Date: Thu, 9 May 1996 14:17:55 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Amer. Anti-Prohibition Lg." <[aal 01] at [teleport.com]>
Subject: OCTA - HEMP PETITION UPDATE (long)

          THE  OREGON CANNABIS TAX ACT OF 1997
         by Paul D. Stanford - Chief Petitioner #1

This statement has been updated on May 9, 1996. Our campaign to
comprehensively reform marijuana laws in the State of Oregon,
regulate the sales of marijuana in Oregon's state-run liquor
stores, license farmers to cultivate the drug for sale to the
state, allow farmers to grow cannabis sativa without license for
sustainable industrial hemp fiber, oil and protein production,
and let doctors prescribe cannabis to patients is nearing the
goal, to qualify for the Oregon, November 1996 ballot. We
currently have in excess of 65,000 signatures in a completely
volunteer campaign. We need 73,261 registered Oregon voter's
signatures by July 5, 1996 to qualify. Because some signatures
aren't valid, due to illegible handwriting or they aren't
registered to vote, we need to turn in a significantly higher
total to insure qualification. We hope to turn in 105,000
signatures, assuming a buffer for a 30% invalid rate. We need
your help to do that. If you are registered to vote in Oregon,
or wish to register to vote in Oregon, please help us collect
signatures. If you can help financially, or in any other way,
contact our office at (503) 236-4606, e-mail Floyd at (
[aal 01] at [teleport.com] ), or write to our address below.
Point your web browser at  http://pantless.com/~octa

The name of our Political Action Committee is "Pay for Schools
by Regulating Cannabis," or the PSRC.

Our proposal is the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act of 1997 (OCTA). OCTA
will regulate the sales of cannabis in Oregon's state-run liquor
stores. The profits from sales, which we estimate will be at
least $500 million a year or 20% of our state's total budget,
will go to education (96%) and drug abuse treatment programs
(4%). We will take that money out of the blackmarket, where it
is currently going to finance drug dealers lifestyles, and use
it for schools, colleges and education. Currently substance
abusers and kids are the people that are controlling most of the
marijuana market. The prohibition of the sales of marijuana to
adults leads to the opposite of its intended effect. In the
Netherlands, where the sales of marijuana is allowed to anyone
18 years or older, the use of marijuana by minors is less than a
quarter what it is the USA, according to the premier British
medical journal,  The Lancet. The use of hard drugs, like
cocaine and heroin by minors in the Netherlands is 1/10th of the
rate in the USA. Dutch police and prosecutors say the legal
sales of cannabis drugs "builds a wall between the hard and soft
drug markets" and the statistics prove this to be so. We want to
emulate this successful model here in Oregon.

Our proposal, OCTA, has shown it has the possibility to be
successful. The largest television station in the state, KATU-TV
in Portland, did a telepoll asking the question, "Should
marijuana be sold in liquor stores to fund education?"  We won
with 54% of respondents saying yes. School funding is a very
urgent matter as hundreds of teachers are being laid off this
summer alone. Thousands have already been cut across Oregon.
OCTA is the solution.

OCTA was written in compliance with various international
treaties that  require the sale be through state-run stores. In
Oregon, since the sale of distilled alcohol products is through
a state-run monopoly, we used this existing infrastructure to
control the sales of the drug to adults only, and to lower the
startup costs. This also helps insure that OCTA will be upheld
in the inevitable federal court challenge that will follow its
passage.

The last time school-age children were involved in the sales of
gin, rum and whiskey was during alcohol prohibition in 1932. In
fact, the use of alcohol has decreased every single year since
1933, when alcohol prohibition ended. We want to take the sales
of drugs out of the hands of children and substance abusers and
place it in the state-run liquor stores, where the age limit is
strictly enforced.

