Note: “It Keeps 45,000 Marijuana “Offenders” Imprisoned” is also Part 11 of Ten Reasons Why MMJ is Cannabis Commerce’s Ball and Chain, found in its entirety here.

Want to know what it’s like to serve a life sentence for trading pot? Neither do MMJ activists fixated on “patients’ rights.” The rights of prisoners and everyone else are nonfactors in their agenda.

Highly-compensated Cannabis Commerce corporate psychologists had me convinced that no one can resist a headline starting with the hypnotic phrase, “Ten Reasons Why.” Using all my power, all my skill, I somehow managed to shoehorn the countless ways MMJ limits cannabis commerce into ten distinct parts.

It wasn’t easy.

However, as I looked longer and closer, sitting on the additional collateral damage that was smacking me right between the eyes became an impossibility.

One particular aftereffect of fixating on MMJ was just too toxic to suppress. I began to suspect that the current infatuation with medical marijuana keeps a surreal number of marijuana “offenders” under lock and key after Thomas Chong commented on the main article.

The outlaw comedian scolded me for coming down way too hard on medical marijuana, adding that I/we should be grateful that we have it.

That 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, in light of the fact an ungodly amount of his fellow stoners still languish behind bars.

It dawned on me that these “acceptable casualties” of the War on Drugs are where they are because the crusade to repeal prohibition — which would set free the lot of them — has been replaced in the collective unconscious with the self-serving agenda of patient rights groups who frankly couldn’t care less about anyone else as long as the privileged “patients” they champion have “safe access to meds.”

But I let it go. Truth is, I was flattered that Thomas Chong commented on my website.

I wasn’t motivated enough yet to post bonus reason eleven.

Last night, everything changed. At a friend’s house in Boulder, Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness beckoned from a bookshelf. Eagerly plucking the tome from the shelf, I began leafing through the introduction.

When Reefer Madness was published in 2003, there were “only” 20,000 marijuana “offenders” incarcerated in the United States. Firing up the nearest laptop, I searched for “pot prisoners 2011.” It turned out that a scant eight years later, the prison system now houses 45,000 prisoners. That’s a staggering number, and a thousand of them are serving life sentences!

It didn’t take long to realize that Schlosser’s book is just too good, in the same sense Robert Hughes finely-honed narrative, The Fatal Shore, is just too accurate as it recounts, in meticulous detail, what it was like in 1850 to be starving in London, steal an orange off a fruit stand, get collared, then find yourself literally bound on a convict ship for a four-month journey around the Cape of Good Hope to colonize Australia. That’s the equivalent of being rocketed to a penal colony on Pluto today.

Hughes’ impeccably researched history, with its photographically realistic descriptions of floggings, starvation, and scurvy, made me squirm like I, too, had suffered every second of the way in that steamy, miserable hellhole. That’s too good.

Steal an orange in 1850 and find yourself on a convict ship bound for 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.

Reefer Madness reprised that same eerie, squeamish feeling as it went about its business of interviewing unfortunate souls serving life sentences for “crimes” no worse than being the middle man in an Indiana weed field deal.

As author Schlosser depicted prisoners’ true life tales of serving out draconian life sentence, I became consumed with a fierce desire to expose how patient rights groups and their MMJ initiatives treat the 45,000 souls rotting away in prison cells as nonpersons. This situation is not taking place in England, in 1850, it’s happening right here, right now, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

There’s no way to sugarcoat this: bowing down to MMJ helps keep 45,000 pot “offenders” imprisoned. Casting your vote for MMJ initiatives rubberstamps their sentences.

Earlier, in Part Five, I stated that perhaps the saddest fallout from MMJ’s ascension into collective consciousness was that, in an ironic twist, MMJ actually blocks clinical studies to research the disease-fighting capabilities of THC. Keeping 45,000 pot “offenders” locked away could be even more deplorable.

Those 45,000 US marijuana prisoners — this one’s for you.

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, I’ve got more. Reason 12 is making its way down the birth chute.