OAKLAND, Calif. — Oakland’s City Council last week approved a 1.8% tax on medicinal marijuana sold in the city. If voters pass the proposal in a July election, Oakland would become the nation’s first city to directly tax the drug.

A city tax on medical marijuana could generate at least $400,000 and perhaps more than $1 million annually, said Rebecca Kaplan, the Oakland City Council member who pushed the proposal. The city of 400,000 residents is facing an $83 million shortfall in a $455 million budget.

The owners and managers of Oakland’s four medical-marijuana dispensaries said they approached the city with the idea. “We wanted to further legitimize the medical-marijuana paradigm to show that we are truly willing to assist [Oakland], and to show other cities that there are social benefits to this,” said Keith Stephenson, executive director of Purple Heart Patient Center.

No formal opposition has formed against the proposal, and Ms. Kaplan and medical-marijuana advocates said they are confident voters will approve it.

But Paul Chabot, a Southern California resident who recently founded the Coalition for a Drug Free California, is opposed to the idea because he thinks the “quasi-legalization” of marijuana would add more of the drug into the black market. “It’s a front; it also sends the wrong message to children,” he said. “What are you doing to do next, allow prostitution and tax that? Allow methamphetamine to be sold and tax that?”

Some people just won’t learn. This opposition leader obviously is not aware that if we legitimize a banned substance and turn a black market into a legitimate business, then it’s no longer a black market. Secondly, here is the message that I want to send to my children: Science over Politics.

As I recenly wrote in my article “Grade School Children Caught Selling Marijuana“, this opposition leader could learn that children have virtually unfettered access to any kind of illicit drug “right now”.

In fact, I asked my 15yr old, who is attending high school near our home in a middle class town in Texas, to share a list of items she can obtain within 24 hrs notice at her school (for purchase inside of her school) and here is what she wrote down off the top of her head:

Marijuana (indoor Chronic of any flavor), LSD, Magic Mushrooms, Mescaline, Cocaine (in any form), Meth, Ice, and Heroin (in any form)

What the list doesn’t contain is Cigarettes or Alcohol. When asked about the availability of those, she stated,

“They are harder to get because you have to go to a store, present an I.D., and undergo a certain amount of scrutiny.”

Paul, if you truly want to protect our children from reefer madness, then you need to embrace decriminalization and help us to shape our laws of oppression into laws of protection.

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“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963

Today our nation honors what would’ve been this week the eightieth birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of these United States.  I was sixty-four days old when an assassin’s bullet cut down Dr. King in the prime of his life.  Today I am six-hundred forty days older than Dr. King when he was killed.  Tomorrow I will see something few people my age and older thought we’d ever see, yet something Dr. King had dreamed from the start.

There remains a grave injustice to be battled, the most unjust of laws to be disobeyed, a law that by its definition is not rooted in eternal law and natural law: the man made code that declares nature itself to be illegal, the prohibition on cannabis.  Yet when I mention marijuana law reform in the context of the great civil rights struggles in America, so many are quick to dismiss me with snickers of derision.  ”You just want pot legal so you can get high!” is a common refrain.

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