The Declaration of Independence (Drug War Revision)

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.

–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

Unless the governed want to legalize uses of marijuana, then Governments derive their just powers from the Drug Czar.

–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It is long past time we alter this drug war government.  I do not believe our government needs to be abolished, but the government must recognize the Natural Right of the people, so long as they harm no others, to make use of the plants in nature, and none more so than the cannabis hemp plant that was a required crop in the American colonies.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

And there is our problem.  We are disposed to suffer, because while 830,000 of us are arrested each year for smoking marijuana, in that same year 25 million of us smoked marijuana.  When only 1-in-30 of us are arrested, and few who are arrested are imprisoned, we feel the evils are sufferable.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

It is our duty to change this government.  35 years of abuses and usurpations, pursuing the same Object – suppressing our rights, stealing our property, and robbing our Liberty – is quite long enough.

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

The governors of several states have passed medical marijuana laws, and in others, the people have passed these laws, and yet our Executive Branch will not allow the laws to function. Several other states have passed laws to permit industrial uses of hemp, and the Executive will not assent to those laws, either.

• …He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

Justice is denied through the use of mandatory minimum sentencing, which renders the opinion of the judge moot and requires the judge to be dependent on the will of the Legislative and Executive.

• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

DEA, ONDCP, NIDA, SAMSHA, PDFA, and more new offices, with officers sworn to harass our people. And the militarization of our domestic police force is a standing army in our midst.

• … For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

Or if we are given that trial by jury, we are forbidden to mention our right to jury nullification, and the jury is forbidden to hear all of the facts of the case.

…In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

We have changed laws in our states.  We have petitioned the government to study cannabis, and when their studies call for an alteration of our government and the abolition of prohibition, those studies are hidden from the people and the tyranny continues.

…And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

And that’s where you’ll find me this Fourth of July (my personal eighteen-year anniversary of smoking my first joint) — pledging my Life, my Fortune, and my sacred Honor to end this insane prohibition against cannabis hemp.  If you consider its vital role in the founding of our country, you would consider it our national plant.  America’s roots are hemp root, and it is time we all declare our Independence from a government that suppresses our natural rights.

* Alas, the popular notion that the Declaration – and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – were written on hemp paper is not true.  Those documents are parchment (animal skin) housed at the National Archives.  That’s not to say there weren’t drafts and copies of those documents written on hemp paper, which was a popular medium of the times.  Jefferson was quite engrossed in hemp farming as well.