This article was written exclusively for Steemit!
Many people say cannabis should be decriminalized or legalized because it's medicine. I disagree.
I've personally seen it help people with everything from pharmaceutical drug withdrawal to back pain to nausea to anxiety and debilitating headaches caused by man-made environmental disasters. Mounting research shows it can help with even more serious ailments, including Crohn’s disease and severe forms of epilepsy, including in children.
It can also ease psychological struggles, including post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. This is why a twelve-year-old girl who suffers from seizures is joining a veteran with PTSD and other cannabis patients to sue Attorney General Jeff Sessions for their right to use the plant as medicine.
But that's still not why prohibition needs to end.
It needs to end because it is not the government's right to dictate what we can put in our own bodies as long as we are not hurting others. We need to evolve past the mentality that the nanny state gets to decide what we can and cannot nonviolently do, whether with our bodies or our consciousness (for example: the mentality that we must justify our choices by proving weed is medicine).
Alcohol is legal despite its link to violence and fatal disease. Cigarettes are legal despite long standing knowledge that they cause death. Painkillers are legal in the face of the ongoing epidemic of addiction and overdose. And they should remain legal (though those who harm others and commit crimes that have victims while using these drugs should obviously be held accountable — as should people who do these things sober).
Of course, special interests and profit and lobbying help maintain the pervasiveness of these legal drugs, and this same dynamic is also a main reason why cannabis remains illegal (but why the FDA is moving to approve a cannabis treatment produced by a major pharmaceutical company while remaining sluggish on actual cannabis).
But at a more fundamental level, these substances are legal because of the basic philosophical premise that people should be able to control their own bodies and consciousness (incidentally, alcohol is legal because prohibition was a complete failure, has has been the war on drugs). This should be applied to all drugs, many of which are far less damaging to health but remain illegal.
Regardless, I'm all about using this little green plant medicinally (and ending the cruel policy of forcibly preventing people from doing so), but the fight for cannabis freedom isn't about begging an ignorant, oppressive government to let us treat ourselves however we like.
We shouldn’t be free to use cannabis because it has been used since ancient times, because public opinion now favors it, because it’s a boon to the economy, or because it can rack up tax revenue for governments that have spent decades brutalizing and caging people for it and now wants to profit from it.
It's because we should be able to freely make all decisions for ourselves as long as we are peaceful.
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We have been so successfully indoctrinated as to believe it not only reasonable but desirable to hand control of our lives to some group of random strangers who call themselves government. Of course we get a list of thieves, liars and reprobates to choose from, but not a choice of none of the above.
Yep, I agree @careywedler. Ain't a pot smoker myself. Never did much to me back in the day when I was doing it. But it's much less harmful overall than Alcohol is, imo
Hear here, ms. Wedler. So many focus on the medical side & for normies that is a gateway argument to help them along to the realization of the importance of freedom. If we're not free to make bad decisions (I'm not saying that using cannabis is a bad decision) then we're not free at all. Give me liberty or you'll get death. End the war on drugs...better said the war on freedom.
Would you post your video for this too! It's very powerful as well! Glad to see you active on here too, Carey!
Good post
@careywedler
Thank you! :)
Love the picture! :-)
Hehe thank you, it's from a video I did last 4/20... it's on dtube! :)
Oh yeah, I think I remember that one. Ha-ha! :-)
Upvoted on headline alone. I agree.
For once I can fully agree with you. The stupid war on drugs has cost enough, both money and lives, and achieves nothing.
I am in agreement with you, but for different reasons. Colorado has had a surplus budget after allowing recreational cannabis, and they've been able to reinvest in their infrastructure and economy. It's spurred jobs, increased taxes, and it's a good fiscal idea. For all this talk about budget deficit, we could very easily find ourselves with a very, very nice source of income. Funds could go to drug treatment and rehabilitation centers, schools, roads, and plenty of other social services.
As you point out, there's all kinds of good reasons for cannabis to be legal. Last I heard, the earliest evidence we have of agriculture is a pouch of hemp seed 12 thousand years old. It's kind of synonymous with human culture.
But you settle on the best reason: we are free. No one has a right to tell us what to think, be, or do, and telling us we can't ingest cannabis is all three.
Thanks!
Yep.
"we should be able to freely make all decisions for ourselves as long as we are peaceful"
Your argument is without merit to the extent that it stands on the proposition that "[i]t needs to end because it is not the government's right to dictate what we can put in our own bodies as long as we are not hurting others."
It's not all about you. You live in a town or city, with hundreds if not millions of people. Who are you to say that the people collectively do not have a right to impose whatever order they see fit to impose?
Looked at another way, the whole idea of "inalienable rights" is a fiction. The order in human society comes from men. It comes from the testosterone driven competition between man and man and between man and Nature, to seize territory and to impose dominion and order upon that territory so that the people who live upon that territory can live with peace and security and prosperity. That is the nature of the world. That is where order comes from.
