Gavin Newsom’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Marijuana Legalization reminded me just how far politicians will go to thwart the will of the people. Lawmakers in Sacramento are still working to undermine Prop 215, almost 20 years after the voters demanded legal access to medical marijuana.

For decades, corrupt politicians like Gavin Newsom have used marijuana prohibition as the iron fist of American fascism at home, because it gives them the green light to use violence against American people with impunity, and allows them to turn American citizens into cheap prison labor. Cannabis prohibition has given a corrupt few unfair, unreasonable, and unconscionable power over the many, and they’ll only give that power up when we pry it out of their cold dead fingers.

They expect that the voters will finally take matters into their own hands in November of 2016, and by initiative, legalize “recreational” use of cannabis for all adults, regardless of their medical “need.” Who knows what this initiative will look like, but everyone knows it’s coming, because the people want their weed, dammit, and we are sick and tired of the oppression. Cannabis prohibition is wrong, and its long history in the US is nothing short of shameful.

If lawmakers in Sacramento actually worked for the people, cannabis prohibition would have ended decades ago, but they don’t. Politicians work for money. Money can do anything it wants in California. Money can kill people or keep them locked-up for decades for no good reason. Money can destroy habitat and poison the environment. Money can kick poor people in the ribs while they sleep. That’s what money does. Lawmakers in Sacramento get paid to make sure that money has what it needs to get the job done, and for the last three decades marijuana prohibition has done that job well.

So Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom convened a Blue Ribbon Panel to figure our how to preserve as much of the injustice of prohibition as possible, even in the face of overwhelming public support for complete legalization. Now they’ve issued their recommendations.

I didn’t read the report, but I did hear Gavin Newsom himself explaining his panel’s recommendations, and I could hardly believe he could keep a straight face as he read them. He explained that the best way to keep pot out of the hands of children is to keep the price high. He told us that kids don’t have very much money, so if pot is expensive, they’ll be less likely to try it, and they won’t be able to afford as much of it.

I guess toy manufacturers, who spend millions of dollars marketing expensive video game consoles to children, didn’t get the memo about kids not having money. I’ll bet there isn’t a single kid an America with a $500 phone and a $100 a month phone plan to go with it. Oh, wait, there’s one. …and another… I suppose adults could be buying all of those rap CDs that glorify violence and drug abuse, but I somehow doubt it, and let’s not forget what a great job high, prohibition-era, marijuana prices did at keeping marijuana out of our schools. How stupid do you think we are, Gavin?

Imagine if we applied Newsom’s logic to alcohol. As an adult, you would pay $60 for a beer, because no kid would be stupid enough to waste that kind of money on it. Does that sound fair? We don’t price products higher for adults in order to keep them out of the hands of children; we allow licensed retailers to sell the products at fair and competitive prices. That eliminates the unregulated black market, and then we prohibit licensed retailers from selling them to minors. It works for alcohol. It works for tobacco, and it will work for marijuana too.

Then Newsom tells us that he wants to keep the legal marijuana industry in the hands of the same people who have been selling weed to your kids, at $10 a gram or more, in every high school and junior high in America for the last 30 years. Why on Earth would we want to do that, Gavin?

You might think that the black-market marijuana industry is a paragon of ethical business practices. I don’t know why you would think that, except perhaps if you lived on another planet, and got all of your information about Planet Earth from listening to KMUD, but let me tell you, as a lifelong marijuana consumer, who has lived in the heart of the Emerald Triangle for the last 15 years or so, drug dealers lie.

They’ll say anything. You never find out what a drug dealer is really up to until they get busted. That’s when they find the stream diversions, the soil erosion, the thousands of spent butane canisters, the stolen guns, the rat poison, and the banned pesticides. I guess Newsom picked up quite a few campaign checks when he made his visit to Garberville a few months ago. Like I said before, politicians work for money, not people. People should remember, however, that half of the reason to legalize marijuana is to put drug dealers out of business. Here’s why.

Another body turned up last week in Whitethorn. This happens so often that we don’t even blink anymore. In any other rural town of this size, a dead body would be a big deal. Everyone would want to know: Who was he? What happened to him? And especially, Could there be a murderer among us? This would shock most small towns to their core.

Not us. We’re like: “Eh, it was just another kid, from out of the area. Somebody killed him, probably over a pot deal, and yeah, there are murderers among us. What do you expect? We’re fucking drug dealers! Do you want us to drive the economy or what?”

Sure, marijuana is safe and effective, but drug dealers are dangerous, dishonest criminals who don’t care how many people people get killed, how much habitat gets destroyed or whose hands their product ends up in, so long as they get paid. They’re a lot like politicians in that way. They warn us that unless we protect their interests, the legal marijuana industry could end up in the hands of big tobacco companies. Honestly, could tobacco company executives really be any more callous? I don’t think so.

Despite the murders, despite the fact that dope yuppies are rapidly turning the last wild habitat in the continental US into industrial wasteland, Gavin Newsom and his dope yuppie supporters here in Humboldt County tell us that we, as pot smokers, who have done the work to legalize marijuana, without any help at all from the legislature, or drug dealers for that matter, should now be forced to pay a premium price to subsidize the greedy drug dealers who have ripped us off for decades.

I guess Humboldt’s dope yuppies are some of the few people left who have enough money to buy politicians these days, but still, watching Gavin Newsom suck up to Humboldt County’s Drug War profiteers shows us just how craven he really is. Maybe California needs a Republican governor in this next election. I’m really sick of Big Government wedging itself between me and my marijuana. If greedy, drug-dealing, forest-raping dope yuppies can buy Newsom, I don’t see how a Republican could do any worse.

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John Hardin blogs at Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do.