week the House of Representatives passed the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act. If the bill passes the Senate and is signed into law it would remove marijuana from the federal government’s list of controlled substances, impose an 8 percent tax on cannabis products, allow some convictions on cannabis charges to be expunged and press for sentencing reviews at the federal and state levels. It would also make Small Business Administration loans and services available to cannabis businesses while setting standards for them. Sooner or later the cannabis prohibition era will fall into the dustbin of history. The culture war around the use of cannabis was born out of racism and in support of the military industrial complex:
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” ~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon What will the next phase of cannabis consumption look like? I cynically believe the main reason there is a push for federal decriminalization now is that the tax income and potential for corporate control of the market.
Giant corporate entities lie in the wake of sweeping federal decriminalization. The benefit of a state by state approach to decriminalization is that it makes it hard for interstate cannabis monopolies to be established. It will be interesting to watch this bill travel through our corporate owned legislature. My hopes is that it allows for us all to grow our own plants, bypassing the market entirely. Anyways… Here are some of the beautiful people that Ehrlichman
was talking about, enjoying cannabis at the 50th Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, MI. They are my people. I have decided to christen each of them with some of my favorite cannabis strains.
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