NOMINATION FOR THE 2021 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE OF
THE “GRAND BOUQUET CANNABIQUE”
OF HUMAN AND CITIZENS RIGHTS DEFENDERS

Voir version française

Letter concerned cannabinophiles can forward to invite qualified
nominators for the 2021 nomination campaign: in English, or in French.

Information for qualified Nominators for the Nobel Peace Prize

Dear cannabinophile friend, dear qualified nominator,

Thank you for reacting to our invitation to nominate the

for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. We hope to convince you of our common interest to nominate the Grand Bouquet and have you contribute simultaneously to the CIRC 30th anniversary festivities.
The “Grand Bouquet Cannabique” groups together all cannabis activists that accepted our invitation in a single, temporary collective, without any other commitment for the individual members than that of being nominated, together with other participants, as candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The purpose of this note is to inform people qualified by Alfred Nobel to nominate candidates for the Prize that bears his name, about our candidate and how to go about a nomination:

1. the occasion: the 30st anniversary of the CIRC,
2. the rationale for the nomination,
3. the nomination procedure and
4. how to assure the success of the nomination.
5. a general outline of the campaign

We hope you accept the invitation to nominate the “Grand Bouquet Cannabique” and help bring the war on cannabis to an end and peace of life and mind to cannabinophiles.
With our best regards and appreciation,

Éric Chapel (Founder of PAKA Chanvre’n Co),
Farid Ghehouièche,( Founder Cannabis sans Frontières)
Stéphane Karcher aka Kshoo (Co-founder of CIRC),

1 . The 30th anniversary of the Collective for Information and Research on Cannabis (CIRC)

This event is organized to celebrate on October 14, 2021 the 30th anniversary of the CIRC, the Collective for Information and Research on Cannabis and its defense of the multiple uses of hemp, its cultivation and distribution. As Jean-Pierre Galland, co-founder and 1st president recounts it: thirty years of fighting at their own risk and peril by questioning and provoking those responsible for the disaster engendered by prohibition, by politicians and experts too often deaf to arguments and to encourage cannabinophiles, in spite of the repression, to campaign alongside them. With the simple objective to get cannabis out of its prison and give its amateurs back their dignity. As Ophélie Perdu states it so simply, “This plant allows me to sleep, eat and calm myself without having to resort to conventional treatments which cause unwanted side effects.”

It would have been great to celebrate this anniversary under the sign of cannabis' journey to victory which seems assured by the decisions taken at the beginning of December 2020 in Vienna and Washington, the capitals of prohibition, in favor of a re-appreciation of our plant and its decriminalization. Humanity can no longer escape the conclusion that the prohibition of cannabis is a historical error inspired by the lie of the Single Convention of 1961, which should be erased, and that we may rejoice that the world starts preparing to apologize and to compensate the victims of the serious damages caused by this cowardly war. Unfortunately, this conclusion is not yet accepted by many prohibitionist regimes, including France.
Although professing to review its 50-year-old cannabis policy, recent government measures have made it abundantly clear that any proposals for reform still need to take the huge hurdle of entrenched prohibitionist ideologies, as repeatedly summarized by the responsible interior minister when he very visually re-iterates that he will not legalize cannabis, “that shit”.

Thus, the government of the 5th Republic, which still incites its citizens to report cannabis related activities to the police and punishes those who dare to present cannabis in ‘a favorable light’, has just instituted a new fixed fine (AFD) - with registration in the criminal record - for the use of drugs in public places. However, cannabis use in private will also be detected in public controls, forcing users to stay at home if they want to escape prosecution by the State. The same State that is the guarantor of citizens' rights to health and freedom of opinion. This AFD which transfers moreover punitive powers from the judiciary to the police administration is a lamentable attack in the French government’s rearguard fight against 5 million cannabis users among its citizens, as J-P Ceccaldi’s testimonial demonstrates.
Béatrice Budin, ardent cannabis resistant, sighs: "as a consumer I no longer leave my home calmly, I am afraid of the police who are supposed to protect me." President Macron thus flouts the rights of ‘the Republic's children’, a betrayal of the Republic and its values.

