* DAMN THE LAW by Kay Lee

Fifteen years ago I didn't question the laws, nor the people who make and enforce them.  I assumed everyone was doing their job properly, that public servants were really serving the public and all was as it should be.  Mine was a late-in-life rude and painful awakening.

The truth that set me on my path was a simple one: Bad laws hurt good people. Tonight I cannot sleep because defenders of one of those laws are wrongfully crippling someone I love, a very good person who is in a great deal of pain and is being denied relief by those around her because they are afraid of the enforcers of a very bad law.

She's only in her 30s but already her fingers are swollen and twisting painfully with advancing crippling arthritis.  She cries with the pain.  I cry because I know there is a much maligned plant that eases her pain without the side effects she fears from man made medicines.  A tiny amount can make her feel better for days.  It loosens her joints and elevates her mind above the pain so that she can enjoy the little chores of life,  and it's possible that, over time, the plant could slow or halt the progress of her ravaging disease. 

But her husband refuses to let her use it because dangerous men could come into their home and take his child.  He felt forced to make a choice between his child's future or his wife's. I doubt that the choice will give him comfort in a few years when she can no longer write her wonderful stories for his son, or when she has to cut her long hair that he loves so much because she can no longer brush it.

In the bible are a number of verses that lead me to believe that everything we need to sustain life, to ease our pain and heal ourselves is already here -  created for the use of mankind, woven right into nature by some wonderful force that obviously intended the benefits of the plants for all who suffer.  Everyone knows it - that's why our medicines are based in nature, culled from the growing things around us.

So it is confusing to me that a relatively small group of people could have claimed total ownership over portions of a nature they didn't create and can't even come close to imitating.  I weep because those people stand waiting to destroy a very good person and the people she loves should she dare to reach in her anguish for one of those plants.

For all the 65 years I've lived on this earth, I've watched the ritualistic celebration of grown men who dress up like toy soldiers and tromp through the fields with scythes raised high to wage war, not on evil human beings, but on medicinal plants and the people who use them.  My gosh, even manmade alcohol wasn't denied to doctors and patients for medical use during that prohibition, yet plants made by God are withheld from everyone, no matter how badly they need them.

I don't give a damn about immoral laws, drug wars, pharmaceutical profits or an imaginary drug free utopia!  What I do care about is people, particularly one beautiful little lady who fears the deformity of her hands will mimic her grandmother's in coming years, and her husband, who should never feel pressured to make such a choice between his son's security and his wife's pain.

It doesn't even matter how a group of men slunk in and used awful lies to take total dominion over the plants of the field.  What matters is that the masses, meaning you and I, continue to allow them to hurt good people, continue to feed their never-ending lies to our children, continue to finance such absurdity as a war on plants, and continue to believe that liars, cheats, and underhanded profiteers are going to create a perfect world for us with their guns and handcuffs and prisons.  To hell with the drug warriors!
I say end the Pain of Prohibition NOW! 

Grandma Kay Lee