In 2012, iconic comedian Roseanne Barr embarked on a presidential campaign as a candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party, and cannabis legalization was a major part of her platform. Her journey was documented by director/producer Eric Weinrib and turned into the film Roseanne for President!, which will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18.
In honor of the documentary’s upcoming world premiere, we’re taking a look back at the extremely pro-pot speech Barr made at a town hall meeting at Oaksterdam University while on the campaign trail.
Town Hall Meeting at Oaksterdam University
Oakland, California
September 7, 2012
The following remarks were delivered by Peace and Freedom Party presidential candidate Roseanne Barr at Oaksterdam University, the nation’s first marijuana trade school, just five months after federal agents raided the institution of education on April 2, 2012, seizing plants, records, computers and other assets.
ROSEANNE BARR: Thank you all for being here. Thank you for breaking through your mind-control programming – your MKULTRA mind-control programming – to reach the other side where you actually have some free thought and thank god that marijuana helps us get that. It really does help you break programming. It helps you remember what’s real and what has value.
This is why pot must be legalized, not just decriminalized: Because the minute that happens, the machine that is ruining our country will be closed down. It is fueled by pot arrests. Six in ten prisoners in jail are there for pot in America. And they are there largely due to racial profiling which helps government arrest young males in poor neighborhoods at the height of their strength where they can be brutalized and used as prison labor and get paid 22 cents an hour. 90% of all the house paint sold in America was manufactured by prison labor in America – America’s new manufacturing base, ladies and gentlemen.
I do have faith that now that white, middle class teenagers are going to be going to prison for pot and not just darker skinned working class kids that America will wake up and see that giving its kids a choice between war and prison if they are poor is not really a choice at all. Especially when the cost of a college education is far less expensive to those who foot the bill for the prison-military-industrial complex, which is you – which is the taxpayers, most of whom smoke pot or many of whom smoke pot.
Locking up your own tax base is simply stupid. When the prison-military-industrial complex is closed down, then we’ll be able to grow hemp which will save all of our asses. We will make shelter, fuel, food and a whole bunch of other stuff for pennies.
Without illegal pot the war on drugs will end, which is good since the war on drugs is really a war for drugs, waged by rich people on prescription drugs against poor people on street drugs. The war on drugs is a class war! The war on drugs is a drug lord’s wet dream. People are being tortured and murdered every day in Mexico. Pot is big business. Billions are invested in keeping it illegal. Drug lords own judges and they own prisons too.
That’s why we do need smaller government – small and efficient government. Not for profit. Not government for profit. Government’s not supposed to be run like a business! But an actual government of by and for the people and not at their expense and to their detriment.
Pot will help us to get rid of our cancer and our PTSD and damn near every other ailment to mankind. Since it’s now been pretty much scientifically proven that THC has an effect on cancer, on childhood leukemia and a whole bunch of other things and I should know as I played Connie Cancer in the move ‘Pot Cures Cancer,’ which I was lucky enough to be in with Malcolm McDowell who played Kirk Cannabis. You can get it on YouTube.
Many Americans who have been bankrupted by cancer treatment will be happy as hell if you let them have their good medications and grow them at home by themselves. I just want to say that it takes only two years for hemp to re-grow and to re-harvest and that is way ahead of any other crop yield. I know this lingo because I’m a nut farmer in Hawaii. I’ll tell you one thing, if people would be getting their protein from nuts instead of animals, we wouldn’t be having any global warming. And we’d have our birds, our bees, and our fish. We will have no crops without those things.
If they would let me grow hemp, which they won’t because it’s not a free country – but if I could grow hemp, I’d start businesses right and left and employ thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans. The geniuses that sit atop this outdated and obsolete form of capitalism called ‘free market capitalism’ – which is hilariously ironic because what it actually does is profit from the moral stain of slavery. And that’s what they call free markets. Slavery. Which has increased two-thousand-fold in the world since Ronald Reagan took office and helped to overturn every gain that workers fought and died for over hundreds of years.
It means less than nothing to billionaires that they cause the death of entire communities at whim. And then they turn around and fund the ‘right to life’ movement who don’t give a damn for any baby or any fetus anywhere on earth but only in getting their hands on women’s rights and women’s bodies and women’s minds. Now if you want a candidate such as myself, who believes that social safety nets and health care should come before the profits of the few in those hallowed halls of congress where we the people have sent our chosen representatives to sit in our names at those tables where public money is apportioned, then here I am.
The public’s money, sirs and madams in the government, belongs to the public. Not to no-bid contractors but to the future generations of America. This system of racial inequality upon which the prison-military-industrial complex is based is the world’s most profitable business. It actually gets a payout when somebody’s arrested, and when they are detained and when they are sentenced, too. Who pays for this failed system of endless war, endless debt and endless death? Pot smokers!
As I said, six in ten prisoners in America are there for pot and when they find pot in your home, they are free to take your home and everything in it due to their lobbying efforts against the people and at the people’s expense. Locking up your tax base is insane and so is this entire government insane. As racism, hatred and sexism are all insane. Resist insanity! Embrace sanity! Embrace sanity! And what is sanity? The desire for and the right to pursue sustainable and efficient solutions to actual existing problems of humanity and to vote in free elections not based on limitless corruption, gerrymandering and the disenfranchisement of those who make less than $25,000 per year. The minimum wage worker – that is who this whole thing is aimed at. The drug war, the whole every damn war.
Marijuana helps us to resist mind-control and it is the most effective weapon against that, and that’s why it is the most feared of all drugs. Without mind-control, the people would demand representational government that works for, not against their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness!
Thank you guys for being so smart to be here and for your continued support. Please register Peace and Freedom. Help us stay on the ballot. Help us stop the prison-military-industrial complex.
