As of August 4th 2019, CBD retailers here in Iowa, who previously said they were unable or unwilling to understand the ever changing CBD laws in Iowa and therefore thought to be operating legally, now say they do not care about Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller’s opinioin on CBD illegality and will continue to sell CBD to resist drug prohibition.
The ideological presupposition regarding effectiveness and degrees of success in reducing drug related problems through totalitarian criminal justice approaches has been truncated into “legalization means drugs are ok,” a message that no educated child would ever fall into. In the world of the internet, drug education resources such as erowid.org counter the myths of prohibition, such as using heroin once gets you addicted or cannabis is a gateway drug. Fear based rhetoric for political or career related gains here in Iowa has avoided the complex intellectual conversation that in other places around the world are reducing societal pain, suffering, and cost. Prisons do not work. Health related issues rarely have part of the discussion revolve around whether human beings who have an illness such as drug abuse deserve to live. While people advocating harsher penalties for drug use and abuse do so from a place of ignorance, their justification that heroin users or others should die and suffer the consequences of their health issue, that being a health issue of drug addiction, or that they should rot away in a prison system that has quick easy and efficient drug access in every cell block in every prison in the country…that is not ignorance. That is satanic, ungodly hellfire against sick people who, says science, are addicted from lack of connection. Closing doors of healing opportunity while savagely advocating for letting people die of their problems is part of why school shootings are so prevalent these days. When neighbors stop caring about neighbors, people, especially young males, snap, and the spiritual rotting at the core of people whose instinct is to jail, beat, rob or even kill other human beings for being in a temporary state of addiction shines through. A normally quiet, underground problem has become loud and very visible. Drug users are not criminals. People who want them to die or go to prison, however, do know what they are doing. And they won’t stop without being forced to. Thus, engaging in the violence that is politics is mandatory. Just make sure when engaging in voting, an egregious act of violence, that these acts of violence are much preferable to school shootings, Wal-Mart manifestos of murderous intent, and other forms of political violence straight out of the socialist playbooks.
Knowing that the world we live in is shockingly violent, harmful, and painful to innocent people, many of us turn to activism of various sorts to channel the frustration and anger into finding solutions. The solution to the drug problem is, according to former Iowa Democratic Party Chair Dr. Andy McGuire, and other studied intellectuals on this issue, quite simply counter-intuitive. While not permissive, it seems to be that we must admit defeat in a “War” on addiction, and instead choose the other path advocated in Books of Wisdom, which is not a cliche. Loving and forgiving those who are sick — and as a result of their sickness, have harmed many of us through robberies, violence, etc — seems to be the way to “defeat” an undefeatable plague which is abusive drug use. While some drugs are good, and save lives, others are bad, and ruin lives, but warfare has blowback, and in the instance of the War on Drugs, that blowback is increased profit margins for dealers, guaranteeing an ever rising and more and more potent supply, as well as other complex and thoroughly interesting issues ancillary to the point at hand.|
CBD laws are the single best example we have recently seen pointing this out. From a purely economic point of view, CBD retailers are more encouraged, not less, by state laws that outlaw CBD activity here in Iowa. Due to the risk that retailers in Iowa selling CBD at Family Video and elsewhere may be subject to various forms of police brutality, this provides a market barrier to accessing the market, thereby lowering competition which makes certain that prices stay higher for consumers than they otherwise would in a fully “legalized” market. Adding to that, the taboo/rebellion factor of selling CBD makes it more intriguing for market players for a variety of reasons, whether they be ideological, political, or egoic/need/desire based. When applied to the entire field of drug policy reform, marijuana and CBD laws make objective evidence-based arguments for rendering drug policy ineffective in achieving goals of reduction of harms to society (financial, medical, etc) and argue for a more adulty approach, one of compassion, objectivism, and forgiveness, as each and every family who has successfully dealt with serious drug use can attest. That not every family, and not every politician, is willing to let their personal experiences with the emotionally hard hitting reality of just how tough drug abuse is, be separated from the literature, has caused pain, but moving forward the tide has finally shifted, and drug policy in the 21st century shall continue to rapidly catch up with the literature, to the benefit of everyone concerned.
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