Point: “Heads” vs. “Feds”: The Debate Over Marijuana Legalization

Steve Hager is perhaps best known as the editor of High Times magazine. He has been a leading figure in what has come to be known as the counterculture revolution. As an advocate for marijuana legalization, Hager has rallied and politicized many people, filmed several documentaries, and even started the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam.

Marijuana is good medicine. Good for cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, strokes, head injuries, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, eating disorders, insomnia, nausea, stuttering, asthma, migraines, depression, and pain.

Hemp is good for the environment. Besides medicine, marijuana plants also produce hemp, the seeds of which are a nutritious form of protein.

Hemp is the easiest plant to grow and the easiest to turn into fabric. You can build your house out of hemp, and you can run your car on hempseed oil.

There are more than 50,000 products that could be made from hemp currently produced from petrochemicals, a leading cause of pollution and cancer.

Marijuana legalization is good for our overloaded criminal justice system; we arrest more than 800,000 people per year for marijuana and continue to have the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.4 million people behind bars.

Prisons are being privatized and judges are being bribed to jail youthful offenders to keep this revenue stream flowing.

Drug prohibition creates criminal cartels because the profits are much higher than can be attained through legal enterprises. This money corrupts our system and always will. The only way to end drug gangs is by legalization.

Finally, it’s a central part of my culture, which I describe as American Hippie, a hybrid culture of Native American and Eastern spiritual concepts.

Members of my community view cannabis as a sacrament: for its immense healing properties as well as the psychoactive ones.