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California Green Democrats voted yes to endorse the Yes on 19 Marijuana Proposition Campaign yesterday for the mid-term elections November, 2010. The President of the club, Rick Guerrero, confirmed that this endorsement comes on the heels of having endorsed all state-wide as well as some regional and local Democratic candidates.
Guerrero served as an Associate Pastor in Richmond, at Waypointe Church, West Contra Costa, and then became Lead Community Organizer for the Obama 2008 Campaign. "Serving the community in Richmond," Guerrero reflects, "I came to see the environmental injustices impinged upon the working poor and their children on a day-to-day basis."
Guerrero furthered, "Serving the community in Richmond I also came to see that we can achieve economic sustainability and social justice by turning away from non-renewable energy and turning toward a green economy. A green economy would not only be fueled by renewable energy," he described, "it would change how we work and live.
A green economy would include everything from retrofitting poorly insulated and the toxic indoor air quality of homes and buildings to manufacturing wind mills and clean energy cars. A green economy would create a new working class." But how could a green economy also mean the legalization of …….marijuana? What's so green about legalizing Marijuana?
"It makes perfect sense for the Green Democrats to support legalizing Marijuana", stated Guerrero. "The goals of the Green Democrats are:
Economic Sustainability, Environmental Balance, and Social Justice, and legalizing Marijuana affects all three goals."
Marijuana is: • Money and cottage industry for the development of local jobs and economies. • Medicine for painful and fatal conditions that can be made into many wellness products including oils, teas, lotions. • Environmental issues if not regulated. Drug lords cultivate with toxic poisonous fertilizers and processing agents on public and private land without permit. • Social Justice for victims of the war on drugs. Human trafficking is associated with the sale of such a highly profitable commodity as the poor are used in the distribution of the herb on the black market. • Organized Crime control- legalization will take the profit out of the sale of the plant and hence the incentives to commit crimes during its cultivation and sale. We saw this same crime intensity associated with the prohibition of alcohol with the days of bootleggers and Al Capone in the 1930s. • Income tax revenues- 1.4 Billion annually projected for the State of California Making money with Marijuana stimulates local economies
Sources interviewed but preferred to remain anonymous say what the legalization of marijuana means to them financially as dealers. "The profit will be taken out of the plant," said a permitted medical marijuana producer south of San Francisco.
The producer admits to selling at a much higher price to his recreational user clientele. "I have to charge the going rate to those who buy from me for the purposes of medicinal use, and I wouldn’t want to overcharge to deny someone really in need of the plant as a medicine. I am not the kind of person who wants to add unnecessary stress to an already stressful situation. Persons with serious illnesses come to me saying marijuana has helped them get not only rheumatoid arthritis under control, but cancer in remission."
However, he was concerned about what legalization would do to his profits from the sale of marijuana, for which have provided substantial income for him for most of his adult life. "My recreational users will pay top dollar and me, top profits. The passage of the State of California medical marijuana initiative in 1996, reduced my profit significantly by anywhere from about a quarter to a third. Passage of the initiative in November could easily cut my profit in half. I may actually have to go out and look for a job."
That job might include a stint back to school at the Oaksterdam University in Oakland, CA. where thousands of students have taken classes with the hope of entering the budding cannabis job field.
Curing Cancer with Marijuana
Gone are the days of the Cheech and Chong brand. Medical research communities at universities, private industry and even government entities such as the National Institutes of Health, have been busy for over a decade compiling research and publishing articles on how the famous and controversial plant has per claims, cured many ailments and fatal diseases including cancer.
Last year, one study in particular made national news when it was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (2009). Cannabinoid action induces autophagy-mediated cell death through stimulation of ER stress in human glioma cells. American Society for Clinical Investigation. The translation is that cannibus can shrink tumors and ceased tumors in two humans this study admidst a number of related articles. San Francisco radio host Christine Kraft covered the famous 'Doc Fry Trial' in 2007. Medical Dr. Marion Fry and her husband Attorney Dale Schafer were both sent to 5 years in prison for when Federal and State law were inconsistent with respect to marijuana regulation. Schafer said he sought out marijuana after seeing his wife's bald head face down in the shower throwing up in misery not and not healing after which as a fully licensed medical doctor she had complete access to.
"We had access to all the pharmaceuticals we wanted," Schaefer pleaded before being sentencing. Marijuana was the only thing they could find that soothed his wife's pain, and then, eventually continued to release pain as to their surprise, the cancer went into full remission.
Dr. Andrew Weil recently went on record applauding the new documentary film released this summer, "What if Cannabis Cured Cancer." Kris Hermes of Safe Access Now http://safeaccessnow.org/blog/?p=832 cited a quote from Weil verifying this research. "Exciting new research suggests that the cannabinoids found in marijuana may have a primary role in cancer treatment and prevention."
The Impact of growing marijuana illegally on the environment
Nancy Roberts (2010) writes on Care2, a petition site, that Marijuana is grown using pesticides and herbicides that pollute groundwater and kill wildlife; illegal encampments of growers have been blamed for several forest fires in California, besides leaving piles of garbage and human waste when they move on.
