Abraham Lincoln said that "Prohibition . . . goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legistlation."

The War on Drugs has put marijuana in the hands of substance abusers and children and has incarcerated more people in the United States than any other nation in the world. With the Cannabis Tax Act, we hope to take marijuana out of the underground economy to generate revenues for education and drug abuse programs.

We also hope to restore the personal freedoms instilled in the Declaration of Independence, including the right to privacy.

Currently, substance abusers and kids are the people who control most of the marijuana market -- the prohibition on the sale of marijuana to adults has lead to the opposite of its intended effects.

The last time school-age children were involved in the sales of gin, rum and whiskey was during alcohol Prohibition, from 1917 to 1933. Since Prohibition ended, the use of alcohol has decreased every year. This is why we want to take the sale of marijuana out of the hands of children and substance abusers and control it in state-run liquor stores, where the age limit of 21 is strictly enforced.

In the Netherlands, where the sale of marijuana is allowed to responsible adults age 18 or older, the use of marijuana by minors is five times less than what it is in the United States, according to the British Medical Journal.

The use of hard drugs like cocaine and heroin by minors in the Netherlands has declined since 1976, to one-tenth the rate in the United States. Dutch police and prosecutors say that the legal sale of cannabis drugs "builds a wall between the hard and soft drug markets" and the statistics prove this to be so.

We want to emulate this successful model here in Oregon.  

We also want to stop the horrible expansion of the prison- and drug-abuse industrial complex, which rivals the military industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1960. Today we witness another expanding bureaucratic and industrial complex, which threatens the freedoms we Americans believe are the essence of our nation's heritage.

Our nation, which we want to believe is the land of the free, is increasingly being ridiculed around the world as the only country on earth, democratic or authoritarian, where government or business can demand urine samples of employees without specific cause.

The prison- and drug-abuse industrial complex holds enormous clout. Police, prosecutors and prison interests are among the most powerful players in the Oregon legislature and other policymaking institutions throughout America. Prison population, construction, probation and parole supervision, local jail populations and police agencies are bigger than at any time in history and are continuing to grow at an unprecedented rate.

There are more inmates incarcerated in our prisons and jails per capita than any other nation. We have more people incarcerated per capita than the Soviet Union ever had, more than South Africa had under Apartheid. Ex-Washington governor Mike Lowry observed that if the same growth over the last 17 years in the number of those imprisoned (more than 300 percent) continues for another 23 years, then half of all Americans will be imprisoned in 2020 and the other half will be employed guarding them. Something has to change.  

Regulating the sale of marijuana will raise tens of millions of dollars each year to fund substance-abuse treatment upon demand for alcoholics and other addicts (currently, 90% of these people are turned away when seeking treatment) as well as eliminate a large prison population.

The Cannabis Tax Act has shown it can be successful. The largest television station in Oregon, Portland's KATU-TV, did a telepoll on January 1, 1995 asking the question, "Should marijuana be sold in liquor stores to fund education?" We won with 54 percent of respondents saying "yes".

The Cannabis Tax Act was written to comply with various international treaties that require sales to be made through state package stores. In Oregon, since the sale of distilled alcohol products is controlled by a state-run monopoly, OCTA will use the existing infrastructure to regulate the manufacture and sale of marijuana, while minimizing start-up costs to the state.

The War on some Drugs is not about drugs at all, but about money and the continued centralization of economic and political control.

Our nation's precious heritage of civil liberties is being erased by the escalating buildup of coercive power by the state. People and their families are being destroyed by this misguided civil war. The war on drugs is the issue on which the future of freedom in America swings.