I decided not to use NORMLs boilerplate. No senator or rep cares about receiving 30,000 copies of (mostly) the same text.

It gets more attention and traction if you just use your own words, so here’s what I wrote and submitted. You can feel free to copy any of this in part, but please do make it your own. Don’t just copy/paste mine or you’ll render a mass of them equally-ineffective.
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Don’t RE-schedule. DE-schedule.

Cannabis, a simple houseplant with medicinal qualities, has a documented history of over FIVE MILLENNIA of safe use.

Cannabis SHOULD NEVER have been scheduled in the first place except for the highly-racist history of attempting to use it to incarcerate people of color, and for no other societal reason. It was always considered medicinal. It was never considered criminal. It was always fully-accepted in society. And then the government came along and promoted the “reefer madness” propaganda, spreading lies about how a single hit causes people to go maniacally crazy and become mass murderers.

All lies. And THAT was the foundation for scheduling in the first place.

Unlike alcohol and tobacco, both fully-legal and also TRULY dangerous and toxic drugs with massive histories of associated and causal deaths, cannabis has never had a SINGLE documented causal death. Its side effects are rare, and impermanent–simply discontinue use or modify the dosage. Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, often used as a reason to keep it illegal, is not likely related to cannabis itself, but rather to black-market pesticide-laden product which is the only available national choice given the current and proposed scheduling.

Scheduling has CAUSED all of the “crime”-related issues with cannabis, and given the hundreds of millions of historical users, done nothing at all to prevent its use. Just with alcohol prohibition that came shortly before it, neither has meaningfully reduced availability.

The government CANNOT prevent people from obtaining this product, if eight decades of prejudice and unreasonable incarceration is any indicator.

Historically, it has been completely illegal, and yet even during that total illegality people grew and used it anyway; they still do, in every illegal state.

BECAUSE of scheduling, MILLIONS of people have been incarcerated for simply possessing, or daring to buy or sell this totally safe plant-based medicine to others. This trend will likely continue, as Schedule III is STILL federally-illegal to possess “without valid prescription”.

With FULL DE-SCHEDULING of cannabis, removing all regulation and letting it be treated as the simple houseplant it is, there will be zero market for illegal cannabis, and the entire issue of illegal grows will evaporate overnight. After all, if they can’t sell the product (because any buyer could simply buy or grow it legitimately for themselves) there will be no market for “illicit” weed.

YOU WILL SOLVE THE ILLEGAL GROW PROBLEM OVERNIGHT by simply removing ALL regulation from this simple plant. Treat it like tomatoes, basil, lavender, and zucchini. Totally legal to grow as much of it as you want. BECAUSE of federal scheduling, states like Oregon (mine) have to deal with black-market mass-producers with illegal resource-stealing mass grows, which package up their product and transport it out to illegal states. BECAUSE it is illegal, states like Idaho then are forced to expend wildly unrealistic amounts of money trying to pursue and prosecute it with no meaningful impact.

And then those same states complain about broken families, unwed mothers, children with no fathers in their lives. It’s because they’ve locked up all those fathers. Scheduling has created massive societal ills and crime. It is the CAUSE of the issue, not its solution.

Making it legal to home grow isn’t suddenly going to make everyone grow and flood the world with cannabis. After all, those other products above (basil, etc) are totally legal, but most people buy them from a grocery store anyway. Those that WANT to grow are the exception. It still takes effort.

Now, as proposed in Schedule III, we expect to see “big pharma” swoop in and lobby for laws which would enforce that all cannabis must be “regulated” and bought through “official” (drug-company) producers–a prescription at your local pharmacy, just like Tylenol with Codeine (another Schedule III but MUCH more dangerous drug that can kill with one simple overdose). Cannabis does not belong scheduled in any way. Scheduling will not only do nothing to stem the tide of illegally-grown cannabis; it will massively limit consumer choice. It is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

Let’s do what should have been done in the first place, and turn this into a simple house plant. There is no valid reason to keep it under any schedule. It’s no more a drug than caffeine.