“One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
Rarely anymore, if ever, is this done out of morality, or duty, or any sense that these scratches on paper are ‘just’ and ‘right’. Almost always the threat of force, or some form of extortion or blackmail, must be used in order to gain compliance with some convoluted and overly complex yet totally vague law. Money will be stolen, goods will be seized, livelihoods and lives will be upended, these are the reasons we continue to play pretend like abused wives acting as if there is nothing wrong, all the while under direct threat from a madman who will attack and bully us the instant we do not follow secret ever changing rules that only exist to satisfy him.
There is no reason at all to continue to play pretend with an abuser. A relationship such as this is beyond toxic, leaping clear over the border wall of self destructive. No one is under any obligation to knowingly place themselves in, or remain in, this sort of immoral arrangement.
People like Andrew Brisbo at the Michigan Marijuana Regulatory Agency who describe their direct and open perversion of the American idea of a government of laws rather than of men as the “holistic approach” have no authority over us. These crooked agencies are in direct violation of the basic tenets of our system of government and justice. They can only bully and steal, and even then only if their victims comply. Every one of their ‘punishments’ are completely self-inflicted wounds; you have to incriminate yourself, you have to send them money, you have to destroy your own inventory. They do not have the right, let alone the manpower, to do anything that you do not voluntarily comply with. These hacks can’t even send timely emails when METRC goes down. Brisbo and crew have zero previous marijuana experience, they know literally nothing about cannabis, and rely on the input of lobbyists and special interest groups that get paid to manipulate regulatory bodies to the advantage of their clients.
Incompetant absentee abusers who expect others to not only follow arbitrary rules, but actually voluntarily cause themselves harm at the abusers whim, deserve neither respect nor fealty let alone recognition of existence. Governments like the Michigan Marijuana Regulatory Agency are a game of pretend that none of us should be playing.
We are free people who wish to grow a plant. To then harvest that plant, turn it into something useful, and to ingest and trade it as we choose. To reap what we sow with our own efforts and engage in free commerce with our fellow free citizens. To live our lives as we see fit, without being harassed or bullied into acting against our own best interests. We do not need permission, or permit, or title, or license. We are American citizens. We are autonomous living beings.
We are free as soon as we choose to be.
Free of the rule of men and women who sit behind closed doors and determine the fate of others, never suffering the consequences of their actions. Free from stepping and fetching at the arbitrary whim of those who defile the term holistic in the most egregious of ways. Free from threats and self inflicted punishments imposed by liars and illusionists.
To continue to pretend as if the MRA is a legitimate body places at risk not only the livelihoods of those who deal in cannabis in Michigan, but the very basic principles of the American revolution. Men do not rule from behind closed doors in this country. They must write clear and concise laws that all can understand and obey equally. These latest iterations of government are anti-American institutions who run outside their constitutional limits and outside the system of checks and balances. They only get away with it because we go along with it.
No group in this country is in a better position to lead the stand against this archaic style of rule than the marijuana community. We are professionals with decades of experience in defying the whims of unjust and immoral laws. This plant was 100% illegal for the majority of our lives, and yet we grew, sold, and smoked it. We took the risk because we knew we were in the right and we can do the same thing now.
In fact, we have a moral obligation to defy the Michigan Marijuana Regulatory Agency. It exists solely to control this market. ‘Safety’ is nothing more than rhetoric used to justify its existence. The exact same way Steve Linder uses safety to justify his anti-caregiver notions.
The MRA is a lever point that can be charmed and swooned into making market changes that benefit the charmers and the swooners. It is a political weapon, the enemy of free people and free market principles. Elitists, and those who benefit in some way from its existence, are the only ones who champion its necessity. Those whose paychecks come from acting like good little tools of the MRA, those whose legal firms benefit from sifting through vaguely written rules, along with those who use it as a political weapon, and those who use it to bend either the market to their favor or the rules to the favor of their market.
The marijuana community knows precisely what kind of lying, manipulating, crooked oppressors those in government truly are. We know exactly how rigged data and censored narratives are used to steal rights and property. Behind closed door bureaucrats destroying the lives and livelihoods of innocent citizens is something we are all too familiar with.
In order to truly free the weed we must free our minds and ourselves. Big money, caregivers, acronyms, black markets, politics, parties, propaganda, government, all hold no value whatsoever. It is a simple, effortless, truth. These things do not matter.They are temporary, ever changing, and serve nothing but the self interests and personal desires of those who would manipulate us. Desires born from a multitude of perspectives, all blending to create a soup of delusions we all agree to pretend are real, to our demise.
End the delusion. Stop playing pretend. Free your mind, and thus, your self.
The weed will follow.
