It is all of our responsibilities to help change cannabis policies. The best way to do this is to use your voice to influence the people in your life. They know you. You are real. They understand you are a good person. The fact that you like cannabis is irrelevant to who you are as a person, and your influence CAN change a person’s mind.
When you have a conversation with your friend, your neighbor, or even the woman on your kid’s soccer team, and you look them right in the eye and tell them that you support cannabis freedom because the policies of cannabis enforcement have been a disaster to our communities, they will listen.
Be educated on the subject. Know what you are talking about.
Tell them that we lock up 25% of the world’s prison population but only have 5% of the actual population—because we take poor people to jail for weed and non-violent drug crimes every day.
Let them know that we incarcerate more black men now on drug crimes than were ever enslaved in the South. When you express disgust for the current policies and relate it to the need for cannabis reform, people get that. They get that the current system is just not working.
When people find out that we are housing low level drug offenders in private prison systems to meet quotas of incarceration levels to keep the stock prices of a corrections company high, they are outraged. When they learn we are outsourcing this labor to companies like Victoria’s Secret for $0.30 per hour, they are shocked. When they find out we arrest nearly a million people a year in this country for cannabis, a large majority for simple possession, they wonder why we waste our money on this nonsense.
Got an uncle who is a fiscal conservative? Let them know we have wasted way more than a trillion bucks fighting the drug war, and drugs are more available than ever with addiction rates unchanged.
Ask them how they feel about dumping another trillion on failure.
Have a buddy who is a freedom-loving Libertarian? Challenge how they can support policies that allow law enforcement to search people’s private home, properties, and use insane levels of surveillance all because they smell a little weed.
Got a religious neighbor who is worried about its affects in the community? Remind them that Jesus would never support mass incarceration for the use of cannabis, nor the racially driven enforcement policies that have resulted from prohibition. Why would God make a plant he wanted people locked up for growing and using?
There are a lot of self-righteous and well-paid people with their hand in the prohibition cookie jar. Millions are being spent to maintain the status quo, and to continue filling private prisons and rehab clinics with people who love weed. The rehab, drug testing, private prison companies, prison lobbies, booze companies, tobacco geniuses, and big pharma all have a financial motivation to keep cannabis illegal. They will use every resource they have to keep making their blood money.
But these are real people suffering. Families are being torn apart, people are losing their jobs, and property is being seized.
And for what? Some cannabis?
We are better than this and we must make the case to anyone and everyone who will listen. Do your part to spread the word. Talk to the people in your life and demand we end cannabis prohibition sooner than later. Anything less is just uncivilized.
Visit www.CannabisKnowledgeForum.com for more details on the program.