Cannabis News
Your Government Doesn’t Represent You Anymore
How to Know for sure your Government doesn’t represent you!
When two people decide to build a partnership, open communication and transparency typically serve as the bedrocks of trust. Vulnerability breeds connection. Yet when it comes to the machinations of the state, opacity appears the modus operandi – often to the detriment of the people subjected to un visible power.
Nowhere does this penchant for concealment seem more perverse than in the spectacle of redaction surrounding cannabis prohibition, where the public remains barred from insights on policies determining what benign plants they can utilize. The lengths government goes to restrict access reveals the degree it fears an informed populace.
While reasonable minds can debate necessary secrecy in areas of defense to protect strategic interests, the reflex towards occlusion in benign cultural issues demands deeper critique. What truths threaten so profoundly that the state’s first impulse is to classify, sanitize and cherry pick data to prevent discourse? Perhaps most alarmingly, what informal doctrines require such assiduous perception control and manufacturing of consent?
When governmental agencies feel empowered to broadly determine fact from fancy for adult consumers regarding comparatively harmless substances, seemingly answerable only to themselves, warning bells should sound. Power derived from the people requires accountability TO people, with proportional justification for curtains drawn.
Alas, the recent documents around cannabis policy consist largely of scribbles, scratches and wholesale omissions. Mostly, readers find an abyss where rigor should reign. The redactions speak volumes compared to their vacant contents – affirming the agency’s tenuous interest in science or truth-seeking. This filters policy through layered agendas disengaged from practical reality.
Ultimately the DEA’s censored files betray insecurity, not security. Their reluctance suggests awareness that prohibition rationale cannot survive open scrutiny. In essence, secrecy shields critical flaws and overreaches from public accountability. If transparent governance requires informed citizens, in areas like drug policy ignorance becomes strength…for the bureaucrats. But it makes citizens powerless spectators, not partners, in determining the laws controlling their lives.
So what are they hiding?
While speculation runs rampant regarding specific content hidden behind DEA redactions, even the visible fragments in recently released documents prove telling. They affirm that the health establishment acknowledges accepted medical use and evolving scientific attitudes around cannabis – even as prohibitionists desperately throttle transparency around formal acknowledgement.
Broadly, the unredacted content suggests federal health authorities now recognize modern research necessitates rescheduling. The past denial cited hinged largely on explicitly repudiating any accepted medical value according to science at the time. Officials now admit “considerable data” shows otherwise.
Yet line after line blacked out prevents public review of the exact science guiding this reversal toward Schedule III admission. If the data demonstrated and reasoning conveyed genuinely pointed to greater therapeutic understanding – rather than mostly underscoring cannabis’ comparative safety – why shroud it in darkness? Who or what suffers from illuminating truth?
Perhaps most revealingly, health authorities concede determining definitive “abuse potential” remains contentious, given “many dimensions” comprising risk profiles. This complexity confounds absolutist scheduling. Any intellectually honest, evidence-based approach allows for nuanced balancing of benefits versus consequences. Yet obfuscation suggests entrenched agendas still masquerading as impartial concern.
Additionally, the public sections document federal reticence to acknowledge state legal medical and recreational policies as guidelines for reform. Government feigning objectivity while dismissing broader legislative trends proves all rhetoric, no reconcilliation. It affirms bureaucratic indifference to public will in favor of perpetuating outdated institutional biases.
The paltry details visible merely frame more obscured evidence that current science and state-level democracy further repudiate and erode longtime federal cannabis prohibition. That we cannot fully parse officials’ interpretations of that increasingly undeniable consensus spotlights profound distrust between transparent governance and controlling interests wishing to bottle inconvenient truths.
What becomes abundantly clear is that the status quo rejects tools of free thought itself – open inquiry, shareable data, peer review, evidentiary analysis, democratically guided policy – to sustain myopic worldviews forged decades prior, now dressed in modern camouflage.
While definitive proof remains redacted, all signs suggest undue pharmaceutical influence steering the DEA’s restrictive handling of cannabis scheduling. The excessive redactions themselves affirm a bureaucratic playing field drastically tilted against open scientific inquiry into therapeutic plant potential. And the product of this opaque process – suggesting movement to Schedule III, not unscheduling – reeks of concessions to patent-protected corporate interests, not liberated consumer welfare.
The DEA has effectively served as pharma’s enforcement arm from inception by granting economic control via restrictive scheduling. The criteria for Schedules I through V make clear that approved medicinal status depends on profitable synthetic mimics from industry, while naturally derived treatments are dismissed as having no medical value by default. This extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence the DEA certainly does not provide.
Worse still, the CSA’s scheduling standards explicitly favor pharmaceutical testing investments as indicators of “potential” abuse before gathering data on actual harm. This market barrier conveniently narrows access to capital intensive labs alone. The DEA’s secretive referral to HHS and FDA perpetuates this cycle by empowering agencies captured by those they presume to regulate.
Even the language around marijuana’s “accepted medical use” in released docs exposes linguistic gymnastics that could only come from bureaucrats 1930’s mindset and pharma lobbyists. Scientifically, the case against medical efficacy dissolved decades ago. Yet outdated institutions churn familiar mud, leaving criminalization the status quo for extra security.
So make no mistake – rescheduling to Schedule III means nothing but a pharma power grab to control cannabis through restrictive federal permits, encumber small providers with needless red tape, and secure patented profits over unpatentable wellness solutions. It offers no true progress from prohibition, only a cover-up consolidating corporatism.
