"You can't be for big government, big taxes and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy."
-Ronald Reagan
Say what you will about Bush’s beloved puppet Ronnie, the man had a +4 charisma roll, amazing speech writers, the cognitive ability to complete full sentences, and a point.
Podcasts about boycotts, and old news MCMA opinions that speak to removing the “grey market”, make a lot of noise and are meant to distract from the real battles for the real little guys: individuals. Important battles that have yet to be fought, are underway, or have already been lost. Such as ‘likely unconstitutional’ limited licensing schemes in Detroit that lie about inclusion and opportunity and prevent the little guy from entering the market in large numbers, Ypsilanti threatening a 79-year old caregiver with jail time for growing in her home, or families losing their businesses over unconstitutional executive orders.
Because fighting for personal and property rights, and the rights of citizens to freely enter into and open their business in any market they choose regardless of skin color, criminal record, past or current address, financial status, or the opinions of government agencies, is not a single issue topic. Liberty is not something you can pick and choose to support. The rights of the little guy matter every single day of every single year, for every single person, not just in specific situations and in line with the opinions of podcasters and politicians. Liberty is not a social slogan or a word trick. It is not a marketing concept, or an issue unique to this industry.
We skipped the one year anniversary of Tinfoil Hat Time. Although, technically, because the first instance involved calling out Whitmer for her patterns of tyranny against small business owners and individual rights on the cover (an editorial that if written today would encompass an entire issue) the argument could be made that July is the one year anniversary.
Speaking of missed anniversaries, it was also around a year ago that MiCIA sent a letter to the Governor’s office asking for their businesses to be exempt from the revocation of civil liberty. Did they include all the small businesses and caregivers in their thoughts? Did they apply their influence over public office to ask that unconstitutional orders not be levied on any free citizen?
No. They thanked her for her tyranny and requested their licensed adult-use retail marijuana establishments, for-profit entities that exist for recreational users and not medical patients, be defined as “essential to human life” in the name of patient access, while the rights of the little guys, free enterprise, and the liberty to worship and peacefully assemble were shut down and stolen. Then they invited her and her allies to their corporate online theft of a real in-person grass roots event known as Hash Bash. The original pro-marijuana populist movement here in Michigan, sparked by the one and only John Sinclair, who adamantly (and rightly) believes weed should be regulated no more than tomatoes. To be sold, bought and consumed at farmers markets. A far cry from United Nations Good Manufacturing Practices, a system of regulation where the biggest guy controls everything. A system the MCMA and MiCIA both fully support.
In the August 2019 MM Report interview with MCMA board member Michael Elias, he was not shy about pushing GMP, “Good Manufacturing Practice, it’s a coveted designation that the FDA uses for food and drug today. Any mass consumable that is regulated by the FDA must be GMP, it essentially drives a significant reduction in contamination and food safety issues. The problem with cannabis is that things are going so quickly that the state of Michigan does not regulate operators to be GMP today, which I think is a huge problem. We are lobbying hard to change that view.” (https://mmmrmag.blogspot.com/2019/08/common-citizen-rare-perspective-by.html)
The Winter 2020 issue of MiCIA Magazine, the official trade journal of the Michigan Cannabis Industry Association, and a Q&A with Lissa Satori simply entitled Good Manufacturing Practices, revealed a bit more of the story, “According to the World Health Organization, Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) is a system for ensuring that products are consistently produced and controlled according to quality standards.” When asked about the Michigan market’s reception of GMP standards she replied, “Early operators were more likely to have experience in the illegal, unregulated cannabis market than in other regulated industries. Trying to explain to an extremely talented cannabis cultivator who has been safely growing medicine for patients for years underground that GMP is needed in the commercial market can elicit an initial emotional reaction and strong resistance. But this is quickly changing. These days, with professionals from other regulated industries flocking to cannabis by the droves, and veteran cultivators paying attention to where the industry is going, I am encountering more business owners who understand how imperative standards and GMP are to expanding other markets.” (https://bluetoadpublishing.co.uk/publication/?i=651404&p=26)
United Nations controls, backed by the tentacle known as the World Health Organization, masked behind the tentacle known as the Food and Drug Administration (the agency targeting minorities with a menthol ban), with the tentacles known as the Republican and Democrat parties pulling the strings of the tentacles known as MCMA and MiCIA. All in an effort to make the marijuana industry like every other industry, devoid of little guys and dominated by handfuls of bloated corporate entities all with ties to one another, all under the rule of the UN. That does not sound like backing the little guy. In fact, that is backing the biggest guy on the planet. It also sounds exactly like the history of the war on drugs, with a United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs popping into existence in 1961, the U.S. Controlled Substances act of 1970 being modelled to comply with it, and politicians on both sides of the aisle backing it for personal gain with the help of news media who never mention the UN.
This is also how Whitmer and her fellow virtual Hash Bash politicians justified their attacks on individual autonomy and small business. The United Nations’ World Health Organization sounded an alarm, the Center for Disease Control grabbed the baton, the parties and the propagandists pulled the strings, and suddenly the rights of the little guys which were won from absentee tyrants by people who literally fought through illness and poverty no longer mattered. Big box stayed open and made a killing in 2020. Health insurance giants still recorded billions in net profits for 2020. Massive tech entities saw their numbers and influence skyrocket in 2020. How did 2020 go for small business and individual rights? Caregivers are individuals. Their concerns are the concerns of property rights, individual autonomy and free commerce. Constitutional issues that need to be defended daily, and that never should have been stolen.
Entities that cheer for unconstitutional tyranny while using power to exempt themselves, that use social movements as tools to bottleneck industries while holding the will of the people like a bargaining chip, that use political partnerships to shut down and then steal real populist movements, and that champion control of everything by the massive global totalitarian corporate shadow bureaucracy that started the war on drugs, are just as responsible for attacking the little guy as entities who have no problem openly admitting their combined true intentions: the theft of marijuana from the little guy by big money and big government.
