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Cannabis Freedom is not Buying Your OWN Freedom by Putting another Patient or Grower in Jail

Shona Gouchenaur Axis of Love

San Francisco, CA May 3, 2007 -- Axis of Love boycotts  San Francisco Cannabis Freedom  Day because organizer Rick Watts is giving federal testimony Against embattled  Green Guru Ed Rosenthal.

We usually ask where is the love ????  We now demand: Where is the solidarity?

We are boycotting this event  after being told by Rick Watts that he was giving Federal Testimony against Ed Rosenthal, Axis of Love took a vote in its general meeting to boycott the "celebration"

This can be seen as a vote to support Ed.  However, it is also a  decision to say NO to testifying against one another to the government.  This action imperils not only one person's freedom but also the access to medicine for the sick and the dying, the freedom of each and every grower and patient, each owner and operator and it spits in the eye of everyone who has risked their health, life and well being fighting for safe access to medical cannabis. 

We do not do this boycott lightly.  We know that our brothers and sisters will be in the park- many of our dispensaries will have bought booths.   However, we take this issue very seriously.  Some of us have friends and lovers who paid for access with their lives, or who are in prison as we speak.

There is no freedom in turning against one another.  There is no freedom in turning one another into a government which has spent billions on a failed drug war which has turned to improving its falling crime statistics on the backs of the sick and dying. Throughout the 1990's the War on Drugs targeted low-level marijuana offenses – stopping neither the supply nor the demand.  It has imprisoned 1 in 5 African American young men though. It has stopped many People with AIDS from getting Cannabis so they can take AIDS cocktails without wasting.  Now, in California, despite Proposition 215, the Federal DEA has targeted the OPEN market, medical marijuana dispensaries for prosecution.  Our growers are imperiled.  Ed Rosenthal was one such grower.   A grower who grew for medical purposes

Operating in the open, licensed by the city of Oakland and still , he was arrested.  His case has been a series of "vindictive prosecutions" http://www.reason.com/blog/show/119158.html and still, the Feds find people in his own community willing to turn on him, in order to save their own hides.  When such people do this to one person, they imperil the entire community. Axis of Love says this imperils each of our freedom, not just Rosenthal's.  It creates an atmosphere where the safe access to medicine becomes imperiled. We additionally oppose  another owner/ operator who has given federal testimony operates a dispensary who  can give information on patients he serves and growers he buys from currently http://www.green-aid.com/thebustandthetrial.htm.

We have feds who believe that they can destroy solidarity with ease.  However, the community is not so easily destroyed by a few individuals.  We can turn our backs on them as they turn their backs on us and thus minimize the damage the can do.

We are opposing this event in the name of solidarity.  We stand together in this effort.