We also want to stop the horrible expansion of the drug abuse
industrial complex, which rivals the military industrial complex
that President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation of in his
farewell speech. In 1960, when Eisenhower completed his second
and final term as US President, he warned the nation not to
allow the buildup of undue influence by the "military industrial
complex." Today we witness another bureaucratic and industrial
complex building which threatens the very freedoms we Americans
believe are the symbol of our nation's heritage. Our nation,
which we want to believe is the land of the free, is
increasingly being ridiculed around the world as the land of the
PEE! Ours is the only nation on Earth, democratic or authoritarian,
that allows its government and business to demand urine samples of
its citizens and employees without specific cause.

The police and drug abuse industrial complex holds enormous
clout in our  political processes, more than at any time in our
nation's history.  Prison  guards and police unions are among
the most powerful players in our legislatures. Prison
population, construction, probation and parole supervision,
local jail populations and police agencies are bigger than at
any time in history and are continuing to grow at an
unprecedented rate. There are more inmates incarcerated in our
prisons and jails per capita than any other nation has ever had
in history. We have more people incarcerated per capita than the
Nazis had, than the Soviet Union had, and than South Africa had
during apartheid. Even the current Washington State Governor,
Mike Lowry, quotes the following statistic: if the same growth
that has occurred over the last 16 years in those imprisoned
(over 300% increase) continues for another 24 years, until the
year 2020, then half of all Americans will be imprisoned in 2020
and the other half will be employed taking care of them.
Something has to change.

The war on drugs is THE issue on which the future of freedom in
America swings. Families and individuals are being destroyed by
this misguided civil war. The  war on drugs is not about drugs,
its about money and the continued centralization  of economic
and political control. The Oregon Cannabis Tax Act is the first
big step toward a solution.

OCTA will supply pharmacies with cannabis so that doctors can
prescribe it. Currently half of all oncologists (cancer doctors)
have said that they have recommended marijuana to their patients
to combat the nausea associated with chemotherapy. A significant
percentage of marijuana arrests are inflicted on patients with a
medical need. Doctors who make these recommendations could also
be subject to sanctions. Let's stop this madness. OCTA will let
a doctor prescribe cannabis to those it will treat. Marijuana is
much less costly  than alternatives. In fact, the Drug
Enforcement Administration's own  administrative law judge,
Francis Young, ruled that, "marijuana, in its natural form, is
among the safest therapeutically active substances known to man."

OCTA will also make hemp fiber, seed oil and protein crops legal
and unregulated. The cannabis sativa plant produces more fiber,
protein and oil than any other plant on Earth. Hemp was renamed
marijuana, playing on anti-hispanic racism, to protect the
petrochemical, wood-based paper and cotton fiber industries from
competition. With the introduction of new machinery (the
decorticator) at the turn of this century, the cost and price of
hemp dropped a hundredfold. The price of hemp fiber dropped from
$0.50 per ton down to $0.005 per ton, much the way the cotton
crop had done with the invention of the cotton gin. The US
Department of Agriculture did a study that was published in
1916, Bulletin 404, called "Hemp Hurds as a Papermaking
Material." Hemp hurds are the waste material from producing hemp
bast fiber for canvas, rope, lace and linen from the stalks of
the marijuana plant. Those stalks produce roughly 15-30 percent
bast fiber, with the remainder being hurd fiber. USDA Bulletin
404 said that this waste product made the best grade of paper
and that hemp hurds produced more than 4 times more paper than
forests and trees. In fact, 40% of all trees are cut  solely to
make paper. Let's give our farmers back this valuable resource.

Both the bast and the hurd fiber from the marijuana stalk can
make fiber board and other composite building materials. In
fact, research in 1993 at Washington State University's Wood
Science Laboratory proved that producing fiber board  from hemp
makes a building material that is several times stronger than
steel.

Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine to run on hemp seed
oil. Because any diesel engine can run, without modification, on
unrefined hemp seed oil, and hemp seed is the most productive
seed oil crop by a factor of three to one in comparison to the
most productive alternatives, the petrochemical industry foresaw
the competition from hemp. Virtually anything  that can be made
from petroleum can be made from hemp seed oil and most other
vegetable oils. Each acre of hemp cultivated will produce over
300 gallons of oil, that can be used for both food and fuel, and
over 3 tons of residual protein, which is indeed the healthiest
protein source on Earth. This is in addition to the bast fiber,
for canvas, rope, lace and linen, and the hurd fiber, for paper
and building materials.

Dr. Udo Erasmus, in his international college text book
"Essential Fats and Oils", says that hemp seed oil is the most
perfectly balanced source of nutrition available on Earth. Hemp
seed was an essential part of our ancestors diet and is the
source of "gruel", the porridge that is referred to in countless
stories and books from prior to this century.

The cotton growing states also played a lead role in prohibiting
hemp. Hemp fiber is many times more durable than cotton. In
fact, any dictionary will verify that our word for "canvas"
comes for the Latin word for marijuana, cannabis. The cotton
crop is also the most pesticide intensive crop. Cotton grows
less than 2 feet tall in a season, compared with hemp growing
15-25 feet tall in a season. Cotton cannot compete with other
weeds and insects when cultivated as a monoculture crop.
Twenty-eight percent of all the pesticide produced on Earth is
applied to the cotton crop. Hemp produces more than a dozen
times as much textile fiber as cotton.

The petrochemical, wood-based paper and cotton fiber industries
created a misinformation campaign to prohibit hemp. They said
that a deadly new drug called marijuana caused users to
uncontrollably kill their family and friends. We call that
misinformation campaign "Reefer Madness," after a 1938 movie
depicting this hoax. The basis of marijuana prohibition is
filled with lies and overt racism. Everyone knew what hemp was.
No one knew that marijuana was hemp when it was prohibited.

The petrochemical and wood-based paper industries are capital
intensive ones. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to cut
down forests and process them into paper. It takes billions of
dollars to drill the earth for petroleum and process that into
fuel, plastics and chemicals. These industries realize that the
capital intensive nature of their endeavors blocks entry and
competition from you and me. They want this money and they want
to impoverish us to the greatest extent they can and still sell
their products. Hemp paper and fuel are not capital intensive
and can be produced on a local basis with comparatively little
money. Let's put economic control back into local hands and
create thousands upon thousands of sustainable jobs. OCTA will
do that.

OCTA will put Oregon on the cutting edge of exciting new
developments that are environmentally sustainable and
economically profitable. We will create thousands of new jobs in
the energy industry, the world's largest industry, in nonwood
paper production, in fiber board production, in textile
production, and, at the same time, return much control to our
farmers and away from these multinational industries that
dominate our political process and destroy our environment.
Tourism will boom! These capital intensive industries have
usurped our economic resources and given us clearcutting of huge
tracts of the world's forests, massive oil spills and
destruction, wars, toxic waste and massive pollution,
destruction of entire ecosystems. OCTA will allow us to take
control back from these forces and return it to the people,
allowing hemp, the oldest agricultural crop, to return to its
rightful place in our economy.

All archeologists agree that hemp/marijuana was among the first
crops purposely cultivated by human beings 12,000 years ago. It
definitely was among the first four plants which were
cultivated. Carl Sagan, the famed Cornell University astronomer
who produced the television series "Cosmos", speculated in his
book "The Dragons of Eden" that marijuana might be the very
first crop grown. Hemp is most likely at the root of the
agricultural revolution that led to  civilization as we know it
today.

