Jay Says -South Bend Cannabis Liberation Day 2003

Organizer’s Keynote Speech. Could’ve been yesterday.

This is the rally organizer’s keynote speech to South Bend, Indiana on their first annual pot rally, Global Cannabis Liberation Day, Also known as the Million Marijuana March. Later years of South Bend Cannabis Liberation Day got rained out almost every year.

Jay Day Statzer Says

The rules for South Bend  Cannabis Liberation Day

…So if anyone comes up and asks you to sell them some pot. I’m the organizer. [of the South Bend Observance of the Global Cannabis Liberation Day] I’m responsible for this event. My name is Jay Statzer, I live in Michigan and I just want to legalize pot. So tell these people that want to sneak up and buy a joint off you to talk to me. Because I’m the organizer. In fact, as the organizer. It’s my job to be responsible for answering any questions that anybody has, that you don’t have the answer to. You just point at that guy up there on the stage. He’s the organizer, in the green and red tie dye shirt that says organizer. Yeah! You gotta go talk to him. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

To the volunteers that are here, the Peace Officers that are here, the same goes for you except there’s, another level here. If there’s a participant of the event and a cop or somebody wants to go talk to them, you need to go intercede that situation and tell the cop.

The person you really want to talk to is the organizer of this event, so that I can do my job to keep you all safe. Because the thing about these rallies is the way they work. Is they don’t work unless you make it as safe, easy and fun as possible for the average Joe out there to participate, or they’re just not going to come out. People are so apathetic now that you really have to work as an organizer to get something to happen, and you can’t say well, everybody must be here exactly at four twenty and then we’re going to march five by five point six miles due east and then turn 90 degrees and March. One point three square miles due north.

People are casual people

No, it doesn’t work that way it’s, a little more casual than that, because we know people are, casual people. So we make this safe, fun and easy, and that’s my job.  I’ve made a safe environment for you people to come here hang out commiserate about the war on drugs and enjoy your high. If you want to, and I’m going to make it easy for you to understand what’s going on with the situation in the war on drugs in America.

Right now, basically, this law that uses the word marijuana is the last of the Jim Crow era laws. It’s the last Jim Crow law to be taken off the books and it’s going to be taken off the books. My friends mark my words. I’m going to explain to you about marijuana. I want to teach you people who like to party, that we need to be diplomats now as people. We need to come out of the closet.

We need to stop saying. Oh, I’m afraid because the undercover cops are going to take my photograph. So what, there’s nothing illegal about being here! There’s nothing illegal about gathering to petition the government for redress of grievances. There ain’t a damn thing illegal about that, and I’ll tell you something else too. There’s a notice posted this is a NC- 17 sort of event. Since there’s free speech going on here and we’re dealing with adult topics. If you’re in a position, or you have children that you want to protect from such things, be advised because it’s my free speech rights. I’m going to say what I want to say and other people on the stage are, going to say what they need to say. And since we have this Civil War of the war on drugs, emotions run a little high.

Explicit Lyrics

So if somebody says [ __ ] or something like that, that’s just going to happen, but that’s somebody truly expressing how they feel and that’s the freedom of speech. That’s, the English language and it’s, my English language and it’s my first amendment rights and I’ll be damned if I don’t use them both to their fullest extent! So we’re, looking at doing a march here, but we’ll take a vote and see whether we do that or maybe we’ll – find some other sorts of activity there’s, lots we can do here. We’ve got this park all day, people. This is our playground. So while everybody’s invited, especially we are invited.

So we got Catman’s splinters here. They’ve got their equipment setup, they came out. Basically, they thought this is on another day I called this morning and the guy’s groggy and says: okay, I think I can find the people, and he’s here and they’re all set up, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. I think there’s, nothing better than a South Bend blues band. Especially there’s This guy in another blues cat, the most travelin’ assed blues musicians in all of Michiana cuz.

They travel all over this state and up in Michigan too, and they’ll, find any little nook and cranny. A liquor store, Even. If they’ll have a band. These guys will play there. They find gigs and blaze trails for musicians. For this region – and I think that’s, a beautiful thing too. They blaze trails musically the way I blaze trails politically. So I want to thank you guys for coming out. I think that’s just excellent. If we don’t march, we’re going to have a good time listening to you guys, you will just get to play longer.

South Bend Cannabis Liberation Day 2003

I want to do a little thing, I call. I don’t use marijuana.

Because I don’t think they’re paying attention to me out there. Let me say this a little louder. Hey! I don’t use marijuana. I do not use marijuana, I do not like marijuana. I’ll smoke some pot, but I don’t use marijuana.

If I can get through the rest of my miserable little life without marijuana passing across my lips one more time, then I can consider myself to have lived a satisfying and successful life, for the rest of my life. Marijuana is a stupid thing. Marijuana is a lie. Because marijuana doesn’t really exist, like most lies. These are things that don’t exist. Marijuana doesn’t exist, except maybe in some people’s minds, and not through administration, I might add. Marijuana is a word. Cannabis is the real word, and that is the cannabis sativa plant, the hemp plant. And if you want to talk to me about cannabis, I don’t want to hear you use that word marijuana, because I just won’t know what the hell you’re talking about. That’s alien language to me.

