Forging Priorities
NORML will not work without democracy.
When it comes to social struggle, I am Sartrean in my approach. This war is mine, I choose it, and I am responsible for it.
What happens to me happens through me, and I can neither affect myself with it nor revolt against it nor resign myself to it. Moreover everything that happens to me is mine. By this we must understand first of all that I am always equal to what happens to me qua man, for what happens to a man through other men and through himself can only be human. The most terrible situations of war, the worst tortures do not create a non-human state of things; there is no non-human situation. It is only through fear, flight, and recourse to magical types of conduct that I shall decide on the non-human, but this decision is human, and I shall carry the entire responsibility for it. But in addition the situation is mine in that it represents me and symbolizes me. Is it not I who decide the coefficient of adversity in things and even their unpredictability by deciding myself?
Thus there are no accidents in life; a community event which suddenly bursts forth and involves me in it does not come from the outside. If I am mobilized in a war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. I deserve it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion; these ultimate possibles are those which must always be present for us when there is a question of envisaging a situation. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it…
But in addition the war is mine because by the sole fact that it arises in a situation that I cause to be and that I can discover it there only by engaging myself for or against it, I can no longer distinguish at present the choice which I make of the war. To live this war is to choose myself through it and to choose it through my choice of myself. There can be no question of considering it as “four years of vacation” or as a “reprieve,” as a “recess,” the essential part of my responsibilities being elsewhere in my married, family, or professional life. In this war which I have chosen I choose myself day to day, and I make it mine by making myself. If it is going to be four empty years, then it is I who bear the responsibility for this.
(Sartre, J.-P. 1985. Existentialism and Human Emotions, New York: Open Road Integrated Media Pp. 44-46).
I am not trading the end of criminal marijuana prohibition for the first amendment. Free weed requires free speech, assembly, and petitioning. It is how we have made legalizations possible, and the only means of reliably sustaining them.
Anyone who can legalize by decree can do the opposite, by the same means.
This is why I consider my cannabis activist colleagues’ conversations about Donald Trump and her1 attitudes toward legalization to fundamentally be without merit, and I do not participate in them. The Bill Clinton-style of political triangulation does not work with an inherently undemocratic ruler who knows from experience the law does not apply to her.
I noted shortly after the election that we are closer to federal legalization than ever before, simply because of the openly transactional engagements (bribes) made possible by Supreme Court rulings. We know Trump is for sale; all it takes is aligning her interests with your interests. Offer her the chance to make money from federal legalization and she will forego the authoritarian benefits provided by prohibition.2
Until that time, expect a lot of anti-drug bullshit to spew from her hole. If there’s nothing in it for her, it’s not going to be happening.
Any strategizing by political operatives that does not go at the undemocratic foundation of Trump’s policymaking is just walking down Memory Lane. It’s like going to Las Vegas to see the surviving members of the Grateful Dead playing all The Hits You Know and Love. Jerry Garcia died thirty years ago, which was itself over eight years after the band had released what was their final studio album.
The dysfunctions of the corporate capitalist political franchises (parties) came to the fore in 2015, when it was clear the populous wanted change. We almost had two presidential elections featuring corporate party outsiders (2016 & 2020, though by then the Republican brand had been commandeered by Trump).
Now we have an active disengagement of federal support programs.
Deportations are being photographed and publicized (but have been ongoing for decades), the first new targets are American farmers. Along with an ongoing reliance on low-price, illegal labor (objections to deportations focus on how dependent our supply chains are on it), our nation’s food supply relies on federal subsidies. International food diplomacy and domestic food programs are actually “farm-to-table,” if you strip away the pretense of private industry marketing.
Someone might take the next step and consider that if farmers need our collective money to cover over- and under-production, and rely on below-market labor to deliver what they provide to private industry, to be resold to those who eat food to live, perhaps we could do the food-provision part of society more efficiently if we took the profit out of it.
Remember, kids, efficiency presumes both a goal and a method. It’s not just corrupting federal computer systems so that you may hold the Treasury hostage when the California water reserves you ordered wasted and a slew of bankrupted farmers happen to trigger food riots. Efficiency means you have the concentration camps set up before then.
It would behoove any cannabis reformer to focus on preserving the tools and the avenues for activism, and not waste time speculating whether Donald Trump actually supports legalization or what can be done or who could be talked with to get her to make it happen. No matter what you get from her, you are going to get the worst of the deal—she prides herself on screwing folks like you over.
She/her are the proper pronouns for the President, given the Executive Order she signed that made all persons female at conception females.
I originally mentioned that a few Multi-State Operators could offer Trump a financial interest in their companies, and that would get her to federally legalize quickly. However, that was before she was sentenced for her felonious cover-up of the Stormy Daniels payoff. Non-cannabis felons are routinely excluded from holding state licenses or ownership. This exclusion could, of course, be written out of any federal legalization.
Well said.