So it’s 34 years now that we’ve been protesting the cannabis laws with MardiGrass, and the world then and now are like different universes.
We were a bunch of outsiders who really just wanted to be left alone to grow and smoke weed, instead of getting endless police harassment, on the ground and in the air.
Millions of dollars have been spent on policing weed in Nimbin, which did nothing to stem the flow, but put a lot of people in gaol, and gave many more criminal records.
We were the stoned idiot hippies to people then, carrying on about pot being good medicine. We were a joke to most, and still are to many; the stigma and judgement remain strong.
Back then the doctors said cannabis had no medical value, and they still say the same today. They have their own rules and requirements for deciding what’s a medicine or not, and weed has never jumped through their hoops.
However, they are now the primary dealers, with the chemists. No-one saw it coming that I know of, we’ve been played like fools.
Mullaway’s Tony Bower started it off by stopping children’s epileptic seizures with his cannabis tincture. They couldn’t ignore it stopping hundreds of daily seizures, often immediately; every seizure doing brain damage, as I understand.
So they set up a ‘Special Access Scheme’ to cater for this, even though they had no “evidence” of it working. That only happens when you do one of their special trials with placebos and it’s not easy letting your child have seizures on a placebo when the kid next to you got the real thing stopping theirs!
Then came the pandemic and Tele-Health clinics and somewhere in the mess as lockdowns and fear took over, weed escaped. And escaped and escaped until now every man and his dog can get legal weed over the phone, delivered to your door the next day, if you don’t want to walk to your local chemist with the script on your phone.
And now it’s happening in Europe in the same way. It’s like they copied us in Germany, where they prescribed two billion dollars worth of weed last year, doubling the year before. Doctors prescribing weed is starting up all over the planet in all sorts of countries. It’s like the Medicos suddenly decided we better join ’em because we’re not winning this war against it.
New propaganda is out now of course, it doesn’t turn you into a “Reefer Madness” rapist and murderer anymore, now it makes you sick, unless it’s grown in a licensed establishment, which pretty much means hydro.
Very little of the legal weed is organic, and I’m not sure any of it at all is grown outside in the sun. Home-grown or weed off the street is unregulated and dangerous, they say. It’s like there has to be a barrier between us and nature which is not to be trusted.
It’s just more lies, like saying if you have cannabis in your blood, or urine or saliva, you’re impaired.
What really muddies the waters every time is the money game. We cannot trust research even, as someone just proved by researching the researchers and discovering they held back or hid a huge percentage of the positive pot research conclusions.
Of course they did because profit is all-powerful. Same as the lies about impairment, or home-grown weed. All in the interest of maximising profit.
And so we come to the tiny one-pub village of Nimbin and its annual protest about the war on cannabis.
It’s been an enormous effort for a small community to keep the flame of truth alive on cannabis, arguably the safest and best medicine on the planet. Anybody anywhere could grow it, with any climate and soil.
Nimbin should feel good about MardiGrass. Nearly everyone now knows we are right, the law is the crime. Millions of people across Australia are using legal cannabis to relax, to lessen anxiety or depression, to take their pain away, and even maybe discover their spiritual life! The plant with a million uses, called God’s gift for centuries.
Who makes money if people can grow their own medicine in their own backyard?
The hippies were right about weed all along, and many other things. Please come to MardiGrass this year, bring your friends, make a day of it. You will learn something new I promise, and maybe even enjoy yourself!
There’ll be all sorts of terrific speakers, comedians, musicians and poets, performers and stalls. You’ll be supporting one of the most important issues of our times which most people haven’t even realised it is yet.
The war on drugs is the forgotten war and its impact is all around us every day. It’s insidious, picking on the poor and traumatised, the people who need help, not locking up. Our jails are stuffed full with strugglers.
And like other wars, there’s all sorts of profit makers and industries feeding off it. Not just Big Pharma, but now doctors and chemists, jail owners and jail keepers, social workers and rehab outfits, lawyers and courts, and of course the police, as the drug war creates most of their work.
The hippies were right all along. Check out the program as it’s being built at: nimbinmardigrass.com and come to meetings if you can in the HEMP Bar, Fridays from 4.20.
Otherwise it’s all on the web if you want to buy tickets or participate. Buy a ticket just to support us, you might even come!