How Jay says it at South Bend Global Cannabis Liberation Day

Marijuana is a word that they used to make a law, to outlaw the world’s foremost renewable resource plant. Using a Mexican word, with the implication that only Negroes and Mexicans and other lowlifes of color, were the people who use this stuff. Therefore it must be dangerous. So in an apartheid, cracker, 1930’s. America. When you read a newspaper article that said Mexicans on marijuana, slashed their fathers and mothers uh, heads apart, you believed it. Because you’d believe anything negative that was said to you about someone of another color. When they wanted to pass the law against marijuana, cannabis.

Basically, there are two people who found out what was going on at the last minute and complained the congress back in 1937, when they first made their marijuana law. There would have been a lot more people, but people didn’t know what marijuana was unless they believed the lying newspaper articles of William Randolph Hearst, a man who not only owned a lot of newspapers and printing presses, but also owned a lot of trees. We’ll get to that later. So I don’t use marijuana and I don’t think you should use marijuana either.

You should use the word cannabis and I’ll, make it easy for you. Cannabis. Since it’s a multi-faceted thing and it’s got a million and one uses. You want to be specific with someone. First case in point, the recreation or what we call personal use of cannabis.

Pot

If you’re talking about the recreational use of cannabis – and you need a word that’s not as long and cumbersome as can-na-bis, call it pot. Pot’s good. Easy to say, easy to do. You want to party smoke some pot.

Hemp

Now, if you want to talk about the industrial use of hemp. Whenever you see me, everything I wear is made of hemp. These t-shirts that we have are made of hemp, peace officer shirts are hemp. These one hundred percent help twill pants that I’m wearing. The underwear, the socks, the shoes, they all have hemp. I’ve, never been more comfortable or felt so good about myself, both physically and spiritually. Since I replaced my cotton and my polyester wardrobe entirely with hemp.

If you see me wearing something other than hemp, it probably means that I’m on the job site and I expect to trash my clothes today. That’s the only reason I wouldn’t want to wear hemp. Because basically, hemp at wholesale cost. At the state of the current temp industry, which is only 10 years old in America, that they’ve been allowed to do hemp products in America, clothing and food and stuff.

The average wholesale cost to the retailer is two to three times what the wholesale cost is for the equivalent mainstream cotton garment, and the only reason that is true is because it’s illegal and you have to import it, and we get most of our hemp from China, but China, just sends us the leftovers, the flawed parts. You know, they keep the good hemp for themselves, so call industrial cannabis, hemp.

Herb

Now let’s talk about the medical use of cannabis. Sure, med-i-cal can-na-bis. That’s a lot of syllables, right. I like herb. What’s wrong with herb? Herbal medicine? They’ve done a lot to eliminate and make inconvenient, access to herbal medicine in this country. That is replacing God’s creation with man’s creation. I can’t, think of anything more sinful and evil than that. To re-create the world in man’s image. Do we or do we not have a right in this country to use herbal medicine and refrain from using drugs, from the drug companies? I say we do and many of us do. So there you have it. Cannabis. Pot, hemp, herb.

So none of us gets confused, but don’t, say marijuana, because marijuana is a racist hate speech word, and they made and they used this word to make a deceptive law. Now, how can a law be valid if that law contains racist hate speech in it? Yeah. Jesse Helms just wrote this new bill. Says that you’ll do 10 years if you get caught pulled over in your car with a [ nigg*r_ ]. I’m in the possession of a [ nigg*r_ ]. That’s a new law now. That’s every bit as much racist hate speech as saying, I’m in possession of marijuana. Except that it’s racist hate speech against an inanimate object like a plant. Instead of racial hate speech against a person, but it’s still racial hate speech, and it has no business being in our legal system.

Down with  the CSA

On that basis alone, the Controlled Substances Act should be repealed immediately. Tell your Congressman. Why does he support a law that is racist in its nature. A law that was obtained through defrauding Congress? That Harry J. Anslinger showed William Randolph Hearst’s phony newspaper articles and entered them into evidence in congress back in 1937 to pass the original Marihuana Tax Act.

That law cannot be legal and I’ll tell you something else too. The Supreme Court agreed and they struck down the first marijuana law, but they struck down for the wrong reason. You see they struck it down because it’s all about a tax, and a prohibitive tax. A tax to tax something like a commodity out of existence.

It’s, not constitutional. That’s not how we do things in a free democracy, in a open marketplace. So they wrote the Controlled Substances Act. Nixon had just done the Schaffer Commission, which was supposed to tell him all the horrible things he wanted to tell everybody about cannabis, and when the results came back and didn’t have anything bad to say about cannabis. He just sort of said well, I can’t show people this. Meanwhile, I’m going to go ahead and pass the Controlled Substances Act. Making that stuff that’s known by the M word illegal, making cannabis illegal, and that was wrong.

That was a trick. That was a fraud against the American people. That law has no standing in law and should be removed.