James L. Mooring, POW: Greetings to the Conference

Editor's note: Les Mooring was invited to make a statement for distribution at the Conference. The following is the message that he sent.

"I am currently in the middle of a 10 year federal prison sentence in Texas for growing marijuana in Arkansas. I must do 85 percent of this 10 year sentence before being released. This amounts to 8½ years. I will spend more time in prison than most rapists, murderers, and thieves. I am a non-violent offender. When I was growing, I had no idea how seriously the DEA pursues indoor marijuana growers. I thought, mistakenly, that cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine had enforcement priorities over marijuana. Wrong. The majority of drug prisoners in federal prison are here for marijuana (over 20,000). Of the 100,000 Americans arrested every MONTH for illegal drugs, over 50,000 are for marijuana alone. Never in American history and seldom in world history has there been such ongoing, continuous, systematic mass arrests. Texas and California, with hundreds of prisons and hundreds of thousands of prisoners, are world class penal colonies. America is rapidly turning into a gulag. And it is all about the Drug War.

So why the emphasis on marijuana? With over 25,000,000 users, marijuana is America's drug of choice and the backbone of the Drug War skeleton. Without marijuana arrests, the Drug War expenditures (18 billion per year and rising) cannot be justified. Plus, the DEA loves marijuana arrests. They are generally non-violent, easy busts with, most importantly, considerable asset forfeitures. A drug that is essentially "harmless," according to a Harvard Medical School authority, is being exploited to imprison and arrest Americans to perpetuate a rotten, corrupt Drug War. That is the real "crime," and history will see it as the real crime.

Thank you for listening.