Follow Your Nose

By Bill Drake

Ever noticed that when you get into an elevator in one of those big corporate/government office buildings, there is always a noticeable smell, an ethereal combination of fear, aggression, lust, hostility, and greed?

All the cologne in the world (and a lot of those goons in suits really do tend to overdo the stuff) can’t cover it up — these are nasty-smelling people.

Their lives are all about gaining power and then abusing it, and illegitimate power has a definite odor — probably closest to the smell of hell’s brimstone, truth be told.

I’ll bet the offices of the DEA really stink these days.

The narcs are clearly pissed that the medical marijuana movement is seriously threatening to take away some of their power. So there’s a lot of rancid sweat mixed in with that brimstone. A spokesman for the DEA came out recently, blinking at the cameras like Joe the Groundhog, to announce that a number of the medical marijuana organizations have been put on some kind of Public Enemies list, and that furthermore, everybody should understand that the movement is just a scam to legalize marijuana.

Wow — what a concept! The DEA is announcing that the medical marijuana movement is a scam and that the people promoting it are public enemies. The scope of the claim simply takes your breath away. Joseph Goebbels was one of the first to discover that if you tell a big enough whopper, most people will nod and agree with you even if it makes no sense at all. But it has to be a big one — a mere fib won’t get you any mileage.

Calling the medical marijuana movement a public enemy running a scam created by fiendish dope smokers qualifies as a really big one. Adolf would be proud. There’s just enough truth to it that most people who don’t know anything about marijuana except what the government tells them will nod and agree — sure, that’s all it is, a scam. Those hippies and low-life bums just want to smoke their dope and get high and lurk in alleys waiting for some old lady to walk by so they can jump out and steal her Social Security money so they can go buy more LEGAL DOPE!

Well, of course, all of us who are working hard so that sick people can have access to every legitimately effective natural medicine without government oppression — and that includes opium and coca as well as marijuana — understand that sure, there are some people faking illness in order to be able to buy marijuana without being subject to arrest and persecution (not a typo) by the cops. Who wouldn’t, if all you wanted was to enjoy the pleas-ures, and perhaps even gain moral and spiritual enlightenment, from inhaling the fumes of a sacred plant? And who created the system that makes these people have to resort to subterfuge in the first place? Aaarrrggghhhh!

OK, OK — I’ve got a grip again. So let’s step back a minute and talk about what is and isn’t a scam.

The cops will be the first to tell you that a couple of bad cops don’t make all cops bad, and the church will chime in that a few pederast priests don’t mean that the church is an evil institution full of child predators, and the corporate world will be quick to claim that Enron was an outlier event, and of course the bankers will tell you that Bernie Madoff was the rare exception, and so on and so on. But when it comes to the evil weed as medicine, ladies and gentlemen, the DEA is here to tell you that the medical marijuana movement is 100 percent a SCAM and that its backers are public enemies.

Let’s ask ourselves who benefits if the public buys the DEA’s big lie? Well, the obvious beneficiary is the DEA, because if they can make John Q. Public believe that the medical marijuana movement is a scam being perpetrated by public enemies, then maybe, just maybe, John Q. won’t ever guess that the real scam here is — wait for it — the DEA. How’s that, John Q. might ask? How is it that the DEA, an agency whose mission is to protect me and my wife

and my 2.5 kids from the evils of dope, could possibly be a scam? And there it is — right there, in plain view. The core of the scam lies in the phrase “protect the public.” What exactly is the DEA and all the other police state agencies protecting the public from? Why, all the harm and sickness and degeneration and evil that dope causes, that’s what. Hmmmm.

Well, it would be good if the government were set up to protect us all from harm and sickness etc., wouldn’t it? I mean, who wouldn’t agree that a benevolent government acting forcefully to prevent little rosy-cheeked tykes from being lured into a life of sickness and degeneration by squinty-eyed criminals would be a good thing? That’s certainly one of the proper roles of government, isn’t it?

Now, while John Q. might agree that protecting little tykes from evil is a good thing, John is almost certainly smart enough to know that it certainly is not, or ought not to be, the role of government to inflict pain, suffer-ing, and death upon millions of innocent people, includ-ing little brown, black, and yellow tykes around the world. But that is exactly what the US Federal Reserve, a privately owned bank in collusion with the US govern-ment, is doing by creating such radical inflation in food prices around the world that people are starving and food riots are breaking out everywhere. That’s exactly what the US government, in collusion with corrupt dicta-tors around the world, is doing when it uses drones to attack wedding parties, schools, and funerals — oops, collateral damage. So sorry — here’s a hundred bucks for your loss. And, of course, that’s exactly what the US government does by maintaining a policy of making pleasurable, medicinal, natural plant drugs illegal, thereby keep-ng the price of illegal drugs so high that vast networks of narco-traffickers are irresistibly attracted to the money.

So, with our scam detectors on full alert, let’s examine that assertion — that the DEA is working to protect the public. I can’t think of a better place to start than by looking at the relationship between the cigarette industry and the government. Note that I said the cigarette industry, not the tobacco industry. But that’s a whole ’nuther story. Let’s just stick with the undisputed fact that the cigarette industry kills over 400,000 people a year just in the US with its toxic little tubes. That’s the equivalent of three fully loaded 747s falling out of the sky every day. That’s the equivalent of two World Trade Centers col-lapsing in flames every week. That’s a shitload of people being killed. And what is the government’s response? Do

they declare a War on Cigarette Companies and send in the troops to occupy RJR and Philip Morris headquarters? Do they have surveillance drones hovering over the factories where these death sticks are manufactured? Of course not. They happily tax the hell out of the little killer tubes and don’t really lift a finger to stop the mass killing.

Oh, they put on a show — warning labels, laws against selling to children, etc., etc. But we shouldn’t have much trouble understanding that game, or should I say scam. If the government wants us to believe that it is dedicated to protecting the public from sickness and death caused by dope, how come it is profiting to the tune of roughly $2.50 in federal and state taxes per pack of cigarettes? Figuring two packs a day times 400,000 dead smokers times 365 days a year, and it’s easy to see through the big lie that the government is in the business of protecting us from nasty evil smoking materials that kill people. To save you the trouble, that would be $730 million the US government makes each year, every year, just off the cigarette smokers they allow to be killed legally. That’s not including all the collateral damage — lives ruined, productivity stolen, quality of life degraded.

Oh, there’s a lot more, a whole lot more that can be said about the government and its exploitation of we the peo-ple, but to stick to the point — who the hell does the DEA think it is trying to tell us that the medical marijua-na movement is a scam, and that the medical marijuana movement is a public enemy? The answer is simple. The smell is the tip-off. Trust your nose. Where is the real scam, and who is the true public enemy? Don’t just fol-low the money; don’t just ask, “Who benefits?” Simply follow your nose.