Our elected servants have once again side-stepped their responsibility to carry out the will of the voters. In 1998, the citizens of Washington voted to allow safe,legal access to medical marijuana. Since 1998, patients have been bullied by the federal government while the state sits back and watches. Here 3 years later hard-working, tax paying law abiding citizens are facing prison time for growing a voter mandated crop.
Feel as you may about this issue, the voters have made their statement and now it is time for our elected servants to do something FOR the citizens for a change and stand up to Obama and tell him that we demand state's rights. We all know what is going on in Arizona; border towns are over-run with crime and disease, meth flows like tap water, hard working ranchers hide on their own property to avoid drug runners. The citizens voted to allow their law enforement officers to ask for proof of citizenship and to be detained if they refused. The voters spoke, the governor acted and the fed disagreed.
This same battle is happening right here in Washington State, but on a different front. Our elected servants have tried on the nanny's clothes and we need to band together and tell her it is time to put on the servants clothes again, we don't need another nanny. We need a representative that will stand up and say, "No, our voters have spoken."
Many of us citizens are on the fence as to who we will cast our vote for in the upcoming elections. In our state, no one can be trusted now that the state supreme court has ruled lying by candidates to be free speech. Some of us that once felt "hope and change" to be the best option are counting on the liberatarian party to bring a feasable candidate for the next presidential election.
Our elected servants have decided to cut aid to the elderly and cut school funding instead of looking into the $100 million that is spent annually on marijuana eradication in Washington State, not to mention the cost of incarceration for persons convicted of posession of marijuana. We feel that that money could be better used by our law enforcement community to eradicate methamphetamines, opiates and cocaine which seem to have a tight grasp on our youth.
I have chosen to support Sensible Washington's Initiative 1149, and urge you to do the same. Their initiative would simply remove all civil and criminal penalties for adults who posess and use marijuana. They do not say that everyone must smoke pot, or that everyone wont. What this will do is allow the voters to decide if marijuana should continue to be illegal in the state of Washington. I for one think the time has come to end prohibition, one state at a time.
Being a white, middle class, conservative, this is my civil rights issue. We have seen civil rights battles with the poor, the minorities, the gay community, the illegal alien community even has a civil rights battle brewing and people still scoff at citizens having legal marijuana. Thomas Jefferson said,
"Some of my finest hours have been spent sitting on my back veranda, smoking hemp and observing as far as my eye can see." George Washington was known to grow marijuana for pleasure, and Ben Franklin made hemp paper in his paper mill. Marijuana eradication, which is only 60 years old, has made our founding fathers into criminals. What a shame.