Showing posts with label cannabis prohibition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cannabis prohibition. Show all posts

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

WATCH: State Rep Says Weed Should Be Illegal Because It Makes Black People Crazy

marijuanaA Kansas lawmaker is under fire this week after channeling the 1930"s mentality on marijuana and claiming blacks are more susceptible to it.

Monday, December 25, 2017

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Melissa Etheridge Arrested For Having Cannabis Oil She Used to Help With Cancer

etheridge

It was reported this week that rock musician and cancer survivor Melissa Etheridge was recently arrested in North Dakota after police found cannabis oil on her tour bus.


The arrest took place on August 17 but was not publicized until TMZ broke the story yesterday. Like millions of people with cancer across the world, including myself, Etheridge has discovered that cannabis oil not only treats the after-effects of chemotherapy but also promote apoptosis, which prevents cancer from developing again.


In October 2004, Etheridge was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer and endured a lumpectomy with five rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. It is not clear what her preventative regimen has been this past decade, but it is safe to speculate that cannabis oil has played a role in her continued remission as well as treatment for pain and nausea.


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Etheridge looked confident after her arrest and can be seen with a huge grin in her mugshot photo. She pleaded not guilty to the charges against her.


Just weeks after her arrest, fellow rock musician Todd Rundgren was also arrested at the very same spot in North Dakota when police found two small vape pens filled with cannabis oil on his tour bus.



Cannabis oil is legal for medical patients who live in California, as Etheridge does, but the laws are still comparatively harsh in North Dakota, despite the fact that measures were recently passed in the legislature to start a medical marijuana program. As of now, North Dakota exists in a legal gray area because politicians are dragging their feet and bickering about how the program will be implemented.



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This situation is sadly common throughout the US. Even in my state of Maryland where I am fighting my cancer, medical cards are available so patients can avoid arrest, but the political process has stalled the establishment of dispensaries for over a year, forcing sick patients into the black market.


In the past several years, the science and strong anecdotal evidence proving the medical value of cannabis has continued to grow, especially in regards to cancer treatment. Just in this past year, we have reported on multiple incidences where studies have confirmed the healing power of cannabis, to the point where organizations tied to big pharma and the US government are now forced to reverse their position on the medicine.



Etheridge said in a recent article that she does not live a party-oriented lifestyle, but found that cannabis is one of the best medicines for a cancer survivor.


“Because I am a musician, people often assume that I must indulge in the fast-paced life that often comes with playing on the road. But they would be wrong. Coming up in the business in the 1980’s, I saw plenty of drugs, but it never really appealed to me. I’m not even much of a drinker,” she wrote in her article at newapproachmissouri.com.


She continued: “But when I was diagnosed with cancer in 2004, I found that there was one substance that helped me through: Cannabis. My doctors gave me what they called ‘dose dense’ chemotherapy, which is stronger than usual. They could prescribe that level of chemo for me because I was able to take time off work to fight my cancer full time. Unfortunately, the dose dense chemo made the side effects even worse. My friends told me that medical cannabis could help me handle chemotherapy, so I gave it a try. It worked even better than they said it would. Not only did it treat my nausea better than anything else I tried, it alleviated both my physical and emotional pain. I continue to use cannabis to treat the lasting gastrointestinal effects of the chemo and to help me get a good night’s sleep.”



Etheridge is scheduled to perform the national anthem at the Chiefs vs. Steelers game this Sunday to raise awareness and funds for the “Crucial Catch” campaign, with the goal of helping unknowing patients catch their cancer early.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

RIP Hugh Hefner—47 Years Ago this Playboy Helped Start a Cannabis Revolution

heffner

Hugh Hefner died at the age of 91 on Wednesday, and while he is most popularly known as the founder of Playboy Magazine, he was also a strong advocate for cannabis legalization, and his charitable organization provided the first funding grant for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.


The nonprofit organization, commonly referred to by the acronym NORML, was founded by Keith Stroup in 1970. At the time, he said he had reached out to a number of foundations asking for funding, only to be turned down because the concept of legalizing cannabis was not mainstream. However, Stroup said he got the idea to reach out to the Playboy Foundation when he was smoking cannabis with a group of lawyers who worked for Ralph Nader in Washington D.C.



“One of [Nader’s] young lawyers named John Esposito said to me, ‘Keith, have you checked with the Playboy Foundation?’ We were in the process at that point of sending funding proposals out to any foundation we could identify where we thought it might be possible that they would give us some funding. And frankly, on the first 8 or 10 we sent out, I didn’t get anything back but standard rejection letters. I hadn’t even been allowed to come and interview personally. So clearly, it was still considered by most foundations too hot to handle.”



