SIN TAX ERROR
Oregon "Marijuana" Sin Tax Enacts January 4th
Monday January 4th is the first fiscal business day in the corporate world…...therefore the politicians marked out this day to start their new business operation guided by the Liquor Control Commission. Salem was coerced by the consortium of out-of-state business owners operating in the OMMP to enabled recreational sales early with no tax so that time could be spent making obtuse regulations around dosing, packaging, licensing, testing, and of course residency.
Salem has been showing their total inability to follow through on Proposition 91 as it was passed by the voter-ship and has embarked on their own mission to mandate prohibition and over-regulation as the state-wide norm in regards to cannabis. Half of our state has no recreational dispensaries. Zoning and canopy limits have been implemented when none of this would have been passed by the citizenry had such obtuse legislation been brought forth in Proposition 91.
This is not far-reaching statement. No cannabis activist or legalization supporter would have wanted to see our legalization scheme be so complicated, obtuse, prohibitory, and contrary to what defines liberty and freedom from unnecessary policy, procedure and regulation. The "councils" created in Salem have shown they have no understanding of cannabis' implications for personal liberty and have shown they have zero accountability to the constituency who passed Proposition 91 so that we could allow average people to grow, access, and consume cannabis.
Proposition 91 passed with less than 60% of the popular vote in Oregon. This is a marginal victory and it can be easily asserted that many of the YES votes came from the hand of people who do not use cannabis personally, do not care about it's benefits or medicinal properties and simply voted yes due to their understanding of personal liberty and the implications of being able to make personal choices with your own body.
Another demographic group many of these yes votes came from the hand of individuals who also have no personal relationship with cannabis but want to see their socialized resources gain the financial benefits of tax dollars from commerce on "recreational marijuana". These voters are referred to as "SIN TAXERS", "WEEDBAGGERS", "MARIJUANA ACTIVISTS".
They see cannabis as a commodity for corporations and governments to harness for their own profit and aggrandizement of power. Politicians with this ideology work to create regulatory blockages for commerce and activity through regulatory "jerry-rigging".
Part of this subversion through jerry-rigging is the zoning, canopy limits, and outright prohibition of cannabis grow operations within specific counties and cities. This creates boom-bust scenarios for counties all around the state and although tax dollars may be distributed back out, they miss all the ancillary tourism and commerce dollars that come from growing and retail operations. This also creates nepotistic relationships between council members and their business-owner constituents….the people who filtered in from out of state to plant themselves within the OMMP (Oregon Medical Marijuana Program) due to residency restrictions being neglected.
The other part of this "jerry-rigging" is enabling a sales tax in a state that constitutionally does not allow for sales tax. This is all-the-more reason to refer to Monday's change in climate as a "Sin Tax".
It's very likely that Proposition 91 would have failed to be passed if the Sin Taxers and Personal Liberty voters were lost to a yes vote because Proposition 91 contained a clause that cannabis should never be taxed due to it's expansive medicinal, industrial, and food qualities.
These "SIN TAXERS", the people who have not done any research of their own, and are still suffering from multi-generational propaganda distributed by the American Education System and that of the Federal Government itself through reefer madness and other subversive marketing techniques. They may not have voted yes at all if they can't gain tax dollars for their schools and roads.
These yes votes may have evaporated and the end-result may have come out lower than 50% for legalization and we would have had to go back to the drawing board and lose another year to outright prohibition.
These yes's, turning into no's are very likely if legalization didn't offer any tax dollars for the public coffers…..56% yes had to have contained thousands of people who saw Colorado and decided the public benefit of tax dollars and tax refunds being a great progression for Oregon.
Oregon, as well as the other preliminary states to legalize all chose a "tax and regulate" scheme over a legalization scheme and in each state, the existing medical program got gutted, oppressed, subverted, and patient rights have been completely disparaged regardless of location and legislative language.
The interesting thing to pay attention to is whether "early-adopter states" such as Colorado and Washington get to swim in tax dollars before our nation wakes up to the ethical dilemma of taxing a food, medicine, and fuel ecological resource...aka...a plant.
America is known for it's intense capitalistic fervor and cannabis is being implicated in the plans of venture capitalists and speculators all across the country. This drive for "profit" is an underlying (or overlying) current in the legalization movement and many state politicians are looking to aggregate power over industry and power over immense tax dollars just like corporate executives move to take advantage of an untapped resources or opportunity through a market vacuum.
This unethical, "profit at all costs" corporate culture we're currently shifting away from has certainly snagged it's nails into the cannabis movement and many countless people who extoll the "green economy" are simply venture capitalists looking to tap the next big economic expansion in our country….they see cannabis as just another resource or commodity to speculate, merchandize and commodify. This notion of self-aggrandizement is part and parcel of the "WEEDBAGGER" mentality and and co-opting the government to do business is just another aspect of "doing business".
The truth is, cannabis is a commodity. It's one of the most valuable commodities the human species has at it's disposal and could be our only hope for shifting our global culture from that of EGO, scarcity, war, famine, ecological disaster to something far more synergistic and abundant.
This leads us to a philosophical truth….nature does not belong to man, man belongs to nature. Furthermore, the right to nature is inalienable, immutable, and not up for debate. The Declaration of Independance says we gain our self-evident rights from God, aka nature, and therefore no Government or Monarchy can rightly prohibit the wide ranging world of nature and the substances it provides us. This makes the Controlled Substances Act fully unconstitutional and distorts the true liberty of every American to put in their bodies, anything from nature they should please.
If you're not a philosophical mind, and like to dwell in the hard currencies of science, then look no further than the human endo-cannabinoid system. Humans have evolved a specific receptor system that interfaces with every single system within our organism, including the brain and brainstem. No bodily function occurs without the use of our CB1 and CB2 receptors and cannabis is one of many plants that contain specific active compounds that inhibit this receptor system. Humans evolved with cannabis, to use cannabis. This is called cohabited evolution and we cannot, to this day, find a single dangerous aspect of cannabis, it's nontoxic in every single sense of it's use. No person has ever harmed themselves through the direct use of cannabis throughout the history of mankind.
When this information is realized by a human, how can they justify taxing or prohibiting such a useful and non-dangerous plant?
Is it our ignorance, our moralistic or statist-mentality or capitalistic programming that allows a government to aggrandize a partner plant, an entheogen, and teacher?
