Title: National Guard, DEA, State Police Raid 81-yo Cancer Patient’s Organic Garden to “Protect” You Source:
Activist Post URL Source:http://www.activistpost.com/2016/08 ... ts-organic-garden-protect.html Published:Aug 3, 2016 Author:Matt Agorist Post Date:2016-08-03 21:38:28 by Deckard Keywords:None Views:869 Comments:10
In a gross display of wasted taxpayer dollars, dozens of Massachusetts National Guard personnel, operating under a grant from the DEA, alongside Massachusetts State Police, descended into the backyard of an 81-year-old cancer patient in a raid last week — to protect society from the dangers of his four marijuana plants.
Paul Jackson, 81, of Martha’s Vineyard, grows cannabis to make medicine. His plants, along with several other plants, became the target of law enforcement last week in a crackdown on hardened criminals who’d dare to grow a plant that helps them.
Jackson was in his backyard last Tuesday when plainclothes men and a helicopter descended on his property. With no warrant, and without showing identification, these heroes ripped Jackson’s plants from the ground.
“They just come charging through and start cutting it down,” Jackson said in an interview with the The MV Times.
According to the The MV Times, Mr. Jackson, a lifelong Islander and renowned organic gardener with over 300 ribbons from the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair, expressed both bewilderment and disgust when he spoke to The Times on Friday.
“I told them they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re destroying it and it could be used for good purposes,” he said. “I know because I went through it before. You wrote about it in The Times. I had the article framed, took it out to show them; I said, ‘This is proof of what it does,’ but they didn’t want to hear it.”
As The Times reports, Mr. Jackson was referring to a February 2013 article,” Love, life, and death: A Martha’s Vineyard marijuana story,” in which he described how cannabis tea had helped Mary, his wife of 53 years, through the pain of pancreatic cancer and the ravages of chemotherapy. Mr. Jackson said they forsook the morphine prescribed by her doctors, and substituted cannabis tea for pain management.
“I never ever saw pain in her face,” he said. “She was eating and happy, right up until she died. You had to see it to believe it. People don’t understand it. It’s a beautiful plant and it works beautifully.”
For years, Jackson has been growing this beneficial plant to help his wife, himself, and other friends in the area.
“There’s another fellow I’ve given it to, his wife has cancer bad,” he said. “They mix it with her food and it’s really helping her. Another fellow had a tube down his stomach and his wife would pour [tea] down his tube for the pain. And it worked. At least there’s no damn pain in it. I gave another guy some, he was taking seven different pills a day. I talked to him a month later and he said he’d gotten rid of three of those pills. It works on all kinds of different things.”
However, these poor people will now suffer thanks to the public service provided by the government in their attempts to stamp out this miraculous plant.
While medical marijuana is legal in Massachusetts, to a certain extent, Jackson says he grows his own because it’s far healthier.
“The people that are selling it are using chemicals that react with the chemotherapy,” he said. “Mine is much better because it’s organically grown. I saw it with my own eyes, I couldn’t believe how well it worked.”In the interview, Jackson noted that he doesn’t smoke the plant and will continue to consume it, in spite of the immoral laws that prohibit it.
“I don’t like smoke and I don’t like dust,” he said. “We just make tea out of it. But if I need to make the tea, I’ve got it. I don’t sell it. I will continue to have a certain amount in case somebody close to me needs it.”
When word began to spread about this embarrassing action to eradicate a beneficial plant, spokesmen from the agencies involved in the raid began denying they had a hand in it.
After their heroic mission to rid Martha’s Vineyard of cannabis, Colonel James Sahady, Public Affairs Officer for the Massachusetts National Guard, said in an email to The Times, “The order was initiated by the DEA and Massachusetts State Police as part of pre-planned eradication missions throughout the year.”
However, Sahady later issued another statement claiming that the DEA was not involved.
On top of the National Guard’s flip-flop, The Times reports:
On Tuesday, two Massachusetts State Police spokesmen checked into the matter and said there was no evidence of State Police involvement. “It was not us,” Officer Tom Ryan told The Times.
In a follow up email received on Thursday, State Police spokesman David Procopio said the operation was initiated by the State Police. “We routinely request the assistance of the National Guard in these operations,” Mr. Procopio said in an email to The Times. “Our Narcotics Inspection Section conducts these operations regularly across the state. We utilize a trained spotter in a helicopter to search for marijuana grow sites. Once one is located, the spotter directs ground units to the plants, which are confiscated and taken by State Police for eventual destruction. These seizures occasionally result in criminal prosecutions, but many times do not, if the plants are seized from rural or wooded areas that can be accessed by many people (as opposed to just growing in some homeowner’s backyard).”
Mr. Procopio said State Police seized 392 plants, “which are slated for destruction as part of our next narcotics burn.”
Although the helicopter was parked at Martha’s Vineyard Airport last Tuesday night, there are no records of landing fees or fuel purchases paid by a government agency, according to airport manager Ann Crook.
“The idea we’re so frivolously spending money on marijuana interdiction, especially now when it’s about to be rolled back, is extremely frustrating. How many books or school lunches could have been bought instead of having these plants ripped up?” Bill Downing, spokesman for MassCan/NORML said to The Times.
Downing’s sentiment is a very real concern as the war on drugs has spent upwards of a trillion taxpayer dollars since its inception. Every one of those dollars spent ruining the lives of otherwise entirely innocent people.At any one time, 59,300 prisoners charged with or convicted of violating marijuana laws are behind bars. Of those, 17,000 are behind bars for possession ONLY, not trafficking.
Enforcing marijuana laws costs an estimated $10-15 billion in direct costs alone — not to mention the sustained costs of incarceration of the individual who has done nothing to harm anyone. It is estimated that the money spent enforcing useless marijuana laws is double what we spend on education in this country.