Stroup said he figured there was no harm in reaching out to the Playboy Foundation, and when he did, he received a phone call from a representative saying they were interested. That phone call led to a meeting in D.C., which led to a meeting in Chicago with Hugh Hefner and the board of directors.


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“It was kind of a historic moment for NORML,” Stroup said. “Hefner almost immediately embraced the idea and certainly, although he was technically just chairman of the foundation board, you can imagine that since he owned 90 percent of the stock in the company that funded the foundation, he basically could do pretty much what he wanted.”


Stroup noted that Hefner was a cannabis user who began smoking as an alternative to alcohol. “Hefner had been someone who used to have been an alcohol drinker, but had given up alcohol some time ago, and had become a marijuana smoker,” Stroup said. “He had a personal interest in the issue that it should be legal, it’s better for people than alcohol.”



After the business meeting, Hefner and the Playboy Foundation offered Stroup a $5,000 grant for NORML—the first one he had been offered. Stroup said he was conflicted on whether he should accept the money at first, because he had received so many rejection letters that he pursued a traditional job, and had just been hired.




“I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to pass up this job opportunity for what was a $5,000 grant, and after the first couple of months we would have used that money up, and I wasn’t sure there would be any other money to follow, but the more I thought about it, I realized this is either something I believed in and wanted to take a risk with, or it wasn’t and the fact that someone was willing to put up some money suggested that maybe it was a risk worth taking, so I accepted their grant, I passed up the chance to take a traditional job again, and I never looked back.”



Nearly 50 years after its inception, NORML is now a thriving organization that is actively working towards its mission to “move public opinion sufficiently to legalize the responsible use of marijuana by adults, and to serve as an advocate for consumers to assure they have access to high quality marijuana that is safe, convenient and affordable.”


In a statement on Hefner’s death, Stroup described the original Playboy as a pioneer who helped awaken millions of Americans to the reality that cannabis prohibition is “a misguided and destructive public policy.”



“Hugh Hefner, or “Hef” as he preferred to be called, played a crucial role in the early days of NORML. At a time when most Americans were accepting the government’s “reefer madness” propaganda, Hef, through the Playboy Foundation, provided NORML with our initial funding in early 1971, and became our primary funder all during the 1970s. And by focusing attention in Playboy magazine on some of the most egregious victims of the war against marijuana smokers, he helped us convince millions of Americans that marijuana prohibition was a misguided and destructive public policy. Hefner was a fearless cultural crusader who believed deeply not just in the right to sexual freedom, but also in civil rights and the right to privacy. May he rest in peace.”



Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Gov’t Ruined 653,249 Lives Over Cannabis in 2016 Because 5 Corrupt Industries Paid Them To

cannabis

In the land of the free, citizens found in possession of a plant — that grows wild on every continent except Antarctica — can and will be kidnapped, caged or killed. In fact, in just the short time it took you to click this article and read this first paragraph, someone was just arrested for cannabis.


According to the most recent FBI statistics available, an American citizen is kidnapped and caged for cannabis — on average — every 48 seconds.


An estimated 653,249 American citizens — who harmed no one — had their lives ruined in 2016 for possessing this plant, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Crime In the United States (CIUS) report.


“Arresting and citing over half a million people a year for a substance that is objectively safer than alcohol is a travesty,” said Morgan Fox, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP). “Despite a steady shift in public opinion away from marijuana prohibition, and the growing number of states that are regulating marijuana like alcohol, marijuana consumers continue to be treated like criminals throughout the country. This is a shameful waste of resources and can create lifelong consequences for the people arrested.”


Arresting people for cannabis is good for business — police state and big pharma business, that is. If we look at who’s lobbying to keep cops kidnapping people for a plant, we see that it is money, and not morals, that motivates this issue.


The prison-industrial complex makes obscene amounts of money kidnapping otherwise innocent people and throwing them in a cage for possessing a plant. Big pharma is also scared to death of pot because it is a cheaper, safer, and often more effective solution to sicknesses than their chemical alternatives.


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According to a report out of US News, lobbyists work hard to secure for police departments millions of dollars in federal grants towards eradicating weed. Pharmaceutical companies compensate leading anti-marijuana researchers in order to keep their customers on painkillers over cannabis, which is cheaper. The prison-industrial complex would like to keep making money on building more prisons to fill with non-violent grass-smokers.


It’s not just cops and big pharma either, legal drug distributors in the alcohol and tobacco industries need to keep cannabis illegal in order maintain their monopoly on ‘taking the edge off.’


