Most Americans know we need to end Prohibition -- of Marijuana.
In California we also know that once we tax and regulate it, it will add billions to our tax base and help solve our serious budget problems.
Every school child learns about alcohol Prohibition in History class. Anyone can see it in Wikipedia, in the movies, in Ken Burns' new PBS documentary series, or on HBO's Boardwalk Empire: Prohibition breeds crime and corruption.
It makes the prohibited substance impossible to regulate or tax, removes law-abiding competitors from the marketplace, and puts the business exclusively into the hands of criminals. It amounts to a hefty price support for a new illegal business.
Prohibition prevents law enforcement. It quickly creates gang violence and organized crime out of what would otherwise be business disagreements and prosecutable theft.
In a state like California, where cannabis is prescribed by doctors, Prohibition also mixes up Americans who choose a controversial medicine with violent criminals. It lumps them together and literally locks them all up together.
Prohibition hurts cops and DAs, and not just by wasting their time. It invites selective prosecution, bribery and police corruption. It promotes fear and contempt for law among ordinary, innocent people. Prohibition tragically tears at the natural healthy bond between citizens and police.
America learned all this by 1933 after the most famously violent, corrupt 14 years in our history: when Prohibition fueled and spread a nationwide epidemic of Organized Crime. By then everyone knew Prohibition wasn't keeping anyone safe or preventing crime, it was doing the very opposite. It's where Al Capone and the St Valentines Day Massacre came from.
Never before nor since Prohibition has there been an Amendment that tried to take away rights and had to be reversed. We realized almost 80 years ago that Prohibition was unAmerican.
The problem is, politicians like Dianne Feinstein think it's in their interest to act like it's still 1919.
They're hoping their continued support for the War on Drugs and Marijuana Prohibition can make them look tough and help them get elected again. While this unwinnable war has cost a trillion dollars already, these politicians and the drug cartels seem to be the only ones who benefit.
The cartels have killed more than 40,000 along the Mexican border in just the last 5 years. The Mexican president recently confessed that legalizing marijuana could help end many of these problems, but there has been no leadership on the United States side.
Marijuana Prohibition has led to even more corruption and injustice here. Most of the prisoners serving time for parole violations today got there by skipping or failing a drug test. So Marijuana Prohibition is a main reason California's overcrowded prisons have been condemned by the Supreme Court, and why we imprison citizens at a higher rate than China, Russia or Rwanda.
Senator Feinstein's solution is to continue the status quo, step up the Drug War, and build more prisons for more prisoners. Feinstein is loved and supported by the growing private prison industry, which helps fund her campaigns and the scare campaigns against marijuana legalization.
How do they sell it? Same way they wage their other wars. With lies.
To politicians like Dianne Feinstein there are no known medical uses for cannabis. A million sick people and their doctors' prescriptions just don't exist. The patients who were literally vomiting themselves do death, who now applaud their doctors for prescribing marijuana? They don't exist. Those 55% of Californians who voted for medical marijuana? -- Don't exist. Just like a climate change denier, when facts and science don't fit their ideology, politicians like Feinstein make them disappear.
Despite that kind of dishonest and backward leadership, most Americans now think marijuana should simply be legalized, while 3 out of 4 favor medical marijuana by prescription. But instead Feinstein's drug war has federal prosecutors at war with California doctors, patients, and state police. It's cowardly, wasteful, unfair, and unAmerican, and it's got to stop.
California needs a Senator who stands up for the truth and for the people - including sick people in states like ours who voted for access to medical marijuana.
And we want to finally end the famously corrupt policy of Marijuana Prohibition.
Let's make it happen.
