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The Scotty J. Project is an informal organization devoted to marijuana legalization and to promoting Scotty J. as a spokesman for the cause. Scotty J. refuses to be drug tested or to be silenced. Even though he is an American with God-given, Constitutionally protected rights, he is unable to use his full name since this would jeopardize his job and career.
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The Scotty J. Project Platform
Legalize marijuana!
End the Drug War!
Keep all other drugs illegal!
********************************************************Why do these three statements sound contradictory? There is no reason all drugs have to be legalized to end the Drug War. The Drug War is destroying our cities and our Constitutional Rights and must be ended. But across-the-board legalization is just as extreme as the Drug War and besides, it will never happen in America.
Americans do not realize how extreme the Drug War actually is. In 1995, there were 400,000 arrests for marijuana. The average time spent in prison for selling marijuana is four years, compared with just one year for rape or manslaughter. The Government can search through our garbage without probable cause, confiscate our property and force us to prove our innocence to get it back, drug test our children and jeopardize their future -- all in the name of the Drug War.
Ending the Drug War is not about legalization. It is about fighting violent crime instead of drug crime and restoring our Constitutional Rights. It is about ending the mentality that views drug users as an enemy to be destroyed.
But most importantly, maintaining a real commitment to solving the drug problem provides marijuana legalization with a broader, more acceptable justification than simply ending discrimination against pot smokers.
Conservatives are absolutely correct in identifying marijuana a steppingstone drug. Marijuana is a soft, illegal drug that bridges the gap between soft, legal drugs and hard, illegal drugs. Since marijuana will never become a hard drug, the only way to remove it as a steppingstone is to make it a legal drug. The increase in juvenile marijuana use is inevitable; an increase in hard drug use is not. Legalizing marijuana will finally end the mixed messages teenagers currently hear and allow a credible condemnation of drug use.
Fifteen years of Drug War have done nothing to solve America's drug problem. This is because the core of the problem lies in the drug use itself. Marijuana legalization will lead to a dramatic decrease, not increase, in illegal drug use and finally begin to solve the problem.
What makes the Scotty J. Project different from other pro-marijuana sites? My page is fundamentally different from other activist pages in that it recognizes that the messenger is just as important as the message. I am not one of those Washington policy wonks who invariably preface their arguments with "I do not use drugs or approve of the use of drugs." Nor am I a faceless marijuana organization, although they do very important work for the cause. It is critical that the pro-marijuana, anti-Drug War message be presented by an active pot smoker, one who is personable and sympathetic, so the American public can identify that person as being human. Then the Drug War zealots' attacks on marijuana and its legalization will finally be revealed to the American public for what they are: attacks on their fellow Americans.
The Scotty J. Project offers a new political vision, one that can appeal to elements of both the Left and the Right, and is optimistic about what can be achieved in the immediate future. I espouse an in-your-face agenda: being open about personal marijuana use and refusing to be silenced by either cynical apathy or Government and Corporate intimidation. Finally, by presenting myself -- a reasonably sane, successful professional -- I hope to eventually give the American public a new image of who pot smokers really are.
