To my Public Servants

I would like to first congratulate you on your vast improvement over the previous ruling party and say that I approve of your efforts to bring progress and humanity back to our nation. Your efforts reflect the desires of a nation to be better then what we have been.

I have been torn as I watch the way the Corporate Interests have hijacked the debate again and as they will always do until we undermine their stranglehold on this great nation's public forum. That great long term goal will have to wait. We must now focus on the short term. With the private hospitals, nursing homes, big pharma, and the insurance industry arrayed against you there is little chance for real effective reform. They are buying adds to promote the health care plan, this is not good for us. The people mistrust the coroporations at the moment, so seeing them advocate for your health care plan makes people mistrustful of your health care plan and you. Further more they also have a hand in hiring these mobs of thugs to go hijack any public forum for discussion of health care. The lobbying companies, who send out these kind of instructions on how to disrupt discourse, do not do so without someone paying the bill. They curse us with their support while creating the illusion of public dissent.

You have it in your ability to so distract the medical industry and the political right that they will forget health care is being legislated. Direct the FDA to suspend the ban on medicinal marijuana until congress can take up the repeal of the failed policy of prohibition and implement a system of regulation, agricultural subsidy, and taxation. This sensible move will castrate big pharma, the private hospitals, and the health insurance industry and galvanize the support of most Americans. You will be viewed once more as decisive and strong by your supporters and your enemies will piss themselves! If the right tries to use the medijuana to scare main street, let them. It will only demonstrate how out of touch they have become. This nation's people have long understood the prohibition was wrong and stupid and taking resources from more worthy avenues.

By doing this you will not only hamstring your health care opponents and reunite the fracturing progressive movement. This move can be a huge economic boon to communities everywhere. It will reduce many prescription costs for those with pain or anxiety maintenance issues. This would create more paycheck to paycheck income in those effected. Many communities also house black market grow operations that could be encouraged to become legal medical operations. If the end of the medicinal prohibition is followed with the end of the recreational prohibition, and the beginning of domestic industrial hemp and active cannabis growth, then the economic benefits are nigh limitless. Every community would now have more prison and jail space to use for dangerous criminals as well as the police and judicial resources to put them there. You want to kill lobbying. Legalize hemp. Good bye fuel lobby, we now have bio diesel that comes from a non food source; paper lobby, wood pulp paper was always the least economic way to produce paper and the chemical and timber industry knew, thus they conspired to give us the damned prohibition in the first place, oh take the timber lobby with you; pharmacutical lobby, what pharmacutical lobby, can't patent a plant, I guess now you'll have to actually cure diseases instead of trying to make money. Furthermore it would remove a barrier between many people and jobs.

This is the boot to the door that will let the greed heads know we have come for blood. Whether you are on the right side of that boot or the wrong side of that door is up to you but the kick is coming whether you throw it or not. I ask you only remember this; you serve us, the people, the every day citizens (including yourself and the two Presidents prior to you) that this law makes into criminals; not the for profit hospitals or prisons, not the insurance companies or the modern day opium lords of big pharma.

R. Thomas Parham

Voter and Criminal