The History and Benefits of Hemp as Food, Fiber, Fuel & Medicine.
The HempCar Trans–American Tour demonstrates how industrial hemp may be used as an alternative fuel source by driving 13,000 miles with it.
NORML is valiantly working to change the laws.
Jack Herer’s home page is fun and informative.
By now you’ve probably heard about the brainless July 29 police assault on Cheye Calvo of Berwyn Heights, Md., and his family. First the cops plant marijuana on them, then storm the house, terrorize Calvo, his mother-in-law, and his wife, and shoot dead their two Labrador retrievers. Despite having apparently been investigating a pot-smuggling ring for some time, the cops didn’t even know that Calvo is the community’s mayor.
Doug Donovan at The Baltimore Sun wrote:
After the raid, Prince George’s County police officials who burst into the home of Berwyn Heights’ mayor last week seized the same unopened package of marijuana that an undercover officer had delivered an hour earlier.
What police left behind was a house stained with blood and a trail of questions about their conduct. No other evidence of illegal activity was found, and no one was arrested at Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home in this small bedroom community near College Park.
This week Prince George’s police arrested two men for orchestrating a plot to deliver marijuana to the addresses of unsuspecting recipients - among them, Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic.
Yet neither county Police Chief Melvin C. High nor Sheriff Michael A. Jackson have apologized to him, his wife or her mother, Georgia Porter, for the raid that traumatized the family and killed their black Labrador retrievers, Payton and Chase.
Yesterday, Calvo called on the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights decision to investigate the raid and other similar actions by Prince George’s law enforcement. He said officers burst into his house without knocking or announcing themselves, in violation of the warrant they had.
And for what? Weed. Even the most avid drug foe cannot say with a straight face that marijuana comes within a country mile of equaling the negative impact on society of alcohol. But, of course, one is legal and the other is prohibited and the law must at all costs be enforced.
It would be encouraging at this juncture if the word “unbelievable” could be used to describe what happened to Mayor Calvo and his family. But it is completely believable to anyone who has even cursorily followed the grotesqueries of what Richard Nixon first called the War on Drugs 37 years ago. article continues
The ACLU had decided that cannabis laws are not fair and has decided to join in
the effort to fix them.
I’ll try to keep it short and sweet on the flip.
The Seattle Times report starts with the necessary reference to the failure of alcohol prohibition and makes a quick jump to the racial issues. Good stuff.
Saying the laws disproportionately affect minorities and can impose severe consequences for possessing as little as 40 grams (roughly the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes), the state ACLU received funding from the national organization to create an informational program it hopes will air on television stations and the Internet. Steves appears in the program.
There’s a great lead-in to talking about this subject: getting the negative comparison to tobacco AND information about racial disparity into one sentence.
I am glad to see an “informational program” about cannabis and reform issues coming out with the credibility of the ACLU behind it.
So often I have seen “liberal and progressive” folks commenting on relegalization articles, deeply offended by the suggestion that the inequities visited upon us by the fervent enforcement of cannabis possession laws rise to the status of prejudice and deprivation of civil liberties.
Well, here it is: the ACLU is seeing fit to finally wade into this unacceptable and artificially-created morass that is so big and tangled up, it has several different names: The war on Drugs, cannabis prohibition,
reefer madness (no, really - it’s a great term). article continues
What costs more: Global Natural Disasters or America’s War on Drugs?
Well…go on…take a guess.
You know the answer but it seems so absurd. It’s hard to say it.
That’s because it is a study in absurdity.
The world community spent
$30 billion for global disasters in 2007.
While losses soared in 2007, the figure was far short of the $99 billion Munich Re recorded in 2005 – when Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans.
The world’s second–largest reinsurer put total economic losses this year – which includes losses not covered by insurance – from natural disasters at $75 billion – a 50 percent increase from last year’s $50 billion, but far below the 2005 figure of $220 billion.
*****
The company said that, in all, 950 natural disasters were recorded this year – up from 850 last year, and the highest figure since the company started keeping systematic records in 1974.
That $30 billion represents what was actually covered and paid for. It appears there was another $45 billion in assessed damage that wasn’t paid for.
That article cites global warming as a very real factor in all this and indicates this will all only get worse.
Now consider this: America spends $50 billion a year on it’s “war on drugs” alone, $500 billion since the 1970’s.
All for nothing.
Paul Armentano, of
NORML, writes in
Ending America’s Domestic Quagmire, that America spends $50 billion a year now on you–know–what.
America now spends nearly $50 billion dollars per year targeting, prosecuting, and incarcerating illicit–drug users. As a result, the population of illicit–drug offenders now behind bars is greater than the entire U.S. prison population in 1980. Since the mid 1990s, drug offenders have accounted for nearly 50 percent of the total federal prison population growth and some 40 percent of all state prison population growth. For marijuana alone, law enforcement currently spends between $7 billion and $10 billion dollars annually targeting users – – primarily low–level offenders – – and taxpayers spend more than $1 billion annually to incarcerate them. article continues
I came across a very good article at
Cannabis Culture Magazine that lays out each of the 2008 Presidential candidate’s positions on medical marijuana, cannabis reform, and/or addressing the "war on drugs".
Cannabis Culture is a Canadian magazine and website run by Marc Emery, a longtime cannabis activist, businessman, and founder of the British Columbia Marijuana Party, as well as longtime thorn in the side to American drug warriors. He is currently fighting extradition to America for engaging in conduct in Canada (like, where he is a citizen) that is illegal in America. This is how important perpetuating cannabis prohibition is to those with the power to affect it.