According to the report, the alcohol and beer industries have also lobbied for years to keep marijuana illegal because they fear the competition that legalized weed would bring. Howard Wooldridge, an anti-drug war activist and retired cop told the online publication Republic Report: “Marijuana and alcohol compete right today as a product to take the edge off the day at six o’clock.”


Despite the myriad of evidence showing the harmful economic and societal impacts of arresting people for cannabis, cops, prisons, big pharma, and the alcohol and tobacco industries continue to push for illegal weed. As they lie about arresting people for a plant in your best interests, the police state is wreaking havoc on liberty, freedom, and the economy. It is deadly too.



While there’s never been a documented overdose from cannabis, if the CDC calculated the number of deaths inflicted by police while enforcing marijuana laws, that number would certainly be shocking and could even be deemed a risk to public health. Marijuana is, indeed, dangerous, but only because of what can happen to you if the police catch you with it — just ask the 653,249 people who had their lives ruined for it last year.



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Nothing highlights the hypocrisy, immorality, and sheer idiocy of the drug war quite like marijuana prohibition. Here we have a medicine that kills cancer cells, saves the lives of countless epileptic children, heals broken bones, relieves pain, treats PTSD, is not dangerous, and exhibits a variety of other incredible benefits – yet the state will kill you over it.


Keeping cannabis illegal also creates more crime.



In the study, titled, “Going to pot? The impact of dispensary closures on crime,” researchers Tom Y. Chang from the USC Marshall School of Business, and Mireille Jacobson from The Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine, looked at what happens with the government forced medical marijuana dispensaries to close. What they found was immediately following a closure of a dispensary — crime rates went up.


“Contrary to popular wisdom, we found an immediate increase in crime around dispensaries ordered to close relative to those allowed to remain open,” Jacobson told Science Daily.


Also, in 2001, the Portuguese government decriminalized all drugs, and their crime rate dropped. 16 years later, drug use, crime, and overdoses have drastically declined in Portugal exposing the cruel reality of prohibition.


“Regulating marijuana for adults creates jobs, generates tax revenue, protects consumers, and takes money away from criminals,” Fox said on behalf of MPP. “It is time for the federal government and the rest of the states to stop ruining peoples’ lives and enact sensible marijuana policies.”


We agree.


The good news is that the tide is shifting. As MPP notes, there are currently eight states that regulate marijuana similarly to alcohol for adults, four of which voted to do so in November 2016. Marijuana possession is also legal for adults in the District of Columbia. Twenty-three states and D.C. considered legislation in 2017 to regulate marijuana, including in Vermont where the legislature approved such a measure before the governor vetoed it.



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As more and more states refuse to kidnap and cage marijuana users, the drug war will continue to implode. We must be resilient in this fight.



If doing drugs bothers you, don’t do drugs. When you transition from holding an opinion — to using government violence to enforce your personal preference, you become the bad guy. Please, for all that is good, don’t be the bad guy and do your part to stay on the right side of history.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Bombshell Study – Federal Cannabis Prohibition Major Cause of Premature Death in U.S.


The mythology behind the War on Drugs has been dealt another blow in the form of a study finding that medical cannabis, if legal nationwide, would prevent 23,500 to 47,500 premature deaths every year.


While the DEA continues to claim cannabis has “no accepted medical use,” medical science has actually been making leaps and bounds in understanding the plant’s medicinal properties and applying them. This is why 29 U.S. states have legalized some form of medical cannabis.


The range of conditions cannabis can treat—thanks to its ability to stimulate the body’s endocannabinoid system and reduce inflammation—is significant to the health of the population as a whole, as this study demonstrates.


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“Adverse effects of moderate Cannabis use on physical health are subtle and rarely fatal, while Cannabis use is associated with decreased rates of obesity, diabetes mellitus, mortality from traumatic brain injury, use of alcohol and prescription drugs, driving fatalities, and opioid overdose deaths…



Specifically:



“Marijuana use is estimated to reduce premature deaths from diabetes mellitus, cancer, and traumatic brain injury by 989 to 2,511 deaths for each 1% of the population using Cannabis.” This means “an estimated 23,500 to 47,500 deaths prevented annually if medical marijuana were legal nationwide.”



Cancer ranks among the top five leading causes of death, according to the CDC. Researchers say their analysis underestimates the real potential of nationwide medical cannabis, suggesting their estimation of preventable premature deaths would double if other causes such as “drunk driving, homicide, or fatal opioid overdose” were included.



We know from previous studies that opioid overdose deaths plummet in states with legal medical cannabis, and that cannabidiol (CBD) actually blocks the opioid reward in the brain—showing exactly how it treats addiction.



