Part 8: Further reflections: cannabis oppression is a worldwide problem

Upon further reflection, cannabis subjugation is a worldwide issue ― not a local, state, or national issue.

Please indulge me while I relive how I luckily became “the last cannabis tourist in The Netherlands.”

Waking up on my last morning in the NL, the shocking development that the US had not only won the Green Grass competition but had vanquished its Dutch foe so convincingly — it would have been a worse drubbing if the score had been tallied a day later and the NL hadn’t won the Cannabis Tourism round— was still sinking in. A bit melancholy over leaving the vanquished for the victorious, I boarded a train bound for Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Even with all the advanced warning, I was bug-eyed at the bold headline screaming from a fellow traveler’s De Telegraaf: “Cannabis toerisme te eindigen in Nederland.”

Translation: the Christian Democratic Party had pulled the plug on cannabis tourism in The Netherlands.

My heart skipped a beat; a kundalini rush surged upwards through each chakra.

Talk about putting an exclamation point on the expedition! After everything I’d been hearing, and everything I’d been seeing — or not seeing like the absence of cannabis supporters at the Cannabis Day Liberation Festival — the death sentence wasn’t any big surprise; but its timing, which meant the honor of being “the last cannabis tourist in The Netherlands” had fallen to me, was astonishing enough. Here was yet another lucky break in my continuing cannabis education, right up there with moving to South Denver to sell Toyota Priuses and finding myself in the epicenter of the medical marijuana phenomenon instead. If I couldn’t take advantage of a break like that after all my preparation, there was no hope for me as a poteconomist.

I didn’t have long to worry if I was up to the task. Inspiration struck before Greenland.

An simple yet powerful epiphany came to me in the air corridor between Ireland and Iceland:

Cannabis oppression is a worldwide issue, not a local, state, or national issue.  Prohibition spans the globe; it is not contained within US borders.

Therefore Cannabis Commerce must do more than pay lip service to The Rest of The World. We have to promote herbal rights worldwide. And we will!

Further reflections followed in swift succession.

Cannabis as subversive substance

If Nelson Mandela was a plant, it’s pretty obvious which one he’d be. Mandela was eventually freed. Cannabis remains in solitary confinement, the only plant in the botany phylum symbolically serving eighty years in the hole, not just in South Africa, not just in Sweden, but in every country around the world.

Although it boggles the mind, cannabis is right up there with plutonium as the most feared substance on Earth. Governments the world over regard the humble, healing plant as a subversive substance.

That’s because it is.

Cannabis is a subversive substance because it makes people feel peaceful (provided it’s not combined with alcohol or worse). It makes people feel less accepting of violence as conflict resolution. It increases the ability to detect bullshit. It makes people more friendly, less accusatory, and more inclined to accommodate other viewpoints.

Governments in power are generally averse to subversion. But if push comes to shove when a majority of their “subjects” display it, the smarter ones accommodate those dissenting viewpoints and remain in power. The US under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson made way for the civil rights express.

Dumb nations draw lines in the sand that are inevitably erased by the force of history.

Although it’s tempting, I’m not going to rant about draconican pot laws around the world.

Suffice it to say that “public stoning” has two meanings, and unfortunately, those two meanings may converge if you practice meaning one in a country utilizing meaning two as the ultimate deterrent.

Instead, I’ll try to remain optimistic in the face of a Mt. Everest-sized challenge.

NATO reconstituted

What if there was a parallel universe where NATO stood for “Netherlands America THC Organsim?” Preliminary research suggests that almost every “modern disease” is controllable with cannabis therapy.

If the two nations visited in this series can join together for warfare, they can unite for peacefare. This is not an impossible dream. What if the US and the NL, countries which cooperate perfectly well as NATO partners fighting “terrorism” on global battlefields, cooperated equally well fighting terrifying diseases like cancer, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis in global laboratories?

This could actually happen. Or do you think it’s unbelievable? Really? I didn’t believe I’d ever be able to walk to thirty marijuana dispensaries in my lifetime, either. But I could have visited ten of them in the time it takes to read this article.

Cannavision

The world has become one big global village. Therefore, it makes no more sense to try and effect legalization country-by-country than it does to go state-by-state [or province by province] within a country.

That’s a variation on the theme: “should we expend energy legalizing marijuana state-by-state in the US, or should we just repeal prohibition, which effectively wins legalization for every state?” From there, it’s only a small leap to: “should we attempt to effect global legalization nation-by-nation, or should we just repeal prohibition for the whole world, which wins legalization for every country?”

The pre-internet world was not a global village in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Council eschewed pursuing civil rights state-by-state in favor of demanding rights for the entire United States. But it is now.

If we want to progress, we can’t continue to keep seeing the world through the same-old nation-centric lens; it’s time for an  upgrade to cannavision and its 360° worldview.

If the corporations of the world see our planet as one marketplace, so can its “little people.”

Cannabis consciousness

The choice between global legalization and global vilification is symptomatic of mankind’s basic choice between good and evil, functionality and dysfunctionality, war and peace, evolution and devolution, utopia or dystopia. Will we choose a cannabis-free future or a cannabis-enhanced future? Vote with your heart, your mind, and your lighter.

The salient point to take away from this series is not that the grass is greener in the US than the NL. That was a cute idea, good for a reasonably entertaining article. But it turned into something more elemental: the realization that cannabis persecution is a world problem.

That’s why our mission here in the US is so vital. The rest of the world looks to us. We legalize it, it copies us. That’s how things work.

Offering Ten Ways to Solve the World’s Pot Problems is beyond the scope of this series. But I’m pretty sure I know Step One:

  1. The first step in solving any problem is correctly identifying what the problem actually is. When it comes to herbal rights, realizing the enormity of the task ahead, that legalizing locally, statewide, or nationwide isn’t going to cut it, that our work isn’t done until herbal rights have spread worldwide correctly identifies the problem.

That’s where it all begins.

Everything else flows from there.