A very powerful OpEd in the Los Angeles Times today by Dan Rush with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5: The California Chamber’s reefer madness: The group says Proposition 19 would prevent employers from punishing workers who show up high. That’s a lie.
This guy doesn’t pull any punches. He comes right out and says it:
Critics of Proposition 19,- which would legalize the private possession of limited quantities of marijuana by adults and allow local governments to regulate its commercial production and retail distribution, will do and say just about anything. Case in point: Radio ads sponsored by the California Chamber of Commerce allege that passage of the measure will threaten workplace safety, a campaign The Times reported on in an Oct. 27 article.
The claim is a bald-faced lie.
Boom!
It’s a great OpEd, very well written, and very well timed.
Of course, there’s a lot more to this; the editorial gets awful close, though.
Namely, it just barely skirts the issue of the de facto ‘class warfare’ that is at the core of the modern DrugWar.
The ‘Owners’ don’t want their wage-serfs to get uppity and demand a return of control of their bodies back to them…for that’s just the beginning of self-emancipation. Which is why the Chamber of Commerce types are pee-their-pants scared of 19.
Further challenges to their social (and eventually, commercial and political) ‘authority’ will ensue after it becomes obvious that present drug testing does not determine impairment. And trying to enforce neurotic corp-rat diktats (that intrude upon your personal life) via fear of job loss courtesy of a ‘positive’ on a drug test will become impossible after the first court case makes the uselessness of present-form drug testing to determine impairment a ‘legal’ fact (as opposed to the obvious physical one).
As was explained in an article I saw at HuffPost, 19 represents a hell of a lot more than just the ability to get buzzed in peace. in the article, the DrugWar was likened to the Cold War, whose effects were universally pervasive to the point of being a kind of undercurrent in society, one that warped and distorted societal priorities.
I’d like to write more, but that article says most of what I wanted to say. It also explains why those who have benefited so much from the DrugWar are terrified of losing the POWER that it accrued to them, not just the money. That POWER was abused…and they rightfully fear the reckoning that will eventually have to be made.
“The more the laws , the more the corrupt the government.”
Time to take away thier laws.Many of them.
“Any worth while action is one that needs neither explaination nor apology.”
Removing these laws fit that catagory.
Let them wimper and pee thier pants on the oval office floor as they sign the repeal of prohibition.
Thanks Nemo, Great piece, I’ve forwarded a link to alot of my contacts list and I never do that. That’s a worthwhile read.
Another good one from Steve Bloom.former editor of High Times:
Legalization or Bust: A Brief History of Marijuana Prohibition
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-bloom/legalization-or-bust-a-br_b_775684.html
And another from LEAP Nom Stamper:
Why they fight
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norm-stamper/why-they-fight_b_775686.html
“That sort of change — and dare we say it in Obama’s America, hope — is something no partisan swing in Congress or any other legislature could possibly top.”
Chills.