I have heard recently the position that marijuana should not be taxed when and if it is legalized. I strongly disagree with this notion. In fact, I think it is absurd to believe that you can somehow take something like legal marijuana and not be expected to capitulate something in return. The assholes in suits are holding all the keys, they are dealing all the cards, and the chips fall where they see fit. You and your five buddies, however insightful and brilliant you feel sitting around your three-chambered bong, have no power or influence to speak of and you’re not about to “take” marijuana back from the prohibitionists.
It is time for the negotiating to begin.
The first simple reality here is that prohibitionists are in power. You doubt that fact? Go spark up a fatty on the front steps of your particular legislative assembly and see what happens. Rhetoric and your “rights” won’t stop the local constabulary from throwing a boot party where you are the guest of honor. We’re losing this fight big-time, people. I think it’s time to call for an armistice and see where we get with honey instead of vinegar. We want legal marijuana; what do greedy suits in the halls of power want?
They want money. They want more tax revenue. Between all the public services and their pilfering, there really isn’t much left at the end of the day. We have tried to elect governments who will not put their hand in the till. So far it hasn’t panned out. Government is corrupt, it is responsible to corporate interests over that of us the body politic, and so we must accept this reality and work with what we’ve got. There would be no place for me in a Utopia anyway, so I’m not even interested in seeing one, never mind pretending it already exists. I live for the fight. When there are no demons left to slay, it will be time for me and my kind to sleep.
We want weed; they want money. Sounds to me like we’ve both got what the other needs and here we are foolishly holding out for a perfect world. It ain’t gonna happen. It’s that simple. We got to where we are not by process of evil magic, but by organic social evolution. This is how the human race is choosing to organize itself, and all too often I hear left-wing activists of all kinds try to pretend we can act like things are the way we want even though they will never be. The same is exceedingly true of marijuana advocates. We don’t live in a world of peace, love and happiness. We live in a world of war, hatred and famine. We might as well work on what is instead of pretending what could be; daydreams don’t pay the bills.
Aside from the fact the stuffed suits would like more revenue to piss away, we all need more public revenue so that we can have the standard of decent society we like to enjoy. Look at Somalia: That is the face of anarchy. A lack of laws and government doesn’t lead to the spontaneous eruption of a perfect society. It leads to hunger, rape gangs, pirates on the open seas, and ever-struggling militia groups engaged in a pointless game of “king-of-the-hill” where they butcher each other over who gets to control the rubble left in their wake. Humanity is not inherently good and decent. We might get there one day, but we are just monkeys with sticks beating each other over the head for a bite of the sweetest fruits. Our sticks have a lot of bells and whistles now: Ten billion dollars worth of cruise missiles is still essentially a stick with which to beat other monkey’s over the head with.
With governments insolvent, the civilized world teetering on the precipice of economic collapse and the rest of the world fighting for the scraps of a diminished resource pool: Legalization and taxation of hemp and cannabis products could fill much of the gap and pull our collective asses out of the fire. It is not time to legalize because of good feelings and bogus rhetoric – it’s just pure utility.
Stuffed suits like utility. They like numbers in the black and things that just work for practical reasons alone. They don’t care about a culture of peace, love and sharing. They just want all the equations to balance at the end of the day so they can feel that they have imposed a sense of order on an otherwise chaotic universe. We use weed to accept that chaos; they choose to fight it tooth and nail. Neither way is “right”. Both ways could be reconciled to help give us all what we want to survive these questionable and frighteningly confusing times we find ourselves in.
There is no “us and them”. There is only Us. We can fight and bicker and never get anywhere, allowing the false binaries imposed to divide us from achieving our goals. It’s never going to make pot legal, though. It’s not going to fix the economic crisis either. We can fix both if we just throw in a little give with our take.
Check out J.J McDubie’s music on Myspace at www.myspace.com/smokeandmoonbeams
