This article was originally published on the Marijuana Patients Organization site on November 27, 2014.
As we recover from another year of giving thanks and stuffing ourselves, we should remember those native Americans that welcomed cold and hungry Europeans to their land over 500 years ago. These native people taught early Americans how to farm, hunt and trap local game, and most importantly how to live. Could these same compassionate people teach us another lesson by providing legal cannabis in a hostile land?
Today Lakota Indians have no jobs and no money coming into their community. The tribes desire to find a much needed boost to their economy is why the Oglala Lakota Tribal Council’s economic committee started looking into legalizing marijuana on its reservation earlier this year. And it appears that tribe members of all ages seemed interested in the plan to promote marijuana, and possibly, also across the country’s 326 reservations.
“In the past there’s always been a generational divide on marijuana between younger Americans and the older Americans,” said Brandon Ecoffey, managing editor of Native Sun News and a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. “On the reservation, that divide doesn’t seem to exist. I think a community that’s been hit so hard by mass incarceration, poverty, so many social afflictions—finding something that might work is appealing to everybody.”
Next year ‘hopefully’ we can give thanks, yet again, to native peoples for blazing a trail to common sense and respect for the individual. The native way.
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