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The authors make no bones about the logical conclusion of their study:


Cannabis use prevents thousands of premature deaths each year, and Cannabis prohibition is revealed as a major cause of premature death in the U.S.


This adds to the numerous ways in which the war on drugs is really a war on people. Prohibition prevents access to medicine, fuels mass incarceration, steals from innocent people through civil asset forfeiture, props up the black market, and denies billions in economic opportunity.



As the opioid epidemic rages, premature deaths from opioids are sure to increase with continued federal prohibition. Congress goes out of its way to suppress cannabis from having any role in solving opioid addiction. Lawmakers stripped out all mention of medical cannabis in the Opioid Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, not even allowing a simple study of its efficacy.


Veterans returning from war zones with chronic pain and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are continually denied medical cannabis by lawmakers and the Veterans Administration. In turn, those who fight overseas wars of aggression for politicians must become criminals to obtain the medicine they need where pharma meds fail.


Even small advances are always under the threat by drug war crusaders and Big Pharma shills. Just yesterday, the House blocked an amendment—in place since 2015—that prevents Dept. of Justice from cracking down on legal cannabis states. If the amendment fails in the House-Senate committee, rabid drug warrior Jeff Sessions will get the teeth he needs to wage war against legal weed states. Prohibitionist groups such as Smart Approaches to Marijuana are urging the feds to “systematically shut down” the cannabis industry.




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The willful ignorance required by prohibitionists grows more astounding by the day. Maybe knowing that cannabis prohibition causes upwards of 40,000 premature deaths a year will cause at least a few to consider the facts, which lead to only one rational conclusion.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Mainstream Media Now Advocating ‘All Citizens’ Spend Time in Prison as ‘Service’ to Country

prison


Corporate media achieved a new level of absurdity last week, when Jesse Ball, writing for the Los Angeles Times, suggested every American be required to spend a stint behind bars every ten years as a veritable guarantee to improve conditions of incarceration in the United States.


In the piece titled, “Everyone should go to jail, say, once every ten years,” Ball writes,


“A notable demand that is made upon the citizens of the United States of America is that of jury duty. Although many despise, hate and avoid it, there is a general sense that the task is necessary. We believe a society is only just if everyone shares in the apportionment of guilt.


“To this demand of jury duty, I would like to add another, and in the same spirit. I propose that all citizens of the United States of America should serve a brief sentence of incarceration in our maximum-security penitentiaries. This service, which would occur for each person once in a decade, would help ensure that the quality of life within our prisons is sufficient for the keeping of human beings.”


Without foreknowledge on length of stay and other details, citizens would languish behind the same bars as convicted criminals under Ball’s proposal — albeit in a section separated from offenders, assumedly not to confuse jailers and inmates, or endanger anyone serving ‘incarceration duty.’


But Ball misses the point — feeding the elephant in the room of overcriminalization of daily life, excessive laws, and, worst by far of all, the normalization of incarceration as conditional to the American way of life — lecturing all of us to walk a mile in the shoes of the convicted rather than declaring the brazen failures of the Injustice System evidence enough, itself, for dismantling the whole dysfunctional mess.


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After all, according to the Prison Policy Institute, the United States now cages some 2.3 million of its roughly 326.5 million total people — the largest per capita incarcerated persons of any nation on the entire planet.



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An interplanetary traveler would logically conclude it a prison nation — or, at least, one astonishingly rife with thugs, murderers, thieves, and worse.


Even the more law-and-order, authoritarian among us could see the flaws evident in a system claiming freedom, while locking away proportionally more than even the dictatorial fascist regimes our troops putatively combat.


While undoubtedly posited from a place of compassion as a plea for ethics in imprisonment, Ball’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek proposal unfortunately evinces the frequency with which Band-aids are applied as a fix for gaping structural flaws which should otherwise condemn the system to demolishment.


But, worst of all, this proposition capriciously normalizes the American Incarceration State.



Consider how those 2.3 million souls wound up stuffed into the cramped confines of the nation’s myriad federal, state, and local facilities; or, worse — judging by a voluminous body of anecdotal accounts — one of the altogether notorious prisons-for-profit, managed by private corporations intent only on thrift in housing its human commodities to save the State some pennies.


Most of the convicted behind bars have committed nonviolent crime — but moralizing on personal vice and legislation enacted sanctimoniously against substances have exploded the nation’s prison population to alarming proportions.


