Upon the Spectacle of Bureaucratic Blindness:
🇺🇸 FRANKLIN MODE: ENGAGED
🪶 Quill drawn. Liberty imperiled. Bureaucracy bewitched. Let us commence.
The Curious Case of Robert Randall and the Tyranny of the File Folder
By B. Franklin, Esq.
Witness to Folly, Defender of Light
Good Heavens! What villainy masquerades here as process!
What fresh devilry hath the Republic cooked in its alphabet soup?
We are told—in dry ink and colder spirit—that a man whose very sight depends upon an herb long known to the apothecaries of Persia, India, and New Spain, must dance like a monkey through the flaming hoops of DEA memoranda and DARAC meetings just to not go blind?
Egad!
Let us examine the affair, exhibit by absurd exhibit.
📜 Exhibit I: A Letter of Deferral
“21 C.F.R. 1307.03 does not offer grounds... Try the FDA.”
Thus quoth the DEA's legal oracle.
The man seeks mercy for his eyesight, and is told to file it under another department like a misplaced invoice?
'Tis like telling a man drowning to petition the Coast Guard via parchment!
📜 Exhibit II: The Petition for Sight
“Without marijuana, Mr. Randall is sure to go blind; with it, there is some chance his sight can be saved.”
And yet—this plea, elegant and evidence-laden, was met with silence, then shackled in red tape and agency ping-pong.
What have we become, America, when a well-documented medical necessity is less persuasive than bureaucratic turf wars?
📜 Exhibit III–VII: The Circle of Denial
DEA: “We cannot protect you; you're merely the subject of research.”
Randall: “But I was told I would be protected.”
DEA (again): “We know of no such precedent.”
Ah, but sirs! The very precedent is before your eyes—it is Mr. Randall himself, blindfolded not by nature, but by policy.
Is there any greater farce than an agency enabling a program while simultaneously disavowing the legality of its patient?
🧠 Intermission: A Word on Absurdity
I once warned that "Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
But I tell you now—those who would deny a man sight, for the sake of a regulatory interpretation, deserve neither the office they hold, nor the robes they hide behind.
📜 Exhibit VIII–IX: DARAC Deliberations
DARAC, that unseen committee of medical minds, did discuss—oh, did they ever!—the matter of cannabis, and glaucoma, and I.O.P., and the pharmacokinetics of nausea, and the hypotheticals of hypotension…
Yet they rendered Robert Randall—a living, breathing proof of efficacy—into a logistical inconvenience.
Did they measure his testimony?
Weigh the ethical gravity of denying a patient life-altering medicine?
Nay. They wrung their hands over aerosol fibers, shipping schedules, and whether Randall traveled too far from home.
Pah!
🗽 Exhibit X: The Thunderclap
And at last, Randall writes, with the force of a Founding Son:
“If we are going to aggressively pursue marijuana’s therapeutic potential... we must not tolerate corruption of that program for ‘research purposes’ or ‘security considerations.’”
Sir Robert of the Sightless sees clearer than the lot of you.
🧾 In Closing
The case of Robert Randall reveals the Republic’s darkest temptation: to prefer the comfort of form over the courage of function.
To hide behind process while a citizen goes blind.
Let it be known—the agencies of health became agents of harm, and the statutes meant to safeguard the public instead bartered a man's vision for procedural comfort.
Let the record show:
That Randall's only sin was asking for clarity in a fog of cowardice.
That Schedule I was never about science—but silence.
That compassion was drafted, redacted, and footnoted until unrecognizable.
And so I ask you, fellow citizens of this noble experiment:
What shall we do with a system that sees red tape more clearly than human need?
Yours in Liberty and Candor,
B. Franklin
Witness to the Madness
Advocate of the Reasonable Herb
🇺🇸 WASHINGTON MODE: ENGAGED
⚔️ Mount Vernon in mourning. Cannons quiet. But the General speaks.
To Whom It May Concern in the Republic I Bled For:
You summoned me with the cries of a soldier of Truth—Robert Randall—who stands, unarmed and unassisted, against a fortress built not of stone, but of bureaucracy.
I have come not in armor, but in command. And I ask plainly:
What kind of nation sends its young men to war… only to make war against them when they return?
🪖 You say this isn’t about soldiers. It is.
Every thread of Robert Randall’s case is woven into the same cloth that blankets the veteran on a hospital bed, blindfolded not by injury—but by policy.
Let me be clear:
If your law cannot tell the difference between a trafficker and a patient, the fault lies not with the citizen but the statute.
You authorized a study.
You dispensed the medicine.
And then you told the man who needed it most:
“We cannot protect you. You're not ‘engaged in research.’ You are merely a subject.”
What manner of cowardice is this?
⚖️ You quote the Constitution when it suits you. So shall I.
“To promote the general Welfare…”
“To secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
Does that not include the liberty to see? To breathe? To live without pain?
When the machinery of government crushes the very people it was built to serve, it ceases to be a Republic. It becomes a theater—where lawmen play medics, and patients become prisoners.
🧭 What Would I Have Done?
I would have summoned Randall to my headquarters and told him:
“Sir, we shall protect your rights as surely as we protect our borders. For your condition is no less dire than the war we once waged.”
I would not have required nine exhibits of desperation, three committees of confusion, and a regulatory circus to decide whether a man can see.
I would have issued orders, not memos.
🗡️ You think this is about cannabis. It is not.
It is about command.
About whether a government retains the courage to act when its people are in peril.
You sent him through the DARAC gauntlet. You dangled protections. You rescinded them. You gave him medicine, but no shield.
And yet—he did not yield.
He fought you.
With his pen.
With his vision.
With the truth.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what makes him one of mine.
🪦 If the Revolution stood for anything...
...it stood for the belief that no man should beg his government for dignity.
Not in the form of a joint.
Not in a letter to an Administrator.
Not in a courtroom.
Not under fluorescent light.
You dishonor the troops when you treat the wounded as liabilities.
You dishonor science when you cage it in caution tape.
And you dishonor the Republic when you break your promise to care for those who bleed for it.
So I ask you—
Are you the keepers of liberty?
Or are you the jailers of mercy?
Choose. Quickly.
The eyes of history are upon you. And so, too, are mine.
– General George Washington
Commander in Chief,
Now and Forever
