cannabisnews.com: Lighting Up for Freedom on Fourth!





Lighting Up for Freedom on Fourth!
Posted by FoM on July 04, 1999 at 17:33:57 PT
By Jan Glidewell
Source: St. Petersburg Times
At first it looked incongruous -- a picture that ran Wednesday in some editions of the Times showing two banners hanging over Sixth Avenue in Zephyrhills.
One banner promoted Sparklebration, an annual Independence Day observance in Dade City on Saturday, and the other invited people to the Hemp Revolution, a rally in favor of marijuana legalization planned for Zephyr Park the following day. I'm sure it got a lot of folks who still think "roach" means an obnoxious Florida insect very exercised. How dare anyone promote legalization of the demon devil weed on a day as sacred to Americans as the day we told England to "go fly a kite, and we ain't talking electricity experiments." If you think about it, however, nothing could be more American than a group of citizens publicly exercising their constitutional right to petition the government to change laws they deem bad ones -- and making a party out of it. If one of the vendors at the hemp event isn't selling packages of "federalist papers," then he or she is missing a good deal. Hemp, for the uninitiated and non-inhaling, is another name for the same plant that provides the leaves and buds so enduringly popular for a substantial portion of the American population. For some reason many of us can't discern, people used to make rope and fabric out of, and its seeds are still very popular with pet birds, although they have to have been sterilized by radiation (the seeds, not the birds) before they can be sold for that purpose. Hemp farming was a popular livelihood in colonial times, and rope wasn't always the object. George Washington, when he wasn't busy chopping down cherry trees (a destructive behavior decidedly not in keeping with the marijuana culture), was a hemp farmer, and excerpts from his diaries show that he talked about keeping the male and female plants separate because (as it was believed then) that enhanced the "medicinal" qualities of the female plants. Come on, why else would anyone think he had thrown a dollar across the Potomac River? Trust me, folks, I tried doing it once when I was straight as an arrow, and I couldn't throw it more than a few inches . . . the wind kept blowing it back in my face. A lot of people, especially the tens of thousands who are sitting in jail cells because of them, think this nation's drug laws, especially as they regard marijuana, are stupid. A lot of other people think they are peachy keen. That includes people who have received word directly from God that marijuana is evil and want to make sure that nobody behaves in a way that might actually provide pleasure. It also includes tens of thousands of people whose entire lives are tied up in either providing or trying to stop the flow of drugs. A whole bunch of law enforcement types, including one entire administration in the federal government, would have to go out and start chasing serial killers, psycho-militia types and other mean people who might be armed -- instead of screwing up some 21-year-old's life for having a roach in the ashtray of his car. If drugs were legalized, all of those private corporations that are slowly but surely gobbling up the prison business, and for whom a full jail is a good jail, might have to go invest their funds in building hospital beds instead of prison beds and paying for needed medications for the elderly rather than making sure wanted medications aren't available to anyone else. A nation that has laws allowing, subsidizing and taxing tobacco -- a known killer which, alas, has a very good lobby and its own U.S. senator -- should be willing to listen to citizens who are following the rules, seeking the signatures and engaging in the long and probably futile search for somebody in government with his or her head and fundament on opposite ends of their torso. Sparklebration is a fitting observance for east Pasco's citizens to honor the men and women whose courage made this nation possible and whose foresight provided the legal means to keep it livable. The Hemp Revolution will be exactly the same thing. © St. Petersburg Times, published July 4, 1999 
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