As long as market access depends on appeasing the DEA’s clandestine corporate advisory committees, cannabis remains suppressed not on scientific grounds, but for threatening the medical monopoly by providing an alternative.
In this sense, full de- or re-scheduling is the only sensible option aligned with social benefit over protectionism. But the DEA’s secrecy proves they cannot be trusted as an impartial arbiter of evidentiary drug classifications. Time has exposed their complicity in magnifying corporate riches over consumer choice or public health. We must discard terms handed down by discredited technocrats, not become beholden to them.
Cannabis simply does not conform to the narrow constructs of scheduled substances under the CSA criteria. As a cultivated flowering plant with multifaceted uses, it resists nearly all attempts to classify, quantify or control it so uniformly. Its diversity of applications and effects make cannabis functionally unlike any other listed drug, demanding an entirely bespoke approach beyond dated prohibitions – namely complete de-scheduling.
The folly of attempting to legislate cannabis akin to concentrated compounds or lethal toxins ignores thousands of years of documented medical, spiritual and recreational usage meeting human needs. No society on earth ever deemed it so hazardous as to criminalize until political machinations in the 1920s-30s, culminating in the nefarious Marihuana Tax Act. Path dependency brought us to this point, not evidence.
In effect, cannabis blurs standard lines, possessing open-ended potential as medicine, sacrament, recreational amenity, textile, food source and artistic muse simultaneously. It serves broad roles legal drugs like alcohol cannot, while lacking the acute toxicity of most illicit compounds. This resists all analogies.
Placing such a protean substance in a siloed regulatory straightjacket compounds errors and constraints. It shoehorns living potential into a capitalist framework demanding standardization for commodification. But cannabis and its derivatives morph with breeders’ artistry and consumers’ intent, escaping rigid designation.
Its essence is variability – across strains, individuals, methods, mindsets ad infinitum – not pharmaceutical uniformity. Cannabis provides experiences, not static products. Hence rescheduling it recognizes no true medical, ethical or practical imperative beyond appeasing outdated technocrats. Doing so merely brings antiquated policies another step towards reckoning with the futile, destructive nature overpowering peaceful herb culture.
With no public safety nor moral cause for scheduling, the onus lies on prohibitionists to conclusively demonstrate cannabis possession demands state criminalization while alcohol merits legal access. They cannot source consistent facts, but rather invoke claims to “protect” people from deciding individually – ironically the core danger of the policy. Removing cultural experience from citizens’ hands belies fundamental distrust and insecurity around personal autonomy.
In this sense, cannabis must not inch policy chains further, even to Schedule III permitting. The appropriate schedule status is NONE, its appropriate authority OVER ONESELF. By what moral standard or empirical evidence does anyone justify limiting access to herbs, fungi and cacti meeting basic needs?
The only sane pathway is fully deregulating and descheduling this culturally embedded botanical ally. Anything less harnesses the violence of law enforcement to interfere with individual choices, communal traditions, and market innovations better left unbridled. The onus lies on sole regulators to conclusively, transparently demonstrate acute danger. In cannabis’ case, claims to protection grow absurd against thousands of years of continuous evidence.
The people never required nor requested such oversight on nature’s cornucopia. The time has come to cease useful fictions that enable meddlesome prohibitions eroding freedom over falsified threats. Cannabis is for the people to explore as they see fit individually and collectively. No law can suppress its flowering from the human spirit.
When examining the DEA’s veiled documents around proposed marijuana rescheduling, the sticky truth remains – the feds’ flaky rationale for maintaining prohibition cannot withstand transparency. Thus secrecy tries filling voids where facts fail.
Rather than illuminate, authorities shade data and processes enabling legitimate inquiry into acceptable botanical use. What started as manipulation of public opinion now hides as bureaucratic hubris too insecure to reveal itself fully. So instead they traffic in bigrams, anticipating obedience over outrage. Such arrogance courts revolt.
Make no mistake; attempts at rescheduling cannabis to appease reform interests fundamentally mock calls for genuine freedom. They expect applause for tightening shackles ever so slightly, as if we will forget decades of propaganda and millions jailed over personal choices concerning helpful plants. Do not be placated.
Authorities have shown willingness to impose the violence of law on peaceful herb culture, not remove its oppression. Their legitimacy expired long ago through unethical dishonesty serving corporate profits over public benefit. Bid government prattle farewell; citizens will freely utilize cannabis howsoever we choose, with no futile laws limiting personal dominion or community tradition.
Total deregulation and descheduling remains the only moral remedy to devastating, racist campaigns inflicting police brutality over arbitrarily demonized vegetation. Expecting compromise emboldens mass injustice. Thus conscientious people should treat emerging permits, regulations and restrictions as paper tigers roarless before autonomous dignity.
The choice remains starkly simple: Shall we beg to authorities already exposed as liars and profiteers to kindly allow slight progress buying off dissent? Or shall we unflinchingly conduct our cannabis affairs by natural right with no futile chains limiting mindful personal conduct or market fruitfulness?
Either a right exists inherently or not at all. The wanton legal fiction of permitting government censorship, seizure and assault over cannabis is finished. The sticky truth outs at last – reefer madness makes madmen of us all, and the public deserves far better. This plant will remain free.
RESCHEDULING CANNABIS, READ ON…
