Commentary: Let Them Smoke Cake

3/26/09 Chris Goldstein

Let Them Smoke Cake

President Obama asked the online community to speak up and pose questions about what was most important, in our view.

The answer was: Marijuana.

Many were watching the live-feed for the answer. Then the President laughed and turned it into a joke.

“I don’t know what this says about the online audience…”

This is the very same online audience that fueled Mr. Obama’s campaign by responding to the call for donations, over and over again.

Let me answer the rhetorical question: This response says the online audience wants to End Marijuana Prohibition.

But the thousands of questions and millions of votes don’t seem matter for this issue.

The 900,000 citizens who will be arrested in 2009 for marijuana violations across this nation do not seem to matter. Somehow there is no economic viability to stopping the draconian concept of absolute cannabis prohibition.

Bubbly college students in short, easy soundbytes on youtube videos posing softball questions on jobs get a nice nod. Yet thousands of well-formulated questions on cannabis are ignored.

America’s online audience has been shown to be a political force to any number of candidates and causes. The bloggers, MySpace and Facebook users, even the avatars of SecondLife have been courted and have organized themselves.

This active group along with the public at large are invited to have honest debates about healthcare, the economy, jobs, wars, stem cells, science, gay marriage, racism, sexism, religion…any number of complex and sticky issues. But not marijuana.

We cannot have an honest debate about marijuana policy in this country when so many brilliant politicians will turn their noses up at the challenge of this vital social justice problem.

Many politicians, but not all: Congressmen Ron Paul and Barney Frank don’t laugh at this topic. Just look at their federal legislation.

Laughing has been a familiar and loathsome political weapon used for decades against the reasonable prospect of repealing cannabis prohibition.

Many would say that there are more important issues than marijuana and philosophically I agree.

But there really is no one other issue that affects so many points of our society and touches so many tens of millions of American lives: Positively and negatively.

Prohibition is the most easily solvable issue of our times. It is a simple policy. Which is why it is so frustrating when it is made into a comic relief.

It is underground, yet at least 94 million Americans have seen it, smelled it, even smoked it.

But many never take it seriously until arrested. Then these cannabis consuming citizens are willing to pay a criminal defense attorney any number of dollars to try and hold back the true vehemence of prohibition. Or they must fully submit to treatment programs, useless because they are designed for alcoholics and heroine addicts. All too often they fall under the full sanctions of the state, in custody.

But when the President was apparently inhaling marijuana frequently he never saw the full face of prohibition, because like many of his peers in government who freely admit thier so-called youthful indiscretions, President Obama was never caught.

 But even in a down-economy the American Marijuana Market grows. In many ways it may represent the most successful free-market, unregulated enterprise and most successful from of pure capitalism. This plant far and away beats out the financial sector.

Green for Green. Every hour of every day on almost every street in America. Green for Green. In some neighborhoods it is only inside, among the hardwood floors and designer kitchens that could, at any moment, be a set for Martha Stewart. In other neighborhoods the green flows right in the streets. A river of cash and fine cannabis.

Perhaps that is what everyone in the federal government must do each year as the marijuana economy continues to grow exponentially: Laugh.

Just snicker, with an agreeing chorus behind, as marijuana use exponentially expands each decade; faster than tightly regulated tobacco.

Giggle as we deploy our law enforcement resources in the impossible task to erradticate a market that should be taxed and regulated.

President Obama invited the online audience to the White House today, many of whom live in areas that have already drastically reformed their marijuana laws locally. Like say, the entire states of Massachusetts, Michigan, California, Oregon, Washington.

To this expectant and, in some ways perhaps, idealistic group our President delivered an insult by laughing at the most important topic.

I believe in ending marijuana prohibition and have spent nearly 10 years interviewing hundreds of experts on the topic.  It is a vastly under-reported issue.

For example: There was a march on Washington DC 3/26/09 and everyone missed it, even the President.

The march arrived online.

Mr. Obama asked the nation to communicate with him directly and then travel to his doorstep with our modern digital methods.

Cannabis consumers and supporters of prohibition reform have endured almost a century of oppression at gunpoint to get there.

The medical users, recreational consumers, religious followers, cultivators, caregivers and industrial hemp farmers have waited for a way to organize and reach out and then found it online.

Please do not laugh at the millions of Americans who consume cannabis and the millions who have faced sanctions for it.

President Obama your online nation answered the call.

Please have a serious discussion about ending marijuana prohibition.