You all know about our vaunted Department of Justice, right? These are the guys who cannot find a way to prosecute a single one of the Wall Street criminals who even as we speak are rolling around in money like Scrooge McDuck in his basement . . . money that we taxpayers have coughed up for their benefit without receiving anything in return. . . . while housing prices continue their plummet and unemployment for people who actually work for a living remains around ten percent. This is the same DOJ which caved to pressure from the right and changed its mind on prosecuting 9/11 prisoners on US soil. The same DOJ which even people like me who keep up on these things cannot tell you of a single accomplishment. My take is these people are not interested in prosecuting anybody worth more than a million dollars.
Yeah, these guys. Well, guess what they're up to now? The always-popular-with-the-dunder-headed-public war on drugs. What better way for the do-nothing-for-justice Department of Justice to divert attention from its utter incompetence than to stir up trouble against medical marijuana? Basically the administration has pussy-footed this issue as it has so many others that the progressive wing of the party cares about. What's happening is that the DOJ has threatened to prosecute state officials if they are in any way involved in the licensing of the production or distribution of marijuana. This effectively scares state governments into the position of doing nothing to further medical marijuana interests in their states. Moreover, DOJ is going after producers of the drug with the tax code which prohibits any tax deductions for companies "trafficking in controlled substances." So if you're a grower or processor, you basically have no tax deductions for expenses connected with your business. Nice, eh?
All of this in the face of the administration's avowed policy of not going after the medical marijuana industry. Remember that pledge? Well, brothers and sisters, what's happening here is the administration doesn't want to appear "soft on drugs" next year, so it's blunting that issue right now. These people lie as easily as they breathe.
5 comments:
as someone who is on several totally legal drugs for totally legal reasons, and who once-upon-a-time was a '60s hippy-chick, i find the fuss over medical marijuana totally obnoxious. it's such a mild drug, compared to most legal drugs! personally, though my own pot days are long past and i spend 3 months a year in a country where i could easily and uncontroversially use it with no interest in doing so, i think laws against even its recreational use are inane. but okay, they won't let us use it for fun: much better to stick to martinis.....but when it really helps sick people and they can't have access to it, it goes beyond catering to conservative prejudices and becomes yet one more form of oppression.
glad you had a good trip, by the way!
p.s. don't know why they called me 'ananymous' just now. i don't think i can get arrested for smoking pot 40 years ago, or taking legal rx asthma meds today. somehow 'anonymous' looks ominous.....
Karen, sometimes I'm able to deal with this sort of habitual stupidity--I mean the extraordinary amount of resources we waste on politically popular but practically useless programs such as the so-called war on drugs (do they call it that anymore?)--but most of the time I just read this sort of thing as more evidence that we are a doomed people. It's more than conservative prejudices at work here. Whenever we talk about something nationwide, we have to factor in national ignorance and/or stupidity. That's certainly at work with our drug polices.
what i don't understand is how this works vis a vis big business. i thought when i was young that the cigarette industry would get hold of patents and then try to legalize it, once only they could sell it. and of course the liquor industry could do the same. i could--and still can--visualize commercials----attractive young housewife getting upset when the joints she tried to roll fall apart, and the male voiceover says, 'tired of always having to roll your own joints' and elaborate on new pre-rolled joints in a smaller version of a cigarette package. then they could genderize--big cigar like joints, man-sized, hot guy smoking while young women ogle him. or a woman complaining about all these big cigar-like joints, and then the voiceover talks about how you enjoy things better when you feel feminine, and the small joints would be pink and come in a rhinestone packet----i mean, they really could do that, and then they'd make the $$ not the drug dealers. still seems odd to me that never happened......
I used to entertain the same kind of thoughts, and I still think Big Tobacco and the Spirits industry probably do have pot-related patents. But here we have a situation where our overweening moral impulse and desire to foist it upon the entire world overcomes even our equally rampant desire for money. This is one of those rare examples of this happening in our history. Money is hands down winner almost every time.
Off on another short trip this weekend, and then the weekend after that. And there are two more trips planned later this year. I don't mind trips, but as a basic homebody, this is getting a little extreme.
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