No Law can make a plant illegal

By Kasate Birhanne I hope to share a High... even grand philosophical theory based on and attached to a very specific, some may say lowly issue that is the plant Cannabis Sativa as well as its industrial cousin Cannabis hempus. And why such a concerted and ostentatious physical attack by a society/civilisation on such an obviously innocent element as a plant.

The premise of this argument is that no constitution, no law, no parliament can make what occurs naturally illegal. Therefore and as such plants occur naturally without man and therefore man cannot adjudicate on plants; man can only adjudicate on what he creates. So man can regulate rum but not cane; man can regulate wine but not grapes.

The premise is that man's judicative authority does not extend beyond what it is man can conjure or imagine in his mind, Therefore man can adjudicate morphine not the Poppy flower, cocaine but not the Coca plant. This is the fundamental position that is stated in this piece.

To say this, I mean that such an issue must and does go to a primary understanding of man in his relationship with his biosphere (biosphere, the totality of our environment including the clouds, the rain, the wind, the electromagnetic field, not just the Earth i.e. the land) his philosophy. Law is how through that philosophy we manage that relationship between ourselves i.e. each other and our environment and the ecology, the universe, your being, more rationally put, the rules by which your existence within your environment is organised and shared.

Now, many of you would say that is too high grand ideas, this relationship with the biosphere and the universal cosmos of being. They would say this is not how I think of life. But it is these very deep seated ideas that are the reasons that inform what we do how we do it. Or why we agree to social norms? And accept daily tasks. It may be grand but in going to archetype we can see more clearly and then can be more precise because philosophy encapsulates the basis for our actions when often we cannot explain them.

The question elementally is: Can or cannot man make laws over natural occurring events. Western civilisation, the rules of which have been imposed on us it, has convinced itself that it has evolved to the state where in their relationship with their biosphere they can say what man says is the law is the law.... therefore... they have reasoned ...that man can for example say ...that this plant cannot grow and alternatively can say..... that this seed can be owned. And they have gone about and made it so, hence Cannabis sativa is illegal and Monsanto can charge you for their seeds growing on your land.

If that logic is true man can also say that ...rain cannot fall... or wind cannot blow...or rock cannot fall. Man in his wisdom has taken action to limit the damage of wind... or stop damage caused by the fall of rocks ....or damage by rain....but not stop it because he cannot. Furthermore man in recognition of the damage caused by western civilisation itself has been forced to negotiate and erect treaties for the protection of plants and biological multiplicity and the diversification of varieties, the enhancement of biological diversity because he has recognised that this destruction of the natural environment hastens their own. The real question then becomes how we have moved to a state where we have to protect natural spaces and species from ourselves by law. The actual question is there any room for natural law, the basis of physics to this there is a resounding no!

The echo of the nnnnnnnooooooo goes back not so far... to the mid- 19th

Century to an Englishman who was attached to a brain (which is now encased in glass in formaldehyde and can still be seen in the halls of the University of London) of a certain Jeremy Bentham a famous intellect of the Western man, a mathematician, philosopher, lawyer who notably decreed: "What a Man posited as the Law ... is the Law". From the acceptance and ascendancy of that premise there was no such thing as natural law or self-emanating law. NO ...law was only what man at the time said was a law. This caught a steam in the intellectual clime and these advocates became known as Positist i.e. As One Posits the Law That is the law. The ascendency of this argument from the mid to end of the 19th Century to pre-eminence NOW shapes even such a mundane matter as our plant laws today.