Countless lives are ruined every year as the state locks people away or worse, for possessing a plant. The time is now to end this violent ridiculousness before another innocent life is ruined or taken in the name of controlling what people can put in their own bodies.
You don't have cancer. It's not easing your biological pain. It eases your emotional pain. You could not stop using it if you wanted to, but because you are addicted, you will never stop wanting to. It would never occur to you.
I drink coffee every day. When I stop drinking it, I get a headache for three days. This is obviously an addiction to caffeine. When I stop drinking it for awhile, I always go back to it.
So I understand addiction.
If the government were to ban coffee, I would be irritated by their intrusion into my private life. I would be offended. I would be angry and seek political change. But I would not risk my liberty to keep drinking coffee, and I would not support people creating an underground ring to import coffee against the law. It's just not that IMPORTANT to me.
You DO support undermining the law against marijuana, including running the blockade, all of that, not on simple principle, but because marijuana is MUCH more powerfully addicting. Coffee is not worth jail and dying over for those who are addicted to it, but marijuana IS for those who are addicted to IT.
And that is why there are laws against it that are so harsh: because everybody who ISN'T addicted to it sees how addictive it is, and we've all seen people we know go into steep, permanent decline from what they once were, because they got stoned on it all the time.
Alcohol is the same, and those same motivations drove the temperance movements that banned it back in the day. You will no doubt point out that Prohibition caused more problems and didn't solve the problem it was aimed at. It was an abject failure that created organized crime in America, which survived long after alcohol was legal again.
And you would be right, too. On balance, the corruption, crime and violence that come from having marijuana illegal probably does more damage than the drug itself, and we probably will end up legalizing it.
But when we do, it will be because we decide, sadly, that we would rather have our freedom to use the substance, EVEN THOUGH it means that we will lose some of our sons and daughters to it, EVEN THOUGH many lives of people we know and love will be reduced and they will cease to rise to what they could be on account of it.
It won't be because the drug is completely harmless and completely good. You write to us about how wonderful it is, and how completely irrational and crazy it is that the government outlaws it and tries to enforce it's laws. What you don't realize is that in doing so so persistently, what you do is show us all your addiction to the plant. You could not stop using marijuana if you wanted to. Neither can any other addict. It's a very strong vice, akin to tobacco in the persistence of its grip, but much MUCH more mentally debilitating. THAT is why it was made illegal, and is kept illegal.
Like tobacco, just about everybody has tried it. Like tobacco, many who have tried it become addicted to it. Unlike tobacco, it has a much stronger effect on the mind. Everybody who smokes knows it is bad for him. They feel the bad effects in their body, they feel the cough. Nobody is deceived. Marijuana is doing the same thing, but because of the effect on the mind, pot smokers will insist that it ISN'T bad for the body, that it's just a pure, blissful good. And you really believe that. Really truly.
The prohibition of pot is based on that effect on the mind. Everybody who ISN'T a pot user sees it plainly. One visible effect of the drug is that, unlike tobacco users who have always frankly called cigarettes "coffin nails", marijuana users are rendered blissfully insensitive to and unaware of the noxious effects on their bodies and minds, which everybody else in the world around them can so obviously see.
So, bottom line: you'll probably get your wish - pot will probably eventually be legalized. But when that happens, it won't be because we all wake up and realize that pot is harmless. We all see the harm - only pot users don't see the harm to themselves (that's one the obvious problems with pot!) - but we may decide in the end, as with alcohol and cigarettes, that we're not willing to fight about it anymore, and just let people diminish themselves in this way.
You defend your drug of choice so passionately because you are an addict. You will passionately deny that because you don't even see it. All of the rest of us do, which is why these laws were originally passed - to save people from entering into a drug life that they do not even perceive has diminished them.
Look how this issue consumes you. Look at what a fanatic you are about it: how the ban is EVIL, how the drug is GOOD, oh so good - the world's most powerful medicine, even! Look at the passion you put into it, every day. Look at yourself in the mirror and remember how the world felt when you were little, before the drug.
You will win in the end - it will be legalized. But it won't be legalized because you'll have successfully convinced the world that the drug isn't addictive, doesn't diminish lives, and is a great medicine. You'll have won because the world is harsh, and your fellow Americans will have decided, as they did with drunks, to simply let others get drunk or high, diminish, fall, shrivel up - more derelicts on the street whose please for money are ignored by stiff-jawed people who pass them by.
That's what you get in the end. Not freedom. Just nobody fighting anymore to keep you out of the slavery of your choice.
It's sad, to me. I'm rare. Most conservatives will just leave drug users to die.
There are many reasons why Christians should not support the war on drugs.
Constitutionally, the federal government has no authority whatsoever to regulate drugs, let alone criminalize their manufacture, sale, and use. Just like the government has no authority to control what Americans choose to eat, drink, smoke, inject, absorb, snort, sniff, inhale, swallow, or otherwise ingest into their bodies.
Philosophically, it is not the purpose of government to be a nanny state that monitors the behavior of its citizens. It is simply not the purpose of government to protect people from bad habits or harmful substances or punish people for risky behavior or vice. Drug prohibition is impossible to reconcile with a limited government.
Pragmatically, the war on drugs should be ended because it is a complete and total failure. As I have pointed out many times, the war on drugs has failed to prevent drug abuse, reduce drug trafficking, or reduce the demand for drugs. It has ruined more lives than drugs themselves.
"Constitutionally, the federal government has no authority whatsoever to regulate drugs"
Congress has the power to regulate the interstate commerce of harmful products. This goes back to 1884 when the interstate commerce of livestock having any infectious disease was forbidden.