The article, a, Sneak Preview: Your Next President on Drugs addresses all the Democratic and Republican party candidates. article continues
I watched the recent NOVA PBS special called Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial., oddly enough, supported by DOW Chemical, one of the major players in reefer madness.
It is a meticulous reporting of events leading up to a landmark Supreme Court trial of a few school board members in a tiny Midwestern town, beginning a few years ago and culminating in a very detailed presentation of the trial’s "play by play".
What can this possibly have to do with cannabis prohibition?…
There’s infinitely more studies about cannabis that there is about anything in the Creationist lore.
What I’d like to see is NOVA to do the same thing with cannabis prohibition. Take the official information as it will come from the ONDCP and watch study versus counter–study compete for the most accurate reflection of reality in a setting as similar to that seen in the presentation.
It would take far longer because cannabis prohibition has enjoyed countless billions in federal and state dollars to spread propaganda so thickly many people think what they have been told is accurate. When it is intentionally far from accuracy.
This is why cannabis reformers are always talking about the same things. There is not a lot of scope to cannabis prohibition. It’s a plant that’s been around longer than we have and until the 1930’s it was used for a thousand different things. Then men conspired to make it illegal and we have the basic state of affairs that it is illegal to touch the plant.
It it called "possession" and it is severely illegal. Arbitrarily and needlessly, but viciously so. But all it means is touching the plant.
This eliminates all non–drug uses of the plant. None can be grown in any sort of quantity sufficient to continue using it in its historical manner.
While there had been lots of anti–cannabis propaganda coming out since the 1930’s, the people of America wanted possession to at least be decriminalized, if not outright relegalized. (It was legal until 1937 when it was made illegal. It needs to be relegalized.)
Richard Nixon reacted to this by convening
The Shafer Commisson to give him the "blue–ribbon" impressive and definitive report that marijuana is some horrible spawn of Satan…but they couldn’t.
We have carefully analyzed the interrelationship between marihuana the drug, marihuana use as a behavior, and marihuana as a social problem. Recognizing the extensive degree of misinformation about marihuana as a drug, we have tried to demythologize it. Viewing the use of marihuana in its wider social context, we have tried to desymbolize it.
Considering the range of social concerns in contemporary America, marihuana does not, in our considered judgment, rank very high. We would deemphasize marihuana as a problem.
The existing social and legal policy is out of proportion to the individual and social harm engendered by the use of the drug. To replace it, we have attempted to design a suitable social policy, which we believe is fair, cautious and attuned to the social realities of our time.
They reported what everybody else then knew – and we still know now: cannabis wasn’t much of a threat to anybody and by far the worse effect was getting busted and all the artificial legal consequences. It recommended decriminalization and Nixon wouldn’t have it. Into the trash it went and he started the current "War on Drugs" and created the DEA to ensure the people would not have free access to this plant. article continues
…I have been writing diaries and articles about cannabis relegalization at Kos for about 4 years. I have worked on this issue hard since about 2000. I pretty much have the facts straight but one amazing thing about cannabis reform is that facts basically mean nothing in this "debate". Nothing at all.
All Americans have grown up bathed in anti–cannabis propaganda. My parents grew up during the time the propaganda was invented, researched and refined. By the time I was 10 or 12 years old Nixon had become president and had declared war on the pot plant. And the GOP took reefer madness and made it part of their total political "philosophy".
Since the 1970’s the mainstream media has been the delivery system for all the highly emotionalized propaganda that passes for most people’s "knowledge" of cannabis. It’s been a torrent of lies, deceit, ill–will, and intentional psychological manipulation.
And it’s worked great: Americans can’t discuss cannabis facts for more than 4 minutes without belching out programmed responses: either the shrill histrionics of "what about the children?" (the idea that any effort to relegalize cannabis is a ploy to get kindergarten–aged children to shoot up on heroin) or the "pot shot": some half–funny "witticism" that people – particularly news reporters and broadcasters – think they HAVE to make every time this subject appears.
Nonetheless, the Debate about Reform has to move forward and Democrats will be the ones to accomplish this (whether they like it or not.) following are a few loosely interrelated issues. I say "loosely" because cannabis prohibition is so huge, it’s hard to grasp everything it influences, impacts, and skews. article continues
With more than 23,000 dues–paying members and more than 100,000 e–mail subscribers, the Marijuana Policy Project is the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the United States. Incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1995, MPP works to minimize the harm associated with marijuana — both the consumption of marijuana and the laws that are intended to prohibit such use.
MPP believes that the greatest harm associated with marijuana is prison. To this end, MPP focuses on removing criminal penalties for marijuana use, with a particular emphasis on making marijuana medically available to seriously ill people who have the approval of their doctors.
Before I launch into this little lecture I would like to make an assertion:
If people had just stuck to smoking pot we wouldn’t have had all the problems we’ve had all these years.
I just like to say that.
I have been wanting to address the issue of comparing marijuana to tobacco. This happens often and it is so stupid it drives me nuts to have to listen to it.
John Walters, "Drug Czar" for the Bush Administration, the worst presidential administration in human history, has often found it useful to compare and contrast tobacco and marijuana.
Is he really stupid, or does he have an agenda?
His purpose, of course, is to hold the Official Line, Reefer Madness. His job is to lie, to distort, to confuse, and to muddy the waters of public discourse. A typical Team Bush
crony.
While the man has overseen the
return of the reefer madness of yesteryear, it is the repeated comparison of cannabis with tobacco I wish to focus upon. article continues
©2007
NoHellBelowUs.com