Prohibiting the cultivation of this ancient plant, the most
productive source of fiber, oil and protein on our planet, is
EVIL! In its place these industries give us capital intensive,
nonsustainable, environmentally destructive processes and
products that have led to unprecedented ecological crisis and
world wide destruction of the biological heritage that we should
bequeath to are children, grandchildren and future generations.
Our civilization is taking petroleum, which represents hundreds
of millions of years of carbon deposits from the earth, at a
cost so high that only the world's largest and most powerful
industries can enter into competition. We are burning this
petroleum for fuel and thereby pumping this carbon into the
atmosphere, causing changes in the world's climate that we are
only beginning to understand. We are growing cotton, the most
pollution intensive crop on Earth for the majority of our
fabric. We are stripping the last remnants of our planets
protective mantel of old-growth forests, causing environmental
destruction, desertification and other changes to the world's
climate that we as yet cannot understand. We are neglecting hemp
seed protein, the most productive and healthiest food crop on
Earth, as human beings  population grows to new heights each
day. We are working so that OCTA will begin to change that.

Oregon is a trendsetting state that has often been the cradle of
governmental innovation for progressive political development in
the USA. Oregon was the first state to implement the initiative
process, the first state to decriminalize marijuana, the first
state to declare Labor Day a state holiday, the first state to
implement universal health care coverage and is the model for
the Clinton Administration's "Reinventing Government" proposals.

In November 1994, Oregon passed an initiative that legalizes
doctor assisted suicide for the terminally ill. Though Oregon is
the 1st place in the world to recognize this right in law, there
is one other place that allows for doctor assisted suicide
tacitly,  without actually writing it into law.

The Netherlands is that place. The Dutch also allow cannabis
sales tacitly. We are seeking to have Oregon follow the Dutch
model yet again.

Oregon had a property tax limitation initiative pass and the
state is desperately seeking new sources of revenue to fund
education; OCTA is the answer. In Portland, Oregon this Spring
1996 alone, over 400 teachers, 1/10th of the teachers, are being
cut and laid off due to budget cuts. Thousands have already lost
their jobs. At the same time, new prisons are being built and
planned, the prison and jail population, already larger than at
any time in history, is forecast to continue exponential growth
for 20 years to come. Our schools are being cut and our jails,
prisons and police are growing at almost identical rates.

The past president of the Oregon Medical Association, our branch
of the AMA, is another one of our Chief Petitioners. Dr. George
Robins' name and address is on each petition. Dr. Robins was the
president of the OMA back when marijuana  was first
decriminalized in 1972. He was in medical school when alcohol
prohibition ended, and saw first hand the debilitating economic
and social costs of alcohol prohibition. He knows that the war
on drugs is doing the same thing to us today. Dr. Robins said at
a recent news conference, "Marijuana is less harmful than
aspirin. The only thing dangerous about marijuana is that it is
illegal."

OCTA was carefully crafted over a period of years, with the
input of dozens of people. The first third of the text, or
preamble, is a finding by the people of our state, giving the
reasons we are breaking from federal drug scheduling.

The text of the law is in Section 3. The last statute of that
law directs our state to push for full federal reform of
cannabis prohibition if the federal government tries to stop
OCTA. This legal battle would be funded by solely by commercial
growers' license fees, not by the citizens tax dollars.

This proposal is in compliance with the international treaties
that the US spearheaded to control psychoactive substances: the
Single Convention Treaty, the U.N. Treaty on Narcotic Drugs and
Psychotropic Substances, and their amendments. OCTA quotes these
treaties in many of its licensing requirements.

Though OCTA violates federal statutes, federal courts are
directed to decide issues based on the Constitution and
international treaty obligations. We wrote our legislation to
withstand any judicial challenge. We set a number of
constitutionally based findings by the people of the state in
our preamble to insure that OCTA will be upheld in the
inevitable court challenge the drug  warriors will file.

The name of our PAC is Pay for Schools by Regulating Cannabis
(PSRC). We need money, computers, equipment, and, most of all,
volunteers to petition.

Portland attorney Paul Loney is our treasurer. If you would like
to help or contribute to our effort, our address is:

P.S.R.C.
P.O. Box 86741
Portland, Oregon   97286
USA

Our phone number is (503) 235-4606.

We need your help to make this happen. Please help as best you
can. Thank you!


                     *** DRUG WAR, or DRUG PEACE? ***