This Belongs To US.

There are few things more personal, more sovereign, than the body you live in.

You wake up in it. You carry your pain, your joy, your history, and your healing in it. And unless you’re breaking the bones or violating the consent of someone else, what you choose to do with your own body should not be up for debate. It shouldn’t be up for legislation. It certainly shouldn’t be up to politicians who can’t even pass a basic budget without breaking into performative tantrums on the House floor.

But here we are—again—watching another round of moral panic thinly veiled as “public safety” roll toward the community. The target this time, like many times before, is a plant. A leaf. A choice.

And it’s always the same story: something natural, something not owned by a pharmaceutical lobby, something that doesn’t generate profit for the “right” people suddenly becomes the newest public enemy. Not because it’s dangerous. Not because it’s killing thousands. But because people are choosing it. Because they’re opting out of the tightly controlled system of suffering, sickness, and debt that props up entire industries.

That scares them.

It’s not about the leaf. It’s about control.

They say it’s about safety—but they ignore the safe use by hundreds of thousands of responsible adults. They say it’s about protecting people—but they criminalize those very people in the process. They say it’s about health—but they refuse to look at the thousands who’ve used this plant to get off opioids, manage pain, reduce anxiety, or simply feel functional again.

Here’s the truth: if this was really about protecting health, we’d see bans on soda before plants. We’d see legislation targeting the companies dumping microplastics into our bodies and our babies, not the small vendors selling crushed leaves in heat-sealed bags.

This is about power.

And more and more people are waking up to that fact.

Whether you’re the kind of person who believes government should have as little say as possible in your day-to-day life, or the kind of person who believes people must come together to fight for the rights of the vulnerable—this fight is yours.

Because it’s our bodies on the line. Our freedom. Our future.

The war on the leaf is just one small branch of something much larger. It’s a war on choice. A war on self-determination. And a war on the kinds of communities that refuse to be quiet and compliant.

It’s not just about banning a plant—it’s about criminalizing independence. It’s about criminalizing compassion. It’s about making sure that if you’re going to find relief, you’ll do it in a way that feeds the machine, or not at all.

And that’s where we draw the line.

Because this isn’t just a fight to keep something legal—it’s a fight to remind our lawmakers that we decide what happens to us. It’s a fight to tell unelected bureaucrats and well-funded lobbyists that we’re not interested in being managed, manipulated, or muzzled.

And if you’re someone who’s ever had to weigh the cost of a prescription against your rent…

If you’ve ever sat in a waiting room and realized your doctor is legally prohibited from recommending what actually works for you…

If you’ve ever found hope in something outside the system, and realized it was only a matter of time before that hope was declared contraband…

Then this is your fight, too.

But it’s not one we can win alone.

This is going to take every voice. Every perspective. Every personal story and every ounce of collective courage we can gather. It’s going to take parents and veterans, blue-collar workers and students, truckers and teachers. It’s going to take the left and the right and everyone in between remembering that before we were divided by slogans and parties, we were human.

We still are.

So whether you believe in personal freedom as the highest virtue, or community solidarity as the best defense—we need you. Right now. Not tomorrow. Not when the next hearing gets scheduled. Not after it’s too late.

The time for passive hope is over.

The time for standing shoulder to shoulder, even with people who don’t vote like you or pray like you or dress like you, is now.

Because if they take this—if they successfully tell us that we don’t have the right to put something natural into our own bodies—what else will they come for? What else will they decide is too dangerous, too independent, too threatening to the institutions that feed off our dependence?

We know how this story goes.

But this time, we write the ending.

Not with silence. Not with hashtags. But with action.

Speak out. Show up. Write your representatives. Share your story. Support the vendors who refuse to cut corners. Educate the curious. Protect the vulnerable. And never, ever let them forget:

This belongs to us.

Our bodies. Our choices. Our communities. Our voice.

And we’re not giving any of it up.