Taking Aim

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!