OAKLAND, California - Channeling a relaxed, Dutch, pro-pot mentality, Dick Lee founded Oaksterdam University with campuses in Oakland, Los Angeles, Sebastopol, and Michigan. He was inspired by Cannabis College in Amsterdam. Now the feds have succeeded, through harassment and selective enforcement, in shutting him down.
Dick ran more than a legitimate educational institution. He had a dispensary, Coffeeshop Blue Sky, a museum, a gift shop, and wealth made prior to endeavoring to make marijuana sales a legitimate business.Because he was so vocal about reforming cannabis laws and using California's direct democratic political channels, he had to be taken down.
The wheelchair-bound entrepreneur knows that cannabis heals various cancers. He may also know that most users in California (ab)use it for recreational rather than medicinal purposes. And he almost certainly knows that there is too much money involved to keep depriving Big Business (the twin profiteers of all disease treatment in the US, the pharmaceutical and medical industries), and large pharmacies from wetting their beak.
Oaksterdam attempts to make sense of the cannabis-medical business. But the idea that states can regulate their own health care efforts is anathema to the federal government.
- As drugs go, cannabis is so mild that two things had to be done. One, it had to be vilified as a "gateway drug," basically an admission that it wasn't so bad but it led to bad things. Soda drinking leads to beer drinking, chewing gum leads to cigarettes, and sugar and nicotine are really the gateway to all abuse, which actually usually begins and ends in the black hole that is alcohol. Two, cultivators aided and abetted by government researchers had to raise THC levels while simultaneously reducing beneficial CBD levels, making it more of an "artificial drug" than a natural "plant medicine."
No one appreciates people breaking the Five Precepts by purposely taking intoxicants to deal with the Matrix we inhabit. The pretense that we live in a fair and free society governed by unbiased laws is the real self-deception that holds the Matrix in place. What year is it really, 1984? What is the way of resistance, getting high? It seems most Americans drink in order to "go along to get along." It would be better if they smoked but they might not get as much done. When THC becomes a useless distorter of reality, rather than a plant grounding us, the police state will have won anyway. (This is why DMT has to be suppressed at all costs; it sometimes opens third eyes).Our centralized authority (Nacism, or National Capitalism) uses its armed agencies -- many of them, such as the IRS, with no business fielding paramilitary SWAT teams -- to enforce policies that are friendliest to Big Business.
This is because living in a "fascist" state means the melding of business and government. This is what Hitler's Germany accomplished and what other nations, like Mussolini's Italy, modeled. If Stalin's Russia, Mao Zedong or Deng Xiapoing's China, and Bush's America (Obama just being a continuation of what pro-Nazi Prescott Bush, Cheney, and the Georges instituted) serve corporations over citizens, then this is fascism.
Who is being served by persecuting Dick Lee, state-approved cannabis dispensaries, or university research of cannabinoids and our pre-existing, internal (endocannabinoid) receptors for them. Who profits and benefits from keeping "marijuana" classified as a Class 1 drug with no known medical benefits when many are known? Glaucoma treatment, appetite stimulation, nausea abatement, pain relief, anxiety suppression, tumor reduction...