A court or jury decision of guilt in no way can be characterized on par with ‘laws’ governing ethics and human rights — for, if a candid observation of inmate records were ventured, a sweeping sum could be said to have landed in prison by violating the State’s prohibition on the cannabis plant.


And not violently so.


Forgetting for a moment ‘the law is the law,’ to describe a society as just, which chooses to not only cement unjust ideas into law, but imprison violators of aberrant legislation — particularly in cases of medicinal use — must be the pinnacle of hypocritical pomposity, if not the telltale heart of a dying empire.


Sure, forcing (on penalty of prison?!) yet more behind bars to prove how base the conditions behind bars might actually assist the vocal calling to improve conditions behind bars, but if so many have been locked there for reasons only justifiable for the violation interned in the print of legal tomes, the plan is an exercise in pure futility.



Unless it simply normalizes prison life as a veritable inevitability — might as well prepare for the eventuality some offensive chunk of life will be wasted rotting between the torrid walls of a prison cell.


The irony, palpable.


No, we do not need to send the relatively innocent to prison to endure torturously foul food and varying degrees of inhospitability to prove locking people in cages does nothing to curb crime — indeed, the opposite is arguably true.


It’s the system, broken — not people’s compassion.


Juries convict based on flawed evidence, evidence omitted by technicality, and an embarrassing list of other inexcusable conditions accumulated on the books over centuries — and more laws and regulations find their way to the ledger every day.


They’re creating additional ways to make you a criminal — so, in that sense, Ball might be onto something.


‘Get ready for prison, dear young people, by the time you’re an adult, there won’t be a thing you can do without somehow breaking the law,’ the writer unintentionally asserts between the lines.


“I wonder,” Ball continues, “once all you citizens of the United States are passing in and out of prison on a regular basis, will the conditions there not seem singularly urgent? Just picture congressmen, priests, stock traders, truck drivers, people of every faith, color, description, all for once sharing in something.”


Sharing in the memory of peering out from inside prison walls isn’t conducive to solving the issue of mass incarceration.



Scrapping unjust, unethical, amoral, and otherwise ludicrous laws governing every conceivable aspect of daily life, however, is.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

NYPD Cops Brag About Tiny Pot Bust on Twitter — So the Internet Destroyed Them

nypd



With acute deterioration in public support and vociferous backlash against the State’s already-failed war on drugs, police departments nationwide should have grasped by now the perils of boasting about drug raids on social media — particularly when the booty consists solely of cannabis and cash.


Two NYPD cops from Queens, stern-faced before an insignificant seizure of weed in a post to Twitter, thus, are either obstinate braggarts, or hapless gluttons for punishment — and the Internet responded accordingly.


Officers Sardone and Winter of the 106th Precinct in Ozone Park stand in front of a table displaying a few dozen gram bags of pot, two machetes, and (perhaps as a cautionary tale) one can of Monster Energy drink, seem to appear concerned for the citizens they heroically rescued from, well, some weed dealer.


“One less marijuana dealer on our streets thanks to Officers Sardone and Winter,” reads the caption accompanying an equally clinical picture, posted from the official Twitter account of the New York Police Department’s 106th Precinct.





Not interested in letting the iconic dimebag bust image sink to the Internet’s dusty corners, or perhaps in the interest of increasing traffic to the precinct’s site, the pair of hero cops proceeded to tweet new versions shortly after the original first appeared.


Although the posts indeed received a smattering of neutral support, Twitter otherwise annihilated the bust as one farcical example of many throughout the duration of the wholly illogical and anachronistic war on drugs.




Volumes of research and findings from myriad scientific studies tout the healing and curative properties of cannabis and its derivatives, like cannabidiol (CBD) oil — yet, the DEA and Federal Government have remained bullheaded, failing to reschedule cannabis from its classification as a dangerous substance devoid of any potential medical use.


But that cult of a fervent few dedicated to destroying weed’s well-established counterculture acceptability has been backfiring in the current context of reputable medical research and loosening of state marijuana laws.


Fully 88 percent of people in the U.S. agree medical cannabis use should be legal, while 61 percent say, when it comes to recreational use, ‘legalize’ — the highest percentage of legalization supporters ever recorded by CBS News for that poll.



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Almost needless to say, that the pair of chest-puffing NYPD cops stood victorious over a few dozen grams of pot, two knives, and an energy drink, became an instant Internet goldmine — the keenest of which noted the drug war’s astonishing hypocrisy, summarized in this highly-polished yet substantively flat reminder it’s altogether illogical to continue the war on drugs.


Following are just a few examples of many in which Twitter users deflated unnecessarily large egos, while educating law enforcement about the pitfalls of enforcing unjust laws.