Tiffany Revelle, Staff Writer for The Cannabus News (2009) reports the Lake County Fish and Wildlife Advisory Committee was the first county organization in the state to address the environmental impacts of illegal marijuana grows on public land, a problem Associate Field Manager Gary Sharpe of the Bureau of Land Management’s Ukiah field office said is mostly a Northern California issue.
Cleanup is time consuming and expensive. Using an old estimate he got from Knudson, Brooks guessed it takes $12,000 to clean up one acre of public land. Compounding the problem is the fact that the sites are often in remote areas surrounded by steep, rocky terrain. Using a helicopter to remove the growing infrastructure adds $18,000 to the cost, according to Sharpe.
Social Justice: the inequality of imprisonment for marijuana offenses
Dr. Harry Levine and colleagues write in Targeting Blacks for Marijuana that a report released documents widespread race-based disparities in the enforcement of low-level marijuana possession laws in California. Focused on the 25 largest counties in the state, the report finds that African Americans are arrested for marijuana possession at substantially higher rates than whites, typically at double, triple or even quadruple the rate of whites. Further, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession far out of proportion to their percentage in the total population of the counties.
Per A New Slavery, communities/race/anewslavery/index.cfm an article by the Drug Policy Alliance, "The racially disproportionate demographics of the victims of the war on drugs will not surprise anyone familiar with the symbiotic relationship between poverty and institutionalized racism. Economic inequality and political disenfranchisement have been inextricably intertwined since the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The racist enforcement of the drug laws is just the latest example of institutionalized racism.
As political economist John Flateau graphically puts it: "Metaphorically, the criminal justice pipeline is like a slave ship, transporting human cargo along interstate triangular trade routes from Black and Brown communities; through the middle passage of police precincts, holding pens, detention centers and courtrooms; to downstate jails or upstate prisons; back to communities as unrehabilitated escapees; and back to prison or jail in a vicious recidivist cycle."
Marijuana: organized crime control
The Drug Policy Alliance tracks the ineffectiveness and history of the war on drugs with meager results. "The U.S. war on drugs is big business -- a multi-billion dollar public/private venture that radically inflates the value of illegal drugs and criminalizes the poorest people of color, trapping them in a vicious cycle of addiction, unemployment and incarceration."
According to the United Nations International Drug Control Program, the international illicit drug business generates as much as $400 billion in trade annually. Profits of this magnitude invariably lead to corruption and complicity at the highest levels.
"In the United States," writes Angela Davis in San Francisco based CorpWatch, "prison architects and contractors, corrections personnel, policy makers and academics, and the thousands of corporate vendors who peddle their wares at the annual trade-show of the American Corrections Association - hawking everything from toothbrushes and socks to barbed-wire fences and shackles."
Davis further implicates even larger concentrations of power, "And multi-national corporations that win tax subsidies, incentives and abatements from local governments -- robbing the public coffers and depriving communities of the kind of quality education, roads, health care and infrastructure that provide genuine incentives for legitimate business. The sale of tax-exempt bonds to underwrite prison construction is now estimated at $2.3 billion annually."
Marijuana Revenue for the State of California
Proponents make the case that whether we legalize marijuana or not, the market for marijuana continues to be used both medicinally and recreationally. Since as a society, we allow and tax liquor and cigarettes, marijuana seems ripe for the tax collector. The Yes on 19 campaign stated that the California Board of Equalization estimated the measure would bring in an additional $1.4 billion in annual revenue.
Further, enforcement agencies have admitted that a reason hemp is not allowed to be grown in the United States is that they cannot distinguish the non- psychedelic cousin from marijuana in fly overs thus making control of marijuana difficult. Hemp was grown and used for rope, clothing, and food nutrition in the United States right up until WWII.
Marijuana historian Jack Herer writes in his famous book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, that William Randolph Hearst demonized hemp in the media and then lobbied to make it illegal so that his paper made from trees would not have to compete with hemp paper. Jack's book is also the source of documenting that the Declaration of Independence was actually written on hemp paper and that our first generation of Americans grew the crop.
Recently, USA Today published a story about using hemp to build houses with in which the sails that carried Christopher Columbus" ships were made of hemp. Of course there is the famous ‘Henry Ford hemp car’ built in 1941 for which millions have googled to see actual footage of on YouTube.
The Daily Vanguard reports America spends about $360 million per year importing hemp, according to the Eugene Register-Guard-money that could benefit local farmers, while the cheaper costs of local cultivation would translate into higher profits for local storeowners.
The Green Democrats are officially affiliated/collaborators with the No on Prop 23 Coalition and the Ella Baker Center against Prop 23. The Green Democrats were officially started in 2008 by Perry Metzger who now serves as Treasurer of the group.
Interested persons wishing to learn more about the group can contact: Rick Guerrero, (m) 916.317.2497, sacgreendems@gmail.com, www.green-democrats.org, facebook: Green Democrats of Sacramento County
Levine, PhD, Harry G., et al. Targeting Blacks for Marijuana: Possession Arrests of African Americans in California, 2004-08. Drug Policy Alliance; June 29, 2010.
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