Appeasement is the Disease; Freedom is the Cure
“Government doesn’t work. It doesn’t keep our streets safe and it doesn’t educate our children. Government is good at only one thing: It breaks your legs, hands you a pair of crutches, and says, ‘See, without us you wouldn’t be able to walk.’”
— Harry Browne, Libertarian
Recently, I observed that paying taxes on medical marijuana was immoral, unconstitutional and “would provide law enforcement with a new quiver of charges against us.”
Some of my activist friends disagreed, arguing that Obama had “changed” federal policy and we were in a new era. The next day a dispensary in San Francisco was raided by federal DEA agents, based upon their alleged failure to pay all of their state taxes.
Some of the best minds in our movement support taxes, admitting it is really protection money, because, in their view, paying bullies to leave you alone is a viable option. Anyone who has ever dealt with a bully, be it in the schoolyard or the criminal justice system, knows that placating and appeasing only increases the threats and bullying.
The appeasers argue that we must be “realistic,” and that we must “change the system from within.” They say we must give up some of our rights, in order to be safe and to create peaceful change. They urge us from one beg-a-thon to the next, imploring us to write the ruling class and beg for leniency. The even cut deals, behind our backs, trading away our rights for their agenda of “regulation and taxation.”
The other day, I had breakfast with the founder and operator of a dispensary that pays $100,000 a month in taxes. She was telling me how Betty Yee of the California Franchise Tax Board was telling the DEA to back off. I asked if the $100 million in taxes being paid annually by licenses dispensaries, on the backs of sick people might not be better spent buying us, I mean electing, a Governor and Attorney General. She had no answer.
Whatever short terms gains appeasers think they might be winning, they betray us all by cooperating with an unconstitutional rogue government.
Appeasement doesn’t work, not when you are in a cultural war with real bullets and the biggest Gulag in the world.
Freedom works. Free choice, free markets and free minds, that is what we can place our trust in, everything else is the road to Hell.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:31 am
The high-fee state ID card is a protection racket. Extorting the ill even further via sales tax on their medicine is about as abominable as prohibition itself.
Doctor Tod’s words: (Nov ‘05)
With taxation goes governance.
At the memorial service for Jane Weirick, long time activist and assistant to Dennis Peron, I articulated that her avoidable death was the consequence of greed and malfeasance.
Greed of the grower who lied to her for at least two seasons concealing that Avid (avermectin), a miticide was used on the plants. When confronted in the hospital admitted this.
Malfeasance by government for having no system for detecting this illict contaminant. Complete failure to ensure safety- let alone affordable.
When cannabis is taxed it must be in compliance with California law which specifically mandates that the cannabis be safe. The Compassionate Use Act also mandates that federal and state government be encouraged to provide for a safe and affordable distribution…”
(CA Health and Safety Code Section 11362.5. C)
And what has state and local government done? Nothing.
Until we get government complying with the law- don’t bother trying to extract sales tax for uncertified, unsafe, and unknown products.
When can we expect governance that will result in compliance with the law.
No compliance = No $
Tod Mikuriya, M.D.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Pardon my ignorance, but are other medicines taxed?
If I get a shot of morphine in the hospital is there a tax?
Are doctors appointments taxed as a “service rendered?”
April 10th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
My wife & I knew Jane quite well and even went to the hospital a couple of times and visited her multiple times when she came home. Our opinion, and we are 67 & 68 years old and raised three kids, is that Jane ran herself to death and it was more of a stroke. We could see it in her speach and demeanor, not Avid. Dr. Todd was our doctor for many years, and he is wrong on this one. Jane ran her body to death. Ralph & “Kat” Sherrow
April 10th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
[...] by Steve Kubby at ShadowCabinet.US and reposted to IPR by Paulie. Steve Kubby was the 2008 and 2000 runner up for the Libertarian [...]
April 11th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I absolutely agree that medical pot should not be taxed. Taxing medicine is just another atrocity that authoritarians force on reality just to make themselves more powerful in any given social situation.
As for the drug war itself, we will never be shed of it because we really do not have ‘activists’ opposing it today. People can play their online activist fantasy game all they want but it is not real. The lack of momentum in the drug reform movement is proof of this. In fact I contend that the online activism actually subverts real momentum for social justice activism by giving people a false sense of doing something when they are simply sitting in front of computers masturbating.
The war on drugs will not end until there are masses of Americans out in the streets of Washington, D.C. and our state capitals screaming at the politicians:
NO MORE DRUG WAR!
NO MORE DRUG WAR!
NO MORE DRUG WAR!
NO MORE DRUG WAR!
Richard Nixon and the Dixie-crats of 1970-71 created the drug war in order to undermine and subvert the electoral empowerment of to two pieces of law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 26st Amendment of 1971. The drug laws reinvigorated Jim Crow morals laws. And the drug laws gave federal police the excuse to go after local political activists organizing anti war and social justice MASS protests. Both of these attacks have had great success ever since then. the drug war appeasers of today are too cowed to take people out into the streets and the poverty oppressed minority communities are too split between those criminally disenfranchised and those who are too morally co-opted by their religious foundation to defend people in their community that they perceive as drug abusers.
Richard Nixon and the Dixie-crats win.