Regardless of all that, I don't see how the legitimacy of med-weed was all that tarnished by this bust. What mean is, med-weed's legitimacy has always been questionable... just as much as the prohibition of the substance has always been questionable at best. Hell, the DEA's budget is a fucking joke. If anything, I think every one of these busts calls into question the legitimacy of the of the various executive drug agencies. What really makes me wonder is why we don't see more of a social media outcry? When Ari engineered the Koman/Planned Parenthood debacle the fallout was tremendous. Why aren't we seeing more of that with regards to the drug war? I suppose I'm as much at fault as anyone, but given the social media vigilance (oxymoron) on every other fucking issue by pot smoking or at least sympathetic demographic, where's the "like"'s and "share"'s? I wonder if its some kind of socialized assumption that you can't fight the government...?
You basically hit on a point I've been trying to get at for a long time:
Most (voting) Americans don't smoke weed and could care less about legalizing it. When they see a bust, they don't see an injustice, they see a bunch of stupid hippies or thugs getting busted for being, at best, stupid, and at worst, criminals.
Moreover, anyone (too) loudly trying to defend potusers, growers, and the industry almost always implicates themselves as a fellow traveler anytime they say anything in the media.
If you talk about pot too much in the media, you get labeled a "pothead", and then you get labelled and shelved in the pothead bin and written off ....or raided.
This is why there's never an outcry about these busts ala SOPA or Planned Parenthood, and this is why whenever complete legalization is put up for a vote in any U.S. state, it always fails. Maybe's its 30 years of COPS on teevee, or 75 years of brainwashing, but most Americans probably see most drug use as a social problem, rather than drug BUSTS as a social injustice.
I'd wager that if medmarj was put up for a RE-vote in 2012, based on all the bad publicity, and the lack of a strong Obama-Youth coat-tail, it would fail in a recall. This policy has been a disaster because it was a poorly written bill with unclear definitions, and the anti-drug people have had a field day with interpreting it to everyone's detriment....but all most Americans probably see is a bunch of fat pot dealers (they always seem to be fat white dudes with health problems...) with alligators in their bathtubs and 200 potplants in their basement.
This is the point I'm usually always driving at: the weed lobby has more or less destroyed any legitimacy for itself because despite the strong case that there is for legalization and the idea that marijuana is a benign substance...most people probably think deep down (as I do...) that the MedMarj lobby is really just after, most of the time, a way to get high without getting busted. Every time there's one of these busts, it seems like just another nail in the coffee of legitimacy for medical marijuana in Michigan.
This is the microcosm that the weed lobby exists in: it thinks that this issue is a big one in the minds of most voters and public. The sad truth is it isn't.
I'm pro-decriminalization, just not in a way that is immediately apparent. If anything, I'm in favor of the new movement to just drop this hogwash about it "only" being medicine and just de-criminalize, tax, and regulate it as a recreational drug.
But I don't think it's gonna happen for a long, long time. Too much money wrapped up in enforcement and the legal system with the way things are now.
