No tax on pot

The following opinion was written in response to a recent press release regarding the marijuana tax, written by Ken Reed, at the Green Cross in San Francisco. http://thegreencross.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=466


Taxing Cannabis is a very bad idea. It never should have happened in 1937 and it shouldn't be happening again now. A tax on medical marijuana will do nothing more than legitimize the dysfunctional government's unwelcome interference in our lives and our individual health.

Time is short. There is a more direct avenue to ending prohibition. Freedom to farm "every herb bearing seed is the first test of religious freedom.

With all due respect, Cannabis is not "medicine." Cannabis is in fact an unique and essential herbal therapeutic. Medicines don't make seeds. Herbs make seeds. The vast differences between drugs and seeds erodes the credibility of anyone who presumes to equate them.

I agree that some people may benefit from consulting professionals regarding the use of marijuana. But to put the world's safest and most healing herb into the hands of doctors dismisses the subcultural evolution, prejudice and ignorance against Cannabis inclusive therapies that has developed during seventy two years of prohibition.

Taxing Cannabis will have several really bad effects. The biggest drawback is concession of rightful jurisdiction over unique and essential natural resources. When valued properly, Cannabis is not illegal -- it's essential.

Secondly, taxing marijuana will drive the price up, enlarge an already unaffordable bureaucracy, and perpetuate the black market in untaxed marijuana.

Cannabis remains prohibited because people in the Cannabis culture persist in under-valuing the world's most useful, nutritious, potentially abundant, globally distributed, safely therapeutic agricultural resource. Seeking incremental change, we forfeit our own strongest argument.

I invite you to consider the "big picture" and recognize the opportunity and obligation of facing the fundamental challenge of our time head-on.

Please contact me if you would care to know more about the strategy I've developed for ending Cannabis prohibition by next spring. Your help is needed to make "essential civilian demand" for Cannabis an effective tool for implementing Cannabis freedom.