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Three years before -- anonymous letter to Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy

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December 9, 2002

To: Janet Wolf

From: One attendee at the conference: ALet My People Go: Religious Leaders and Drug Policy@

Subject: We have met the victims and (sometimes) they are us

I tossed and turned last night, wondering what I would write to you and whether I should or not. As much as all of us need to speak out about the injustices associated with the drug war, sometimes there is a time for silence. Unfortunately, that time is now for me.

Even though it was a restless night, I am thankful that I was in my own bed, listening to the early morning rain on my roof, surrounded by the peace and quiet of my country home of 34 years. If all goes as expected, I will trade this quiet retreat for the company of many strangers in a few short months. And I will continue in that company for many years, even if the criminal justice system attempts (in the very limited ways that it can) to be lenient to me. The federal charges I face (for growing medical marijuana for myself and four other sick friends and neighbors) carry a sentence of 10 to 40 years, confiscation of everything I own and a $2 million fine. Like too many other people, I cooperated with the Marijuana Task Force during their ten hour visit to my farm, rather than asserting the rights that might have cushioned the force with which the State can respond to my disregard for cannabis-related laws. As a result, I have left the State B and myself B with few options.

But it was the lack of options B to use marijuana responsibly and therapeutically, to opt out of the illegal markets by growing my own B that helped lead me to this point. And there is nothing like facing the rest of my life in prison and (if I get out) being a convicted felon to help focus the mind and the heart. It has now been over three months since the Task Force visit, and every day has been a living prayer of thanks that the system sometimes moves slowly. Slowly enough to give me time at home to put my affairs in order, time enough to tell friends and family what has happened and what the future holds without bars blocking our view of each other. Time enough to hug my nieces and nephews without them being searched first, time enough to pet my dogs one more time.

During those same three months, we have all heard about the raids in California, where terminal patients in hospices that provided them marijuana have been chained to their beds and hauled to jail, as the modern-day Inquisitors added other names to their drug war body count. We have heard about hundreds, if not thousands, of marijuana users and growers fleeing north to request asylum in Canada. (Unfortunately, that is not a solution. If the US feds want them back, the Canadian authorities will return them, perhaps reluctantly but no less real in its consequences.)

But we have also heard of the growing unrest, in California and the other eight states which have established legitimate medical marijuana programs, about the intrusion of federal forces in overtaking and destroying programs which have worked to ease pain and suffering; to provide a safe, humane way to obtain cannabis medicine; without increasing the size and scope of the illegal markets for marijuana. (Don=t take my word for it B read the new GAO report which comes to the same conclusions.) We have heard of elected officials in some California cities distributing medical marijuana on the steps of their City Halls. We have celebrated the decision by San Francisco voters who approved a referendum to have their elected leaders establish a city-run medical marijuana farm.

But as we celebrate these small steps toward reducing the force of the federal government to impose their own notions of purity upon the sick and dying, or even on the healthy and hard-working who choose to balance their lives occasionally with illegal smiles, the trains to our modern concentration camps keep filling, and pulling out for the short ride to a long imprisonment. This situation may change, if the actions of the few gathered at this meeting help stimulate the involvement of many hundreds of thousands of others to oppose this intransigent drug war, and replace it with a sane, tolerant and long-lasting peace. Until that happens, we will continue to chisel names on our own black granite wall B one that adds fifteen times as many names each year as the Vietnam Memorial wall memorializes for the entirety of that other failed war.

Thanks for being the catalyst for this meeting. It has given me two days of hope to mediate the last three months of fear and uncertainty, and the coming years of silence and forced solitude that is likely my fate, and the fate of millions of others before a sensible and sensitive set of future elected leaders declares a truce in this drug war, and lets all of us exhale.

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