To the eurodrug group regarding taxation of Cannabis

Dear Jorge and friends,

Most people would agree that our generation is facing the proximate reality, if not the likelihood of global extinction. Drug policy is being revealed as fundamentally related to many issues, including most notably, climate destabilization. If radiative forcing with monoterpenes hasn't registered with people yet, it may be time to focus on it as a final argument in favor of intensifying Cannabis cultivation.

In my opinion, if we don't meaningfully address "global warming" by recognizing the opportunity afforded by reconstructing drug policy, then it probably won't matter what problems we do solve. There is no drug policy on a burned-out planet.

As it is, far too many decades of intransigence regarding drug policy has had an enormous impact on environment, social justice, food security & nutrition, health and most other issues experiencing critical imbalance. A priority seems then, to determine how rationale drug policy reform can maximize benefit in all of the areas effected by drug prohibition.

For example, in regard to climate change, the effects of prohibition on organic agriculture have economically empowered chemical companies, including fossil fuels, big pharma and chemical agriculture. Our governments are being steered by those wealthy few, enriched by chemically-based industries waging wars all over the planet.

Ending prohibition is proving that the world has been deceived by those who pretend to solve problems rather than create them. The magnitude of harm inflicted and the amount of time and energy it's taken the grassroots movement to end prohibition provides an opportunity to see the "glitch in the maxtrix" that we were all born into.

If we impose taxes and bureaucratic regulation on something that could help mankind to achieve a much more efficient system, then we are delegating our well-being to the same economic structures that have been waging a counter-productive "war" on the majority of the world's people. As the majority awakens to the fatal deception of the "drug war" I trust we can make the most of being awake, and really "go for it" in time to have maximum beneficial effect on our common future.

This is the process I presently envision:

Step One:
Release all people convicted of minor drug charges from all of the world's prisons -- immediately. Redirect the money being spent on incarceration to provide practical support, helping people reintegrate into healthy, productive lives. This would mean redirecting "drug war" related bureaucracies (i.e. the DEA) into community-based enterprise for helping people recover from the harms of having been imprisoned.

Step Two:
Make hard drugs legally affordable and available by prescription, while discarding all laws pertaining to Cannabis and coca cultivation, manufacture and trade.

Step Three:
Teach individual responsibility for choices made from an early age. The importance of "sending the right message" of accountability to young people, by holding elected officials and industry leaders accountable for their crimes and gross negligence, cannot be underestimated.

Step Four:
Provide employment by initiating organic, non-GMO Cannabis agricultural projects in every country, to allow regional adaption of hemp seed strains to produce food, fuel, paper, cloth, building materials, etc. This will produce a global abundance of sustainable resources on which to base hyper-efficient, carbon positive ("gaiatherapeutic") regional economies.

Step Five:
Redirect "drug war" and other wasteful government funding to healthcare, drug education and harm reduction measures.

Step Six:
Establish the true value of Cannabis using all existing peer-reviewed studies, while increasing research into the benefits of Cannabis therapeutics, agronomics and ecology. Educate people about the unique and essential benefits of Cannabis nutrition, organic crop rotation, conversion from chemical ag and other health benefits associated with the Cannabis plant.

Step Seven:
Expansion of the arable base using a full range of organic pioneer crops, to regenerate depleted, compacted and toxic soils and desertified lands.

When Cannabis is allowed to compete unencumbered on the free-market, the true value of it will make obsolete those polluting industries and the economic political structures built upon unevenly distributed poisons. Predictably, the dangers and pitfalls of chemically intensive mono-cropping need to be guarded against.

Not taxing Cannabis-based production will afford the industry a stimulus that will increase its competitive position in relation to industries that currently enjoy no taxation or are so favored by economic monopoly and the influence that affluence buys, that they may as well be operating untaxed.

Discontinuing income taxes altogether would eliminate countless hours wasted in accounting, and save hundreds of billions that prop up the bureaucracy that exists to controls us. Greater efficiency between an individual's income and the direct community support that comes from people spending money on goods and services would result in a higher standard of living, which is the most effective way to reduce drug abuse.