Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Marijuana will never, ever be legal in the United States of America, Fact. I’ve made this statement and ones similar to those that will follow before, but it bears mentioning again as the Trump regime signaled on Thursday that it was going to step up enforcement of profits for big-booze and big-pharma.
“’I do believe you’ll see greater enforcement of it,’ Spicer said at a news conference. ‘Because again there’s a big difference between the medical use … that’s very different than the recreational use, which is something the Department of Justice will be further looking into,’” Reuters quoted White House Spokesman Sean Spicer as saying Thursday.
In those couple of mangled sentences, Spicer basically put the government’s cards on the table. The federal government sees a difference between medical and recreational use only insofar as to which oligarchs those two uses of marijuana hurt – big-pharma and big-booze respectively – and how to use violence to protect said oligarchs.
So, expect federal law enforcement to step up their presence in places like Colorado and Washington, where full recreational use is now legal and theoretically eating into the profits of big-booze, which has a government-enforced monopoly on how people can catch a buzz.
In states where marijuana has been legalized for medical use, all of those legalizations will soon be invalidated. As I type this, big-pharma is busily isolating all the various cannabinoids found in marijuana. Once done, these will be sent to the FDA for “testing” and then made available to the public via prescription. Of course, a new drug needs to be put into one of the drug schedules – at that point, marijuana itself, along with the cannabinoid pills, will be rescheduled into the same prescription-only schedule as opioid painkillers. With that one stroke of a pen, the DEA will immediately invalidate all state-level medical marijuana laws, which hinge on doctors “recommending” patients use marijuana as doctors cannot “prescribe” substances that aren’t approved by the FDA.
Once marijuana and its pill-form derivatives are rescheduled where they can be prescribed, the Drug Enforcement Administration has jurisdiction to investigate where large numbers of prescriptions are being given out by a single doctor or clinic – much the way they crack down on “pill-mills” now. Under current law, in states where it’s legal, doctors face almost no scrutiny for handing out scores of medical marijuana recommendations a day. Once put under the same scrutiny they’d face for writing a script for OxyContin, doctors will be far more hesitant to write someone a script for a cannabinoid pill.
Granted, there has been a lot of optimism among various pro-marijuana groups, most of which centered around the increasing number of states that are legalizing it for medical and/or recreational use and polling data that shows public support for legalizing marijuana now hovering around 60 percent. If we think back to 2012, the day after polling data put public support for gay marriage at just over 50 percent, then-president Obama said his views on gay marriage had “evolved” to mirror those of the majority of voters, oddly enough. A few weeks later and the Supreme Court invalidated all state-level bans on gay marriage; and there was much rejoicing. So, with a full ten percent more Americans on board for legal pot than gay marriage, why isn’t it legal yet?
Money, of course.
There’s no money to be made stopping gay people from getting married; hell, opening up marriage to gay couples increases the number of marriage licenses a county gets to sell each year. Sure, there aren’t many arguments that can be made in favor of gay marriage that don’t apply to recreational drug use: in both cases all parties are willing participants who aren’t harming the person or property of anyone else. This, again, isn’t a matter of reason, logic or morality as none of those things make a whit of difference to government, which is a creature of violence and control. This is about money and power.
The USA is not now and has not been for a long time the constitutional republic the founders created; the USA is, by definition a corporatist oligarchy. By definition, a corporatist oligarchy exists solely to serve the oligarchs, not the people. So, if you work for big-booze or big-pharma, congrats, the government works for you. If you don’t, and you’re just some cog in the machine who wants to smoke pot because you can’t see how you don’t have the absolute right to do so, you’re not wrong, you just don’t matter. It’s in the government’s interest to lock you in a cage because locking you in a cage is in big-booze’s interests – if you’re not going to buy your buzz from them, then you might as well sit in a cage or get shot in a police raid. You don’t matter. I don’t matter. To government, no lives matter.
The sooner we all figure this out, the better off we’ll be.
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