Thugs & Drugs - Joe's Article

My name is Joe Blundell, and I refuse to live under the tyranny of the irrational.

Nine years ago in London, I was crushed under the wheels of a 30,000 ton train engine. Needless to say, this was a painful experience. It resulted in the insertion of several three inch long titanium screws, rods, and brackets drilled into my spinal column. This was also a very painful experience; which still hurts to this day. In fact, words cheapen the sensations I experience in the mornings, during weather changes, or even changing positions in my wheelchair.

The current medical industry’s assistance in helping me alleviate this pain is inadequate. For the first year after the accident, the doctors’ prescribed me Morphine, Codeine, and Demerol; all opium biased narcotics that made my first few years after the train wreck a living nightmare of surreal proportions. Surreal because the narcotics I was forced to take caused a myriad of interesting and embarrassing side effects.

I was not only subject to frightful hallucinations in the textured ceiling of my room, where I lay strung out in bed like a heroine addict; but my immobility led to bedsores that still trouble me. One such unpleasant bedsore is a 7 cm hole where I can touch my skeleton, which often looses chunks of bone. As interesting as this may be from an anatomical and psychological viewpoint, it is an extremely painful and horrifying condition; which I carry as a result of our current medical industry.

The most uncomfortable side effect of all was caused by opium based narcotics. The worst effect of the drugs was that it relaxes the muscles to the point where it greatly slowed my digestion. This effect is not noticed by able bodied people, because the natural movement of walking helps stimulate the process. This is not the case with a paralyzed individual. In a nutshell, everything stopped. I continued eating for a while; then I couldn’t even eat. There was simply no more room. It could be said, I was “full of shit”.

This is one of the most dangerous conditions that a person in a wheelchair can have: leading to Autonomic dysreflexia. This condition causes the deaths of hundreds of paralyzed individuals each year. The pain from the train wreck, from the screws, and from the holes in my body paled in comparison to not having a bowel movement for an entire week!

How does the current medical industry treat this condition? Drano. It isn’t called Drano, but Magnesium citrate; and it is simply Drano for the human body. It essentially liquefies all of the fecal matter in your digestive system until you go, and go, and go. I would spend an entire day on a portable toilet, and would measure over 10 pounds of waste flushed over the course of one shit storm…LOL. I have to say it this way, for I can think of no other way to approach this subject than humor; because it no longer happens, and I am eternally blessed for no longer having to experience it. Why does this no longer happen?

In 2001, I moved to Cliff Village and lived for a year teetering between sedation and pain on the doctors’ drugs, my Drano bowel program, and wasting away watching TV. My discomfort was felt every waking minute, and seemed to be mirrored by a neighbors’ basset hound that constantly wailed from the confinement of his 4ft by 8ft cage. One day, I had had enough. “That poor dog,” I thought. Someone has to let it out, and take it for a walk. That’s when I decided to get up, get into my power chair, and go walk the neighbors’ dog.

Joy is the only adequate word of how the dog reacted as I led him into Wildcat Park. I parked my chair and sat for hours watching him play on the glades. On my return, I happened into a neighbor that lived down the street from me. We started talking, and he wondered why he had never seen me out in the neighborhood before. I explained my situation: my pain, my sores, and my drugs. He immediately began to laugh. “Why would you take that shit?” he asked, and went into his house and brought out a joint. “Why don’t you try this and see if it helps.” I took the dog home, and then lit the joint and began to inhale.

Only people who have experienced it can truly understand the instantaneous effect. I felt as if a giant weight had been lifted from my body. I felt so good I cried. It was my first waking moment without pain since 2000. Needless to say, I found some people who could supply this medicine. With the unfortunate fact, that ounce for ounce, marijuana is more expensive than gold. I began to wonder how a naturally occurring flower, which grows like a weed, became more expensive than gold?

I began to enjoy a brand new life. Since my release from the doctors’ heroine, I began getting out and meeting the people of the village. While doing this, I began to find out that in the past decade many people and pets were dying of rare bladder cancers. I immediately asked if anyone had checked the water. The answer was a resounding no. So in this way, I began my time as a public servant.

It was like pulling teeth to get the EPA or DNR to even speak to me, let alone come and check the wells. The village suggested that I might have more pull as an elected official, so in the next election, I was voted in as the Honorable Joseph T. Blundell, Mayor of the Town of Cliff Village.

When the wells were finally tested, we found that several of the wells were contaminated with dangerous levels of TCE and lead. Rather than this being proof that our town needed assistance, it was only proof of how deeply flawed our system has become. Case in point, one of the wells by a day care had 4.8 ppb of TCE and the EPA and DNR said that it needed to be 5 ppb in order for them to ‘have’ to do anything. I asked the representative if this was a safe amount for kids to drink. He said it was according to the government. I then asked if I could bottle the water to send home for his kids to drink. He immediately said, “NO, that’s not even funny.” “No, it isn’t” I replied.

After a couple years, we finally got the contaminated wells on a bottled water program, and officials from Missouri American Water assured me that waterlines would be run with the expansion to the Wildcat Park Nature Center. No such lines have yet been run. I continue to endeavor toward this end, for we still have people in the village bathing in dangerous chemicals.

While attending NEO A&M College, my work in supplying safe drinking water earned me the first Howard R. Swearer Student Humanitarian Award in Oklahoma. With this award, I received award money to construct a community greenhouse. This greenhouse has supplied tomato and bamboo plants to many of the village residents.

But after building the greenhouse, we ran into a slight problem. While we were given the money to initially construct the building, we had no money to heat it. Necessity being the mother of invention, we designed a system of building that completely heats and cools itself with no power consumption. Visit Sustainable Living Systems to learn how it works.

