34 Harms of Cannabis Prohibition

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,

Thank you for your courageous acknowledgment of the importance of a Cannabis debate. I am writing to offer my services as an international Cannabis scholar, biodynamic agroecologist, green economist and filmmaker. Please contact me to further understand how important a resource Cannabis truly is.

The following list is meant to serve as an introduction to a vast debate. There are many more harms yet to be articulated. People are being invited to add to this list, so that we may assess the true cost of Cannabis prohibition, in time to avoid extinction.

34 Harms of Cannabis Prohibition

1. Induces essential resource scarcity. Cannabis is not an optional natural resource. Nutritionally, Cannabis seed is both unique and essential.
2. Imposes radical energy inefficiency by limiting regional production and availability of several bio-fuels, including cellulosic hydrogen, ethanol, pyrolytic charcoal, diesel seed oil, methane gas and compost heat.
3. Induces global food insecurity and malnutrition by limiting the production and availability of an unique and essential foods. Three essential fatty acids, the best organic vegetable proteins, critically important vitamins & minerals, and all of the essential amino acids in nutritionally significant amounts.
4. Induces scarcity of affordable, recyclable and biodegradable building materials.
5. Reduces the carrying capacity of wildlife habitat by reducing the availability of essential food and cover.
6. Institutionalizes a black market economy in god-given herbs by misidentifying them as "drugs."
7. Corrupts governments, locally and globally.
8. Creates radical resource disparity, that inevitably leads to wars over energy, water and other essential natural resources.
9. Creates an economic vacuum that has addicted and corrupted our economic system into dependence on toxic, unevenly distributed, finite resources.
10. Degrades the environment on regional and global levels. "Global Broiling" (increasing levels of UV-B radiation) is perhaps the least discussed example of the "extinctionistic" effects mankind's addiction to chemicals is having.
11. Engenders poverty, illness and violence, where abundance, health and peace could otherwise exist.
12. Causes epidemic malnutrition.
13. Threatens everyone's health by inducing essential food scarcity, which obviates optimum human development and potential.
14. Perverts human social evolution toward synergistic collapse of environment, economics, and social structures.
15. Largely responsible for the rise of GMOs, having created protein shortages.
16. Economically and politically empowers the most greedy, least conscious people.
17. Disrespects and interferes with science.
18. Institutionalizes disrespect for Nature.
19. Inhibits free individual spiritual evolution
20. Robs us of our Natural Rights, which government was founded to protect.
21. Robs the other creatures with whom we share this planet of unique and essential food and shelter.
22. Creates conditions of irrational acceptance of government misinformation, undermining the credibility of government.
23 Accelerates the spread of HIV/AIDS between infected mothers and nursing infants.
24. Creates a "forbidden fruit" which makes adolescent experimentation with 'marijuana' and other psychoactive substances more likely.
25. Makes the wild places into war zones, driving illegal growers further and further back into remote wilderness areas.
26. Interferes with regeneration of damaged lands, and expansion of the global arable base.
27. Cripples organic agriculture by banning environmentally benign biogenic pesticides and interfering with rotational cropping methods.
28. Disrespects the sacrifices made by previous generations, for the freedoms we are losing, because of the counter-productive, hypocritical, selective and expensive "drug war."
29. Results, on average, in the pointless death of one police officer per month, whose lives are wasted enforcing anti-Constitutional laws, that are counter-productive to their own stated objectives.
30. Constricts the global agricultural production of atmospheric aerosols called "monoterpenes" which have been shown to reflect solar radiation away from the planet, and seed cloud formation to protect the Earth from "global broiling" by increasing UV-B radiation.
31. Inhibits the use of a safe and effective herbal therapeutic by people who are intimidated by the misinformation and violence that characterizes 'marijuana' prohibition.
32. Destroys families and undermines social structures that are the most effective means of addressing substance abuse and other symptoms of imbalance.
33. Interferes with the spread of knowledge that is critical to social evolution.
34. Suppresses the peaceful side of human nature. Cultures that use Cannabis are invariably more peaceful than societies that don’t.

Paul J. von Hartmann
California Cannabis Ministry
http://www.californiacannabisministry.blogspot.com

Project P.E.A.C.E.
Planet Ecology Advancing Conscious Economics
http://www.webspawner.com/users/projectpeace