The 30th anniversary of the CIRC appears to be in jeopardy and expressions of disapproval to avoid further unnecessary suffering seem not only justified, but even necessary for a worthy anniversary celebration. A resistance celebration in the CIRC 30-year-long tradition of a playful, often heroic and always peaceful struggle for the preservation of cannabis in French culture and of the universal values of freedom, equality and fraternity that this marvelous plant embodies. Verbal resistance in the form of an eulogy of cannabis sativa, a violation of an immoral French law perpetrated before the Oslo Nobel Committee, the highest peace promoting body in the world. An offense in France, but in furtherance of the fundamental values of humanity the Nobel Committee has the task to uphold. An offense told in the forbidden words of experts with lifelong experience, pacifists, cannabinophiles, human rights defenders of delicious flowers in a grand cannabis bouquet. Listen to them to hear the unity of earth and humanity in your heart, listen to them like we learned after WWII to listen to the persecuted instead of the executioners, to the colonized instead of the colonizers, listen to the victims to understand the injustice and the horrors of the War on Drugs. Listen to inoffensive drug users and to us, cannabis consumers, instead of the warmongering prohibitionists, the bedfellows of fascism, clerical radicalism and unbridled capitalism if you want to cherish the brotherhood among peoples. Listen to the voices of the Grand Bouquet, a reassuring testimony of a global cannabis campaign.

Illustration by Gaël Denhard, All Rights Reserved

2. The rationale for the nomination to the Nobel Peace Prize (NPP)

Science and politics, the fishponds for the nominators of candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, are supposed to guarantee the balance between the possible and the socially acceptable, between progress and preservation, between freedom, individual sovereignty and personal responsibility on the one hand and obedience, integration and social responsibility on the other hand. But the balance is out of working order since science was banned in the wake of the 1961 Single Convention and the food of the gods that provides mankind with the knowledge to escape from man-created evil was forbidden by ideological dictates so that social responsibility had to give way to social abdication, submission, and enslavement.

“Wir haben es nicht gewust” is the only answer society provides when asked for the responsibility for the war on drugs. The word of the counterweight, science, "wir sollen alles wissen" (We should know everything), was not heard of, victim of decades-long obscurantism. So, why would science and politics nominate drugs pacifists for the NPP?

The answer is given by the growing desire for a paradigm shift currently expressing itself in Western democracies. France’s drug policy, still a prototype of Europe’s modern, evidence-free insistence on the evil of cannabis use, is an excellent example of the old medieval model of a religion-based mindset, determined by the Christian church. Under the Renaissance it resulted in the Inquisition and the persecution of witches and heresy in general. In the 20th century it translated into a US-dictated worldwide prohibition of mind-altering substances to be enforced by penal law, military intervention. and economic coercion of producing countries. With the help of newly independent former colonies, the US succeeded to impose a new global, moral colonization program that would hold the whole world in its grip. Two decades after the jubilant adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs set the clock back and had the whole world agree that mind-altering substances are the scourge of nations and that even history-long nature religions relying on these substances, had to close shop. The freedom of conscience, thought and religion was no longer meant as the right of individual people but rather as the right of institutions and mentally arrived at ideologies within the framework of mind-control. Consequently, the claim to the right to use mind-altering substances and the use itself were met with the same denial of human rights protection from a diktat which, for lack of answers, cannot tolerate questioning

The justification of prohibition could therefore no longer be sought in a divine command, henceforth invalidated by the religious freedom clause of the Universal Declaration, but only in the protection of public health. The main consequence of this new ground for justification is that, contrary to non-verifiable divine promises for a happy afterlife, the evolution of public health can be objectively measured and evaluated. And the result is horrible.