You’ve often heard that there is no magic bullet that heals the world’s woes; but when you have the ability to heat and cool a structure for free, it lends itself to a myriad of applications; directly solving the most pressing humanitarian problems of the world by providing local food; water; electricity; and shelter for those living in even the harshest of climates.

Imagine homes that work for people, rather than people for their homes. Imagine solar water distilleries converting agricultural levels of seawater into safe-water, with little more than the power of the Sun. Imagine biogas digesters that greatly increase the efficiency of converting bio-waste into an abundant source of electricity. Imagine greenhouses that grow produce year round, with a fraction of traditional costs. Imagine no more; for the C.O.R.E. offers the seamless integration of technology and nature, benefiting local economies on a global scale.

Why am I telling you this? Because I wish to illustrate how much my life has been enriched by the use of marijuana, and how productive and valuable a person can be to their community while using this medicine. With the truth and the example of my life to bare, I asked the people of Cliff Village if they would support me on legalizing medical marijuana in the village. I had recently learned of Missouri House Bill #277 and the portion pertaining to the legalization of medical marijuana in the State of Missouri. Fashioning our ordinance after the state bill, I asked the village residents if they would support such a proposal. It was an overwhelming yes by most residents, and the town council voted in favor of adopting Cliff Village Ordnance 277.

I’m not saying I’ll be the first to try this ordnance, which permits qualifying patients to grow medical marijuana; but I just might. Our ordinance might just be a statement by our village of support for the state bill, or perhaps something much more. If my choice is to either live under the doctors’ heroine, which costs my friends and neighbors - the taxpayers of Missouri, hundreds of millions of dollars every year; or grow and enjoy flowers in my yard, I have to pick the flowers.

Anyone who honestly examines how the most widely used and useful plant in human history became illegal, will see a clear cut example of the subversion of the U.S. Constitution for corporate interests over the will of the people. Take for example the first law concerning marijuana in America: a decree that every farmer’s crop had to be 20% marijuana; for it is a nitrogen fixer, needs little care, and was the mainstay of human food, clothing, medicine, and fuel for nearly 8000 years. Why the first person to outlaw marijuana was Napoleon Bonaparte; and we all know what a tyrant he was. And that’s what it has become: tyranny, pure and simple.

What does this say about our country when we outlaw the plant that made the paper for the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and every page of every bible for 1900 years? Historically, marijuana was also one of the 13 herbs burnt as incense in Solomon’s Temple. So I guess you could say it is also infringing on my right to practice Judaism or Christianity.

If you delve deeper into the issue, it becomes clear that it is an illegal illegalization, purely for the selfish interests of the few, at the detriment of all. They didn’t even really make it illegal. They didn’t take it to a vote of the states. That would have been too constitutional. They simply snuck it in the backdoor as a tax you can never pay, or get permission to pay. What’s that? Taxation Without Representation! HELLO!! Is this still America? With a law like this, I say NO! This is the rule of money over people: greed and corruption.

An ounce of good marijuana in the Midwest is roughly $800. On the East Coast, you’ll pay twice that or more. The price of gold today is $901. So in some locations, gold is worth only half of what a flower is. How does this happen? The only force that gives the artificial value of gold to a flower is the Police Force. The only way we can empower drug dealers is by having the opposite side of the LAW dictating the price, and enforcing prohibition so that farmers cannot grow their own flowers. This is one of the most obvious facts of the abysmal results of the Prohibition of Alcohol. It did nothing more than empower people who didn’t mind breaking the law or hurting everyone who stood in the way of their profits and control.

I’ve already decided to stop buying marijuana. I’m tired of empowering thugs with drugs. I’m tired of helping fill our prisons with FARMERS! I’m tired of people regurgitating propaganda as some sort of truth or science. Marijuana Prohibition is simply an illogical argument between rational truth and fiscal interests.

I serve my fellow man, and I would be derelict in my duties to my friends, neighbors, and future generations if I did not act. I would be sentencing everyone to do as they’re told, and not what is right. I simply cannot stand for this. Even in a wheelchair, I can stand for something. And I stand for the rights of what can be grown from the good Earth that GOD in heaven has given us.

Just consider: methanphedimines are the #1 drug prescribed to children in the form of Ritalin. The same people that are drugging our children are the same people who tell me flowers are dangerous and evil. I can spot bullshit when I see it. And it’s piling up all around us.

This issue is less about the rule of law, and more about people using laws to unjustly rule, empowering selfish corporate interests to the determent of our whole society. It happens to be a new day, with new avenues of information, and new means of communication and thought. The people of today’s generations will no longer take the answers we’re given. We want answers with REASON.

Does “We the People” still mean “We the People”? If so, why have bills similar to Missouri House Bill #277 gone to the Missouri House several times, only to be put in special session right before the election so it is never voted on by “WE THE PEOPLE”!!!

I’m calling for every Missouri resident and reader to write their representatives at the state and federal level, and DEMAND that your voice be heard. Demand a vote. DEMAND A VOTE!!! I’m calling for YOU to examine the issue. There are many worthwhile references to help enlighten and educate about how we have arrived in our current state of affairs. I will abide by how the people rule; but I will not abide by a system that gives the people no vote, no voice. When a corrupt system has the control, and does not allow “We the People” to have a voice, I guess we don’t really have to worry about terrorists destroying America, we’re doing it all by ourselves: by our inaction.

Please visit Why Is Marijuana Illegal and Resent Research on Medical Marijuana and Watch The Union

Thanks,

The Honorable Joseph T. Blundell