CELEBRITIES
 Shay Addams, one of CAMP's founding members, whose High Times endeavors include the expose' of the Carter cocaine conspiracy (November '78) and creation of the cartoon strip "Lawrence of Colombia" (May '79) Legal
Pot-The Civil Rights Fight of the '80s
Today's marijuana movement has grown from a few hardy seeds of discontent into an ongoing international effort to totally abolish pot prohibition. Change is the order of the day. Every element involved in this movement can gain valuable insights, and a more practical perspective, from a review of the monumentally successful black civil-rights movement. The overwhelming victories of the civil rights movement were won not by any one organization but by a coalition of groups working together toward a common goal - civil rights for black people. The overall legislation by some groups, supplemented by carefully targeted direct-action campaigns organized by action-oriented organizations. As Martin Luther King explained, the purpose of direct-action tactics was to create confrontations of such dynamically creative intensity that public attention would force government- officials to face the issue and negotiate new laws and policies years before they might have considered doing so voluntarily. Creative forms of nonviolent civil disobedience, such as sit-ins, were employed to create such confrontations, Any arrests for violation of a law being protested could be tactically used to challenge the constitutionality of that law, carrying the struggle to yet another legal crossroad. Like sitting-in to denounce racist laws or burning the American flag to protest U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, smoking a joint at a reefer rally constitutes a legitimate form of symbolic protest, an act of civil disobedience equally protected by the First Amendment. The lessons of the civil-rights movement become particularly relevant when the tangled roots of pot prohibition are traced to the rampant racism of the American Southwest during the early '30s. Pot laws were first enacted there as a tool of racial discrimination aimed at a specific ethnic minority group, the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who were rapidly deported as a direct result. This deliberate violation of the civil rights of an ethnic group has been perpetuated as the pot prohibition of today, continuing this political repression against every pot smoker in this country. Exercising constitutional rights to freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and to petition the government for redress of grievances proved to be the master key to the spectacular successes of the civil-rights movement. This traditionally American approach can also unlock and swing wide open the door to a world of legal marijuana. Just as blacks had a right to break an unconstitutional law ordering them to sit in the back of Birmingham, Alabama, buses in 1953, pot smokers not only have a constitutional right to break the marijuana laws in protest but have a responsibility -- yes, a duty -- as patriotic American citizens to smoke as much marijuana as we can get our hands on, to go more than just "one toke over the line" this spring as the movement to legalize marijuana marches on to ultimate victory. -Shay Addams Coalition for the Abolition of Marijuana Prohibition (CAMP) |
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