Three out of four Americans believe the “war on drugs” is a failure and can never be won. Serious people like Sen. Jim Webb, former Mexican president Vicente Fox, Congressmen Barney Frank, Charlie Rangel, Steve Cohen and others, even a growing body of right-of-center analysts and politicians have been saying it’s time to fundamentally reshape our approach to drug control.

So, why this divide between massive public opposition to current policies and the positions taken by our leaders? Fear, of course. They’re afraid of being punished for touching what has been perceived, mistakenly, as a third rail issue.

And the cause of this “drug war dementia”? I’m guessing it has something to do with a brilliant 2004 poll on the topic of medical marijuana. The poll asked two questions, the first confirming what had already been shown over and over again: that about 70 percent of people support the idea of legalizing marijuana, at least for medical purposes.

But then, pollsters asked something interesting:

“Regardless of your own opinion, do you think the majority of people support making marijuana medically available, or do you think the majority opposes making marijuana medically available?”

The result? In Rhode Island, where the poll was conducted, only 26.5 percent thought that most people support medical marijuana.

The lesson here? While many of our elected representatives privately support serious changes to our failed drug laws, they believe they are alone. They think if they stick their necks out they’ll be handed their heads come election time.

Which is why we must rise up and let our elected officials know they are safe to support drug law reform. And in considerable political danger if they do not.

via Norm Stamper: Progressives Push Against Drug War: Will Dems Listen?.

This is also why we must come out of the cannabis closet and make ourselves known as the responsible, taxpaying, normal-with-an-a, law-abiding-(except-that-law) citizens that we are.  When the only public image of the cannabis community is the “stoner”, the people who support our issue will only do so quietly, lest they be lumped in with the “burnouts”.

Never has this point been so crystal clear to me as during this last weekend’s family campout for Independence Day.

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{{Well, look what was sitting in my draft folder.  I posted the July 4 podcast to the feed, but forgot to post the on the blog.  Hey, it was a holiday and I was working, so cut me some slack, Jack…    “R”R }}

Happy Independence Day!  Remember, the patriots who signed their name to a death sentence on July 4, 1776, faced the most insurmountable odds you can imagine.  (Picture Puerto Rico declaring independence from the US if we really didn’t want them to.)  Britain was the greatest global empire on the planet and had the best military and navy.  But dedicated freedom fighters who stuck to their principles of equality and freedom overcame the odds and established the first nation created for a purpose, not born of race, geography, religion, ethnicity, or station.

They were hemp farmers and cannabis users and they were flawed men of their times, considering the slavery, genocide, and second-class treatment of women and minorities that they accommodated, but they instituted a framework in the Declaration that aspires to a greater ideal – that we are endowed with the rights of Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness, that all men (in the “human” sense) are created equal, and that just governments rule by the consent of the governed.

We’re striving for that “more perfect Union” referred to in the Constitution.  We overcame slavery, we’re repairing Jim Crow, we’ve recognized most women’s and minorities’ rights and we’re working on recognizing them all.  We’re far more diverse and tolerant than most anyplace on Earth even though we still have our pockets of bigotry, ignorance, and hatred.  Enlightenment is not achieved overnight or even over two centuries because it is a continuous process.  We’re better every generation.  And this generation will be the one to finally restore America to her hemp roots and reassert our natural right of sovereignty of mind and consciousness.

Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2008-07-04

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We’ve got Steve Bloom from CelebStoner.com with us with the marijuana entertainment connection, and I give you my take on the Declaration of Independence, the Drug War Revision.

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Eleven score and a dozen years ago the United States of America began with the Declaration of Independence.  There will be much reflection on our founding document today.  Our Founders pledged their lives to stand up for their natural rights and fight together against the tyranny of an oppressive and unresponsive government.

As a proud American freedom fighter against the drug war, I pledge the same.

Scribbling with quill and ink on parchment*, Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owning hemp farmer, wrote these ironic words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

Though it would take a century to end the slavery and another century to recognize fully the legal equality of most men and women, we still fall short of the ideal.  The drug war disproportionately arrests, incarcerates, and disenfranchises African-Americans and Hispanics.  And all drug users of any ethnicity are chattel in the modern slavery – for-profit prison labor.  All men are created equal, but afterward their urine can be tainted, and those men need not be treated equally by government or in commerce.

…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Unless your pursuit of Happiness involves personal use of certain mind-altering substances and unless your Life depends on the use of medical marijuana.  Then you are going to lose your Liberty.

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