Taking Aim
The Florida Department of
Agriculture has recently released statistics praising their marijuana
eradication efforts. The commissioner,
Adam Putnam, has announced that last year nearly 800 grow sites and 37,000
plants were destroyed. Over 700
individuals were arrested in combination with the seizure of $1.7 million in
assets. The mission stated by the
department includes these goals: to ensure safety, to protect consumers from unfair
and deceptive business practices, to assist farmers, to conserve resources, and
to promote environmentally safe practices.
As is the case for most
governmental bodies, the department seems to be doing the exact opposite of
their listed intentions. One only needs
to look to certain organizations such as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
(LEAP) or the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) to
gather the overwhelming evidence against these enormously wasteful eradication
efforts. All the common arguments
provided by federal, state, and local agencies can be easily dissected.
Arresting marijuana producers and
consumers endangers children. By
removing productive workers from everyday society who voluntarily transact with
other hard working producers enslaves the youngest by requiring the youth to
respond to a once fulfilled workload. By
continually imprisoning valuable personnel, we promote the acceleration of our
own bankruptcy. In essence we force our
children to start over and lose all the momentum that their predecessors had
labored for.
Consumers become neglected when heavily
demanded markets are forced underground.
The quality of product cannot be guaranteed or protected by the courts,
and in turn allows for questionable manufacturing procedures. It remains completely unfair for government
officials to sidestep the first amendment (freedom of choice) in order to
siphon dollars in their own personal direction.
The highest form of deception present in the land today is the use of
legislature as a means to eradicating competition.
If the Florida Department of
Agriculture truly desired to assist farmers they would keep farmers tending the
soil and not mowing the grass on the side of the highways. Oh, just a little side note out there for you
readers: the largest crop produced in Florida is not oranges but grass, and the
vast majorities of chemicals used for growing in the state is not for
agriculture, but for grass as well. Imprisoning
marijuana farmers obstructs the supply to the market, and thus raises the price
for the goods. This in turn hurts other
seemingly non related industries as consumers’ supplemental incomes becomes
less and less. By blocking the flow of
goods to individuals a clot develops in the economy, and new creative
businesses that would have popped up cannot come into fruition. Impeding marijuana farmers is simply a tactic
to eradicate the small farmers who wish to diversify their crop portfolio and to
keep the dollars in the hands of enormous monocrop agribusinesses.
The human resources wasted by the attempt
to eliminate the supply of marijuana remain outlandish. It sends unnecessary money to the prison
industrial complex while increasing human suffering. The energy it takes to run these programs is also
at the expense of the taxpayer. It
creates an unnecessary war on our homeland and forces technology to be used for
perverse reasons, especially domestic spying.
Worst of all this war has been directed at minority ethnic groups, purposefully
male, while the vast majority of demand and usage has come from middle and
upper class Caucasians. These practices have
spread poverty while increasing violence.
In closing, the Florida Department
of Agriculture facilitates the destruction of environments. Whether it’s tearing away fathers, mothers,
brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters from their families or investing in the
continuation of chemical agribusiness, the organization is failing on all
fronts. They’re explicitly in bed with
government officials who are expanding an already disastrous infrastructure
while concurrently assisting in the depletion of our beautiful and natural primitive
old growths. We do not expect or predict
a change from the Department of Agriculture, nor from the commissioner himself,
Adam Putnam. In the darkest of ages, it
has become difficult to find the light, yet the truth shall always prevail!
