Pubdate: Thu, 31 Oct 2002
Source: Las Vegas Weekly (NV)
Copyright: 2002 Radiant City Publications, LLC
Contact:  http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1036
Author: David Perkins
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?162 (Nevadans for Responsible Law 
Enforcement)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?163 (Question 9 (NV))

GOD AND MARIJUANA

Citing Religion And History To Make A Case For Pot

God made just about everything in nature, and most would agree that 
everything in nature was created for a very good reason. Did God make grass 
so people who smoke it would then go on to do harder drugs? Don't think so. 
Everything in creation was good by God's own opinion, and this we know by 
what God said after everything made was finished: "O and God said, it is 
good." It might be worth considering (before we vote on the issue) just how 
this product of nature recently has gotten such an evil reputation in our 
society.

The use of marijuana has been well-documented throughout history, on 
scrolls in ancient China, clay tablets, Egyptian papyrus, and even was 
legal in most of these United States as late as the early 1900s. Not once 
in these six millennia worth of data - from 6,000 B.C. to 1920 - was 
marijuana ever (connected) to gang killings or a starting point for harder 
drug use. About the worst said about the effects of it was that it made 
people lazy, forgetful and silly behavior many of us exhibit anyway, naturally.

Who decided marijuana become evil in the 1930s? The United States 
government did. When Americans came to their senses and repealed the 18th 
amendment banning alcohol, marijuana was then needed by our government to 
be a public enemy - and out of purely economic reasons, not for the effects 
the plant produces within the human system. Remember, to rid the great evil 
alcohol back then, thousands of law enforcement agents were hired during 
the 1920s for this great moral experiment. When the (stock market) crash 
came in 1929, these government workers certainly could not be laid off in 
the middle of the Great Depression when alcohol became legal again in 1933.

Under similar circumstances, any government would probably have done the 
same. Unfortunately, the outrageous facts the government put out in order 
to justify making cannabis a crime are still within many citizens' psyches 
today, creating an unbalanced approach to handle this weed that God wished 
to grow naturally throughout the Earth.

Marijuana is a social problem today simply because the word "criminal" is 
associated with it on the law books. Didn't we already learn with alcohol? 
Americans were drinking beer when our founding fathers penned the 
Constitution. How did beer suddenly make people who drank it evil, and how 
did nearly all the gangsters rise in political and financial power during 
Prohibition? Was it the beer? Was it the people? No, it was THE LAWS.

David Perkins
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth