AWESOME : Happy Birthday prohibition...Now Die.

Happy birthday prohibition. Now die.

by Vivian McPeak

Source: http://blog.seattlepi.com/vivianmcpeak/2012/09/30/happy-birthday-prohibition-now-die/

Happy birthday, marijuana Prohibition. You are now  75 years old—well past retirement age. You have accomplished so much, you must be very proud of yourself. You have largely conquered the world. You’ve spread your policies of persecution and subjugation from nation to nation, perpetuating the expansion of a prison industrial complex that would have made Stalin proud.

Your righteous crusade against a largely benign, natural plant and all who dare to embrace it has been the status quo for an entire human lifetime or better. Ever since you were conceived by the Rockefellers and promoted by their henchman, Harry Anslinger, you have been relentlessly waging a campaign of hate, terror, and brutality on a populace that is almost totally non-threatening.

Using the tactics of yellow journalism, racist bigotry, and outright lies, you have sabotaged and minimized that which makes America great: Constitutional liberty for Americans. You used the United States’ military against its own citizens, on American soil. That is unprecedented.

You have invaded the homes, the cars, the businesses, and the bloodstreams of millions of otherwise decent, law-abiding Americans in order to advance your campaign of misery and suffering. You have seized homes, cars, boats, bank accounts, and property from tens of thousands American citizens, often with no due process or conviction.

You have pitted neighbor against neighbors, parent against child, and teacher against student in an effort to create a nation of simple stool pigeons.  You have thrown millions of human lives into the incinerator of injustice while you line the corporate pockets of your benefactors with enough money to purchase the facts straight out of the mouth of the truth. You have co-opted history, bypassed the U.S. Constitution, and favored building prisons over schools. You paved the way for racialized social control resulting in the mass incarceration of Americans, particularly Americans of color. You have effectively created a brilliant tool for voter suppression among minority communities.

You have selectively enforced your madness on people of color, the poor, the infirm, and an entire counterculture. You have strong-armed your way into our homes, pulled Americans out of their beds in the dark night, laid them on the floor in their nightclothes, and brutalized them as if they were terrorists. You have stripped Americans of all dignity and stuck them with a stigma formerly reserved for child molesters and communists; you have treated them worse than common criminals, who do not face the routine sanctions, fines, forced drug classes, and “forfeitures” that people accused of drug “crimes” endure.

You have lied in court, falsified evidence, framed innocents, entrapped citizens, and used people as informants, sometimes at the cost of their lives.  You have ruined futures, broken families, and stolen children from their parents.

You have poured enough resources into your campaign of hate to build tens of thousands of schools, daycare centers, hospitals, and food banks. Instead, you have built prisons, privatized them, created incentives to lock up Americans, and then profited greatly from it all. You have enjoyed uncompensated prison labor and a mountain of working people’s taxes, which you then used to lock up millions with impunity. You have helped to jail more citizens per capita than any nation in human history.

You have cooperated and conspired with tyrants, despots and dictators, all in the name of justice. You have promoted stereotypes while you have spread pure, raw, unadulterated hatred. You have divided Americans, and fractured our society.

You have caused murders, suicides, and suffering beyond imagination. You have denied the sick, the elderly, and the terminally ill relief from suffering by denying them access to medical marijuana. Hell, you have even persecuted crippled, broken, and dying men and women and then tossed them into jails and prisons like caged rats. You have denied medical care, treatment, and medicine to prisoners. You have made possible untold prison rapes.

You have ignored presidential commissions, scientists, physicians, and journalists, in order to manufacture the consent of the American public. You have lied, distorted, twisted, fabricated, insinuated, and attacked the truth in a vicious crusade that has been part of the most well-funded domestic government policy ever known. You have declared an internal war against citizens of your own country.

You have undermined a general respect for the rule of law among many of America’s youth, who can clearly see through the hypocrisy of treating cannabis like it is a poison, while allowing poisonous alcohol and tobacco to be legal. You have endangered the lives of law enforcement officers with no just cause and caused animosity between citizens and police that will take years to undo. You have diverted resources from investigating actual crimes, and distracted from them.

Yes, happy birthday, Prohibition. You have done well. You must be so proud. You have spread fear, mistrust, paranoia, shame, embarrassment, and hate all over the globe.

Now it is time for you to retire, old policy. You are ashen and gray, heartless and cold, soulless and unfeeling. You are evil, and it is time for you to go.  You cannot have America, and we are going to take her back.  She is just now learning of your lies, your hate, and your destruction of liberty, freedom and justice.

It is time to retire, fade into the past, and disappear.  Your time is limited, because justice is on the march.