In today's urban society, people do not see these fundamental realities and do not comprehend them. But if you pierce the veil and see how things really are, and how they really came to be the way that they are, you find that the order that makes your life possible was given to you by men who died on battlefields and by kings who seized land and imposed order.
You think like a child. People generally who live in urban society today think like children. This is not a criticism of you; you were born and raised into this situation. But now you must do something to leave your childish thinking behind and to grow up into good strong men and good strong women. When you do that, you will together in community use your collective force to seize a place for yourselves, and then you will impose whatever order you see fit, whether it is a libertarian order in which cannabis is legal, or the order of a Caliphate in which using cannabis is a capital crime. You will, collectively, have the right to decide. That right comes from your power, from your strength, from your ability to impose your collective will upon territory, upon other men, and upon Nature.
My experience is all about me, as yours is all about you, and hers is all about her. Each of our experience is centered exclusively in ourself, in our body, in our mind.
Because no group has any rights more or different from those of any given individual in that group. Otherwise, any time two (or more) men decided to rape a woman, they would have that right because there are more of them.
So anyone can do anything the want to you, with your body?
You are referring to people killing each other, raping, pillaging, and destroying the land as order, peace and security... Order comes from nature, from the evolution of any given system towards equilibrium.
Actually, most of the order in the world exists in spite of those men killing on command and the "kings" commanding it. Genocide is anathema to order, war is anathema to order, punishing others for actions that harmed nobody is anathema to order.
By identifying as a slave with no agency in your own life, except that allowed by the masters who "maintain order" for you?
The flag on this post illustrates why steemit will fail. A single turd whale can censor any post that he/she/it wants to. The flag cannot be justified as due to spam. It is clearly censorship of either the idea that I express or the way that I express it.
The flag also proves the point by demonstrating WHY people in urban environments think like children. The turd whale flagged my post to keep the idea from reaching you! Wake up, people! You live in a world where Truth cannot get to you because it is stopped by intolerant censors.
What tangible right do YOU or any majority have to impose on someone who hasn't hurt you? It sounds like you're relying on some variation of the social contract, which none of us ever actually consented to.
Thanks for engaging me. My position is that "rights" are illusion. Order is imposed by force. "Rights" are merely words used to express the imposed order. We like to say that the order in our societies is imposed by "the majority". But that is also an illusion, though one that contains some truth. Whoever imposes the order in your life will do so by threat of lethal force. You are utterly powerless to resist. Only by gaining control of that entity ("the majority", "the deep state" or whatever) will you be able to determine the order that is imposed upon you. And if you succeed in doing so, you will accomplish it by using the threat of lethal force.
That is the way of the world. "Rights" do not come into it. This is why I say (perhaps too much) that you people of urban society think like children. You have no clue as to your true situation. Nor do you have a clue as to where the order in human society, and also in Nature, comes from.
Perhaps, if you allow me to, I will be your clue, and you will thereby become good, strong men and women, leaving behind your childish illusions to seize your world and determine its order for yourselves.
It's rare to come across a person who properly understands rights. I like to joke, how humane our rights are, since the most conscientious government of Netherlands recognized a gorilla as innately having 'human rights'! - how really, truly humane is that?
Interesting point. What I said can also be applied to speaking about animal rights. I'll resist comedy here regarding gorillas voting, owning property, etc.; I presume that such rights involve conditions of imprisonment and such.
You state that rights don't exist, but that's fallacious.
A gazelle has the right to life, as do lions. People, on the other hand, have those same rights, and the need to defend them, but are also bound to a higher standard: to respect the rights of others.
To fail to do so is a moral failure in every society that has ever been, and continues to be so now. Therefore, lawful societies are bound to recognize that individual persons have rights that must be respected, or criminal depredation--we are not animals that can prey on one another--results.
Just societies are bound to enforce the rights commonly enjoyed by their people, and the degree to which a society is just can be measured by the degree to which the rights of man are enforced.
To claim otherwise is to claim we are nothing but animals, and the sheep need fear the wolves without hope of lawful remedy.
I am a man, not a sheep nor a wolf. I am bound to respect your rights, and you are mine. Are you a man or an animal? You answer not with words, but with your life. As you live, you either live as a man, or an animal.
Rights exist because we are people, and inure to people by sole virtue of their existence. To maintain otherwise is to impugn the very essence of society, and reckon us chattel.
Your post exemplifies social media at its best. We are both correct. It is our nature as humans to construct societies characterized by liberty and justice, and it is our nature as humans to speak of "human rights" and "animal rights". But how do such words become realized in the societies that we construct? With the threat of lethal force.
IOW, notions of rights, of justice, of liberty, are just that: notions and words and visions of possibilities. To make such visions real, order must be imposed, and that is done by the men, with lethal force.