[Bonus] Part 11: It keeps 45,000 pot “offenders” imprisoned

the cover of Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness

Want to know what it’s like to serve a life sentence for trading pot? Neither do MMJ activists who focus on “patients” at the exclusion of prisoners and everyone else.

Highly-compensated Cannabis Commerce corporate psychologists convinced me readers can’t resist an article titled with the hypnotic words, “Ten Reasons Why … ”

So I strove to keep the myriad ways MMJ mangles the cannabis economy down to ten parts.

And I succeeded. For a while.

However, the deeper I look, the more the collateral damage jumps out at me. One particular aftereffect of the public’s infatuation with MMJ became too toxic to suppress.

That the current obsession with MMJ keeps 45,000 marijuana “offenders” imprisoned occurred to me after Thomas Chong commented on the main article. The outlaw comic said that I came down way too hard on medical marijuana, adding that in his opinion we should be grateful that we have it.

This would be the same Thomas Chong, of Cheech and Chong fame, unquestionably the most conspicuous marijuana convict of our times. Chong served nine months in California’s Taft Correctional Institute for mailing a shipment of autographed bongs to the wrong state. His stance seemed a little … well … funny. But I let it go. I wasn’t motivated enough yet to post bonus reason eleven.

Last night, everything changed. I’ve been staying at a nonsmoker friend’s house in Boulder, where Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness unexpectedly stood out on a bookshelf. I eagerly plucked it from the shelf and began reading the introduction. Schlosser’s book was published in 2003, when the number of marijuana prisoners was still in the 20,000s — half the number the nation’s prisons house in 2011, according to DEA statistics, eight years later.

It wasn’t long before I realized Schlosser’s book was just too good. It was just too good in the same sense Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore was just too good about what it was like in 1850 to be starving in London, steal an orange off a fruit stand, then find yourself literally bound on a convict ship for a four-month journey around the Cape of Good Hope to Australia. That’s the equivalent of being sent to a penal colony on Pluto today. Hughes’ finely-honed powers of description made me squirm like I, too, suffered for months in the bilge of that steamy, miserable hellhole.

old drawing of a scene from a prison ship

Steal an orange in 1850 and find yourself on a convict ship to Botany Bay, Australia; sell a gram of pot in the wrong state today, and find yourself locked up for a life sentence in Leavenworth, Kansas.

That sort of eerie, squeamish feeling was reprised as author Schlosser captured in meticulous detail the horror of serving a life sentence for having something vaguely to do with brokering a field of weed in our own times. It was almost too well written to read, it made me that uncomfortable.

The more Schlosser talked about the draconian sentences dished out to pot offenders in states like Oklahoma, the madder and more sickened I became about about MMJ proponents focusing on patient rights at the exclusion of everyone’s rights. That tact completely ignores the lives and fates of the 45,000 people, just like you and me, rotting away in prison cells — not in Australia in 1850, but right here in the land of the free and the home of the brave today.

There’s just no way to sugarcoat this reality. The needs of the “sick and dying” are served even as the basic human rights of the incarcerated are completely ignored.

Earlier, in Part Five, I stated that medical marijuana ironically blocking clinical studies into the disease-fighting attributes of THC was perhaps the saddest fallout from MMJ consciousness. Acting as if the 45,000 imprisoned pot offenders don’t exist is probably even worse, if that’s possible.

There are currently over 1,000 Americans serving life sentences for pot trafficking.

MMJ: the more you look, the heavier the ball, the longer the chain. Repealing prohibition is the only way the insanity will cease.

p.s. Unfortunately, there’s more. Reason 12 is making it s way down the birth chute.