Prompted by “Big Alcohol and Pharma are Paying Politicians to Block Marijuana Legalization”: http://www.thedailychronic.net/2016/52390/big-alcohol-and-big-pharma-are-paying-politicians-to-block-marijuana-legalization/
Politicians Are Being Bought By Big Alcohol, Pharma and Police Unions […]
Not everyone is thrilled with the idea of marijuana being legally sold though, and we aren’t just talking about the un-informed prudes that voice their disgust for the Devil’s Lettuce. Some of the largest industries in the world are throwing mountains of money at politicians to maintain the status quo and keep prohibition intact.
Powerful self-interest groups against public safety (and sanity — judicial and otherwise) are the ultimate reason why our government “leaders” too often oppose ending a completely demonstrably failed policy (the war on some drugs) by any concrete measure.
The alcohol industry stands to lose quite a bit of their market share if marijuana prohibition becomes history. They are already feeling the crunch in states that have gone forward to full recreational legalization, people just don’t want to drink when they toke up.
There are two types of players in the alcohol industry — the smart ones and the fools.
The latter group is trying to fight consumer demand via law. How did that work for the major record labels relying upon a similar tactic to fight the flood of musical availability online? It didn’t.
Smart alcohol players understand the cannabis writing is on the wall (and smart and ethical businesses understand that it’s unwise to oppose consumer demand). Their best move is to replace the wonderfully healthily diminishing alcohol market with their cannabis one by leveraging established brand loyalty against newcomers in the cannabis marketplace.
Brand loyalty is nothing to scoff at. A drinker of a certain alcohol brand decides to switch to cannabis upon learning the serious health improvement likely from that change. They see the alcohol brand connected to a product that they’ve enjoyed for years now has a cannabis leaf revealing the new product line. Next to it, they see an unfamiliar cannabis brand. Basic psychology (familiar is less risky) probably leads to buying the familiar brand.
Big Liquor isn’t the only industry titan feeling the pinch from prohibition ending. Pharmaceutical companies could have the most to lose. A few puffs of cannabis can replace the need for dozens of over the counter medicines, from Advil to Vicodin, even Oxycontin and other opioid based painkillers.
Like the aforementioned fools, too many pharmaceutical companies put their preferable entrenchment against public safety and righteous consumer demand.
My mom is thankfully a prime example. Even without insurance coverage towards medical cannabis, her drug costs are low enough to comfortably fit within even low income budgets.
Two small pinches daily lead to basically two quarter ounces used yearly (the actual amount noticeably covers even beyond a year), so we’re basically talking less than $200 yearly (less than only $16.67 monthly).
While all pharmaceuticals pertaining to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at best expensively help manage symptoms of the disease (commonly with harsh side effects), my mom has only experienced a steady improvement against AD (nonetheless another health condition unmentioned due to “too much information” consideration, and cannabis apparently keeps her safe from a revisit of breast cancer).
Somewhat in other words, within just one year of mild cannabis use (which doesn’t negatively impact her never-used-cannabis-before lifestyle at all), while she’s not cured (apparently yet), she has obviously continuously mentally improved.
That’s brilliant news and hope for literally millions of people worldwide (suffering from AD and logically other forms of dementia — if not mental illness in general), but the law supposedly serving the public temporarily prevents my strong push to raise awareness to help those people (and logically all others entering senior citizenship to become captured by harsh pharmaceuticals — at least prematurely — so becoming a massive group of ‘drug cattle’ for insane profit).
Police unions and prison guard unions have been spending big bucks to stop marijuana reform efforts. Spending their money on anti-legalization campaigns and funding programs that support putting drug users in prison instead of a drug treatment program.
The police force has quite a bit to lose if the war on weed finally ends. Federal funding for the departments responsible for fighting the war on drugs will be eliminated. Meaning these officers may be out of a job, or they will be forced to start taking down dangerous criminals instead of peaceful pot-heads.
Prison unions also have quite a bit to lose. Private prison companies will see their profits fall as prisons require fewer beds and fewer meals once drug users stop being imprisoned.
Sanctioned thuggery against fundamental rights is big business.
The result is dangerously overcrowded prisons at terrible societal costs — critically noting such prisons are not even “drug free” (strongly fueling the idea of a “drug free” America as being demonstrably insane).
Wouldn’t it be nice if these companies couldn’t simply purchase politicians? Imagine if our politicians made decisions based on facts, reality, evidence and what is best for the public.
The only logical solution against that unethical purchase is scientific constitutionalism (as defined and promoted via our Liberty Shield project), which necessarily replaces vague judicial language with objective (fair, so just) language.
At the end of the day, there are two groups working powerfully (sometimes orderly) together to dominate humanity. I call them the reason abusers (i.e. people lying and leveraging the ‘partial truth = whole truth’ scam) and thugs (including academic thugs, criminal thugs, economic thugs, informational thugs, judicial thugs, religious thugs, technological thugs, etc.)
Thugs and reason abusers never care about civility and public safety. They care about pathetically cheap but powerful dominance (reason — the scientific method — be damned to their satisfaction).
Logically righteous enemies against reason abusers and thugs are people honestly embracing the scientific method and responsible toughness to maturely remove those society abusers from power.
The scientific method — which has worked brilliantly towards increasing human understanding of (and technological adaptation within) reality itself — is the only sensible answer and foundation for righteous societal leverage.
Critically note that method is not equal to scientific conclusions (which can be — and have been — wrong), especially scientific consensus shy of 100% — i.e. scientists are not dogmatic priests of the “science” religion.
The scientific method must be brought into spoken language itself to improve certainty in communication.
In addition to better communication naturally leading to better survival odds, more certainty in language inevitably means more certainty in law, so liberty (by way of sharpest focus upon the maximum scientific definition of harm — e.g. murder, assault, theft, slander, etc. — in this purely energetic and indestructible reality, at least according to mainstream physics).
One very powerful group was unfortunately left out of the prompting article — the mainstream media.
They’re largely accountable for the mass atrocity from the war on some drugs, because they almost completely refuse to challenge the legitimacy of Certain Drug Prohibition (as I prefer to call it).
That’s because the mainstream media is obviously addicted to what they consider newsworthy information about impressive looking tragic events. Suppliers (dealers) of that fix are generally government sources (especially law enforcement) — i.e. the people usually on the front lines of such tragic events — so the journalistically unethically undisclosed conflict of interest severely against public safety (and the people’s right to know) is the grossest form of reason abuse powerfully contributing to literally socially tearing our nation apart — with nobody to report that fact conveniently for the masses.
Linguistics can no longer simply be the observational study of natural language evolution, but carefully scientifically expanded to include increasing objectivity in language to fight off the reason abusers and thugs (society abusers) putting our species at serious risk of extinction.
We (e.g. you) can (and obviously must) do much better.
That includes yours truly doing the very best to break free from this dominating obscurity equaling my hard work continuing to overwhelmingly dominantly fly by the readers’ radar with no consideration and care (instant dismissal due to the aforementioned psychology involving familiarity and credibility — i.e. way too many people are much more familiar with the deceptively placating ways of society abusers merely presenting themselves as credible leaders).
Become familiar with yours truly, because my proposals are always subject to the tried-and-true (i.e. familiar and credible) scientific method fundamentally refusing discrimination against anyone but actual society abusers.
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