In this episode: I talk with Beorn from the Stereo app. Find Beorn on Stereo @beorn or IG @StereoBeorn. This is an excerpt from our live talk on 10.7.22 Part 1 of 3

We cover a lot of ground in this episode including term limits, rank choice voting, the drug war vs legalization, and blockchain voting.

President Biden in a highly political move pardoned people in federal prison for marijuana charges. This is a really hollow and meaningless act just done to gain headlines and make Biden look progressive when he is the farthest thing from a progressive president. The reason this is such a hollow gesture is that most people in jail for marijuana are tried at the state level. To be in in federal prisoner for marijuana you would need to have been caught smuggling into the country or across state lines. If Biden really wanted to do something of substance, he would have rescheduled marijuana so that it was no longer a "class 1 drug" in the same category as heroin and crystal meth. Another thing he could have done would have been to decriminalize marijuana federally or have made it legal nationwide. Any of these would have had profound impact and would have helped thousands ensnared in our antiquated war on drugs. 

The class 1 classification is for drugs with no medical use. Well, we have seen a ton of information come out in the last decade about how hemp (cbd) and marijuana (thc) have a multitude of medical uses. Not to mention California legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996. This would seem to me to set a precedent for rescheduling if not full-blown national legalization. 

The entire election system in the US needs to be overhauled and it seems Blockchain technology offers a great mechanism to do this. Blockchain voting would offer a solution to many of the ills facing our current political system including access to voting, election security, election transparency, and greater citizen involvement.

First off, blockchain provides a record of each step in a process which would prevent election fraud and would secure our elections from ballot tampering. Second, with our voting being done online more people would have a chance to vote. Third, we could open the process and provide greater transparency, so the people were actually able to vote on every issue/measure and remove the element of secrecy that corrupt politicians hide under. Too often politicians will pass some shady bill at midnight on Thanksgiving or Christmas knowing nobody is paying attention. I say we need to make voting day a national holiday and move toward greater transparency with the help of blockchain technology.

Psylocibin mushrooms are showing very promising potential in the treatment of a number of mental health issues from ptsd to depression. It is time we moved to a more progressive drug policy in this country. All prescription psych meds were derived from LSD when it was being studied in the 1950s before it was criminalized. Who knows what type of progress we would have made on mental illness if this research was not stopped. I believe it is time we allow research to resume. 

President Nixons head aid announced on his death bed that the Nixon administration had created the war on drugs so they "could arrest blacks for heroin and hippies for marijuana". If you get a felony, you can never vote again, so the drug war was used as a tool in political warfare. 

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