Indeed, the history of the Single Convention prohibition can be summed up as a complete health, moral and social failure. The false claims of prohibition have seriously affected the integrity of science, our confidence in just policies and the social cohesion necessary for healthy nations to exist. Drug policy has become an instrument of social oppression, when people are exposed to artificially generated health risks or even driven to death for the sole reason that drug use is part of a forbidden lifestyle.
Although all men are born equal and free, the UN 1961 Single Convention created a sub-kind of people with ‘no humanity’, as Filipino president Duterte says of shabu users (methamphetamine), which he believes justifies him to have them killed by police and vigilantes. A cleansing act of genocide, presented as enforcing the human rights of the other Filipinos, perpetrated with the blessings of the three permanent members of the UN Security Council. President Trump congratulated Duterte on three occasions with his drug policy.

Although the situation in the Philippines is under preliminary examination by the International Criminal Court and is closely watched by the UN Human Rights Council, the extrajudicial killings that started in 2016 nevertheless continue in 2021, unabated.

Duterte and Macron both represent a variant of one and the same model, that has not been devised according to policy objectives but on ideological, moral conviction, that can only be sustained by the repetition of the lie and terrorization of the adversary, thereby enforcing social consent with policies that run counter to public health and the rule of law. This model is not based on informed decisions but rather on the lack of insight and opposition to information and prohibition of research. Where science failed to compete with power, the work of the CIRC and peers has been the oxygen supply of the cannabis movement. With little or no direct impact on policy, but invaluable for the survival of hope and dare among cannabinophiles. Because the history of the CIRC has clearly shown that contrary to shabu, cannabis is a harmless, non-addictive substance, its present social acceptance is at an all-time high.

As Macron seems nevertheless prepared to have the French cannabinophiles suffer a new round of beatings, it is time for French academe to step forward and follow the example of countrymen Kenzi Riboulet-Zemouli and Farid Ghehouièche who’s lobbying efforts were instrumental to have the Vienna Commission on Narcotic Drugs to de-schedule cannabis from UN schedule IV - the most dangerous substances, which are particularly harmful and of extremely limited medical or therapeutic value – and to convince this Commission to finally listen to science. If science does not oppose power, and forsakes its own arguments of conviction, it renounces its mandate to the benefit of ideology. These times ask for a paradigm shift where science joins activists and holds power accountable. In the US, Congress prepares laws to develop research on cannabis, in France a Parliamentary mission studies the possibilities for the introduction of cannabis in society but in the meantime the government attempts an act of desperation, driving as many civilians as possible into their misfortune. Therefore, if cannabis users are still not listened to in their own country, let them be heard higher up, where others may listen. It is up to science now to provide their cannabis friends the platform to be heard, by the nomination of the Grand Bouquet Cannabique in Oslo.
Towards a great anniversary celebration of the CIRC.
#AuChanvreCitoyens!

3. The nomination procedure.

The reader who is a member of the European Parliament, or of a national parliament or government, a university professor of social or religious sciences, history, philosophy, law or theology, or director of a research institute on peace or a foreign policy institute belong to an exclusive group of people whom Alfred Nobel deemed worthy of judging on issues of war and peace and of nominating candidates for the Peace Prize which bears his name.

If you wish to support the “Grand Bouquet Cannabique” for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, you can do so by supporting the nomination by the Drugs Peace Institute, made on January 31, 2021, with a personal letter addressed to CIRC by email at federation@circ-asso.net . The endorsement can be written directly in the body of the email or added in a scan, with letterhead attesting to your capacity to nominate. The deadline for receiving the letter of support is August 31, 2021.

4 To assure the success of the nomination

The legalization of cannabis and the defense of all other democratic ideals, are global matters and as cannabis prohibition shows us, they must never be taken for granted.
France, Europe and all democracy-loving countries share common challenges and a responsibility to defend these ideals as partners. 
#AuChanvreCitoyens!

5. A general outline of the campaign

Voir version française