ANTI CANNABIS LETTER WAS IGNORANT

Dear Collegian Staff,

Collegian staff writer Kyle Klavetter has laid a heavy dollop of
righteous ambiguity on all our heads with his pretentious and off-key
screed, "Pot lacks purpose."

Cannabis is one of humanity's oldest agricultural commodities with a
proud and prominent place in both global and U.S. history. Its
prohibition is but seven decades old and a prohibition that began
with a rotten and corrupt foundation, based on the xenophobic lies
and perjured testimony before the US Congress by lifelong bureaucrat
Harry Anslinger. Those corrupt beginnings are enough in themselves
for any intelligent mind to see the moral failures, not in the use of
cannabis, but in criminalizing those who consume it.

Cannabis has defended our nation, clothed our early settlers and
covered their wagons as they headed westward in our nation's
exuberant early expansion.

Cannabis was important enough that Thomas Jefferson saw fit to
smuggle the multi-purpose plant's seeds from China at a time when
that was a crime that carried a penalty of death. Napoleon thought
cannabis important enough that it was a major factor in his invasion of Russia.

So old are human relations with this plant that we bear receptors for
its properties in our body's cells. It is not, as Klavetter would
have us believe, our consumption of this wondrous plant that lessens
the moral strengths of our nation but its prohibition that truly degrades us.

Would young Mr. Klavetter consider our prison system, the world's
largest (both in total and per capita) as a moral victory even though
it has become a for-profit growth industry that incarcerates young
black males at a rate almost six times greater than that of South
Africa during Apartheid? This growth is fueled in large part by our
War On Drugs.

And have the 800,000 arrests each year in the United States for
possession of pot done anything to stem the plant's popularity? Are
there any successes to cannabis' prohibition that Klavetter can
trumpet or even defend?

Does Klavetter's condemnation include cannabis' useful medical
properties - properties that may even hold a possible cure for cancer?

Or should his condemnation be directed towards a policy founded on
racist lies? This policy has seen our government attempt to hide the
results of studies that show the promise this plant has in treating cancer
( see: www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n572/a11.html?310095 ) can bear our nation no good.

Instead of condemning the very real desire by many to consume one of the creator’s very useful plants, a plant so safe it has no fatal level of consumption, placed here, as I understand scripture, for our use, he should instead look at the very real criminality of a government willing to lie and bury the truth as a means of preserving its power.

It is prohibition that is the destroyer of any righteousness here, Mr. Klavetter, not cannabis.

Allan Erickson,

Drug Policy Forum of Oregon