Roger began, "I'm here to tell you, on November 3rd,
Thursday, November 3rd,
Moonalice is going to be playing a concert at
Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, California. That's the venue owned by
BobWeir of the
Grateful Dead. We're going to be there on November 3rd for a
Proposition 64 awareness concert. We're going to be joined at that show by
Steve DeAngelo, the founder of the
Harborside Health Center, which is the
first, the largest, and in my opinion the best medical dispensary in the state
of California. He's going to be there to answer all your questions."
He continued, "There is a
tremendous campaign being waged by people who are coming out of industries like
the pharmaceutical opiate industry, the hard liquor industry, for-profit
prisons, and other people who are trying to protect the status quo, to keep our
state from making what is a really, really, really important next step in the
battle to free people from just the hell that has been the war on drugs. I want
you to understand a few things. Proposition 64 is just a step. It's one in a
long line. It's not perfect, but we're going to fix what's wrong with it, and
it is so much better than what we have now that I want to encourage you to
listen to the arguments that I want to make right now so that you can
appreciate why I'm so enthusiastic about this."
"My first and
driving motivation on Prop 64 is about civil rights," Roger said. "I don't know if you know
this, but did you realize that people of color are arrested and incarcerated
for marijuana at three times not just the rate of the population but thee times
the rate of usage of marijuana? Essentially the drug laws are the foundation of
the new
Jim Crow. This is the way that white supremacists, one of the core ways
for controlling people of color. It's really horrible. It's a tremendous waste
of law enforcement resources. The people who are caught in the cross-hairs of
this, it's so, so hard to recover. The only way, the only way we can help them
is by taking this important step to legalize cannabis in the state of
California."
He added passionately, "To me, this is a civil rights issue. For me, it's not an investment opportunity. For many people it will be. My focus is, if I have anything I can do about this, I want to make sure that people of color get special advantages to come into this industry and be successful, because frankly they're the ones who've been abused by these laws all the way along, and they deserve a chance to be part of whatever success comes. Let's not kid ourselves. This is a humongous industry today. It's $50 billion. The notion that this isn't dominated by big business? It is. It's dominated by big crime. Our job is to get this into the legitimate economy so that it can help everybody."
Continuing, Roger said, "I'm sitting there going, look, you're free to vote any way you want, but if you want to vote in a way that you can feel really good about, just ask yourself the following question: How often do you get to make a vote that directly impacts the civil rights of people in our state? How often do we get to do that? I'm involved in this because I grew up in a family where civil rights was a big deal. My parents were super active in the '60s in the civil rights movement. I was raised to believe that that stuff really matters, so I'm doing everything in my power to try to fix the great wrong that has been done to people of color in the name of the war on drugs. I'm inviting all of you to join me."
Other reasons for saying #YesOn64
Roger elaborated on other reasons for saying #YesOn64, "There are lots
of other reasons to do this. Let me just list a few of them. The first thing to
understand is that California has a gigantic black market today, and the black
market for marijuana is somewhere between $20 and $70 billion a year. The folks
at Harborside would tell you somewhere between $50 and $70 billion is probably
the correct number. A lot of this is in the hands of people who are growing
illegally in state parks and national parks with enormous environmental
consequences. None of the people who work in that industry get health
insurance. They don't get social security. There is no labor protection. There
was a story in The New York Times this week about people who are being abused,
I mean physically abused working in that industry because everything is
currently illegal. That's just wrong."
He continued, "The key thing
here is that the state of California needs to accept the fact that marijuana is
the largest cash crop in our state, and that having it outside the legitimate
economy, it's just crazy. This is a commonsense thing that we're trying to do
here. Again, it's a step along the way. Prop 64 does not do anything about
bringing the black market into the legitimate economy, but it sets the basis
for it. It sets the next step that essentially creates and normalizes the
cannabis industry in our state. It allows a bunch of really important things to
happen. The first thing that it does is that it's going to begin to create a
real industry, so the folks who've labored so hard during the medical era have
a chance to also address the portion of the market that is, if you will, adult
use."
"Why is that
important? The reason it's important is that we want this inside our economy.
We want to regulate it," said Roger. "We would like to tax it, because the state needs more
money for education. It needs more money for mental health care. It needs more
money for infrastructure. The reality is, if you had a 10% tax on cannabis all
the way through the industry and somehow you were able to get two-thirds of the
black market to be part of the real economy, it would literally change the
economics of the state of California dramatically. Effectively it would be as
important to California as oil has been to the state of Texas. I think that would
be a really, really good idea. I think in many ways marijuana is that important
to the state of California. Let's make it part of the mainstream economy."
Opponents' disinformation campaign
Describing the plethora of #NoOn64 memes on social media, Roger said, "There have been
a ton of complaints that this is going to be bad for smaller farmers, that it's
going to create new crimes that currently aren't crimes. All of that stuff, all
the stuff you've been reading on Facebook, it's coming from people who profit
from the status quo, and it misses some points. There are clearly some things
wrong with the bill. I think it is stupid to have misdemeanor for certain kinds
of growing at home. That's nuts, but let's remember, today it's a felony. This
is clearly a step in the right direction."
He continued, "Is it perfect?
Not even close, but I am now working more or less full-time trying to get this
done, trying to help our state get this right. I'm working with the Lieutenant
Governor's Office. I'm working with other people in our state government. I'm
working with people in the federal government. Why am I doing this? I'm doing this
because people of color have been victimized by these laws for ages. Our state
needs the tax revenues. The people who work in this industry need better
protections. It's not going to go perfectly. We're going to make mistakes.
We're going to fix them. We've got to do this
together."
"Here's the
thing. The disinformation campaign being waged by the people who make opiate
pharmaceuticals, by the people who make hard liquor, by the for-profit prison
companies and all that, their disinformation campaign has caused the polling to
get much tighter," said Roger. "It shouldn't be that way. This is a core part of our economy.
Let's just do the right thing and treat it with the respect it deserves. Let's
treat the people with respect. I want to protect small business."
Rocking the prop
Roger described the
show (embedded below) of his band Moonalice in support of Prop 64, saying, "On
November 3rd at the
Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, California, Moonalice
is going to be
playing a show. We've invited Steve DeAngelo, the founder of the
Harborside Health Center, the largest, the first dispensary in the state of
California, to come and answer your questions. Come and meet Steve. Come and
meet the other people from Harborside. It's going to be a fun show, but we're
going to learn a lot, and we're going to bring the tribe together to do
something for civil rights that we can all be incredibly proud of."
He concluded by saying, "I will tell
you, I don't pretend that Prop 64 solves the whole problem. In politics it
never works that way. In politics you make small steps and you make lots of
them, and you keep at it and you're determined and you fight for the right
thing. If you're really lucky, you live to see the finish line. I look at all
my friends in the LGBTQ community and the incredible job they did on marriage
equality, and I admire them for just hanging in there and fighting the good
fight. Look what's happened. They've been really successful. If we elect the
right person President this year, we're going to keep all of those gains. Now is the time to do the same thing for cannabis. Join me. Vote "Yes" on Proposition 64 on November 8th."
Everyone who attends the Prop 64 awareness concert at Sweetwater Music Hall on 3 November will receive a set of
11 #yeson64 posters, including these posters by
Dennis Loren,
Carolyn Ferris and
Wes Wilson and
Wendy Wright, Moonalice artists from the
Haight Street Art Center collective.
Remember those times when you sat in front of your record
player playing your favorite records, again, and again, and again? Fast forward
to your first car, road trips and playing those 8-tracks over, and over, and
over? And then there were the cassette tapes and now mp3s… There were always
those songs that you could never hear enough of…
