Some Items of Interest
A Canadian man has been acquitted after killing a police officer whom he mistook for a burglar during a botched drug raid. Looks like the right verdict was reached for the right reasons. Meanwhile, here in the states, Cory Maye sits in prison and Ryan Frederick awaits a capital murder trail for doing essentially the same thing under the same circumstances.
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Speaking of Ryan Frederick, new evidence points towards a cover up by police. A bullet hole was found in his home and "primer residue" was found on the hands of the officers who conducted the botched raid on his home. Looks like they've been lying about not firing a weapon during the raid. This new evidence casts further doubt on the prosecution's theory that Frederick fired on police while they were still in his front yard. Bottom line, Ryan Frederick wasn't growing marijuana. He'd been burglarized days before. When he fired on the intruders, he thought he was defending his home. This whole murder trial is a sham and the more we learn, the clearer that fact becomes.
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John Stossel says Legalize Every Drug in The New York Sun. It's nice to see someone in the mainstream media who gets the issue – the whole damn thing – not just bits and pieces. Of course, anyone familiar with Stossel knows that he's been on the right page about this for a long time.
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Paul Armentano at NORML is really super exhausted from spending the whole week debunking the potent pot propaganda parade, but he summoned the energy to produce a final post on the topic. Paul calls our attention to a disgraceful CNN report falsely crediting increased potency for increased marijuana treatment, as though skyrocketing marijuana arrests and subsequent treatment referrals had nothing to do with that.
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Pete Guither has a thorough account of Senator Jim Webb's hearing this morning on the economic impact of the war on drugs. It was an important event that I was unfortunately unable to attend. I don’t think Pete was there either because he lives in Illinois, but he's got the story, so that's awesome and you guys should go read about it. This post about drug free zones is good too.
CNN Elizabeth Cohen is merely a propagandist for ONDCP
It's not surprising she would report marijuana that way. She still reports that it causes lung cancer even though the largest study ever conducted refuted that over a year ago.
Here's proof that the government has the media in their pocket when it comes to reporting on drugs. How come these people don't come to the Drug Policy Alliance Conference?
http://www.casacolumbia.org/templates/Conferences.aspx?articleid=514&zon...
DOUBLE JEOPARDY: SUBSTANCE ABUSE AND CO-OCCURRING MENTAL HEALTH DISORDERS IN YOUNG PEOPLE
$175, includes postage; $157.50 for CASA Members
Recorded October 18, 2007
This CASACONFERENCESM brought together the leading researchers and practitioners at the intersection of mental health disorders and substance abuse to explore the issue in detail. The 2-DVD set features keynote addresses by Nora D. Volkow, MD, Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse and Terry Cline, PhD, Administrator, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Panel discussions moderated by the nation’s leading print and television journalists, including Robert Bazell, Chief Science and Health Correspondent, NBC News; Tracy Smith, National Correspondent, CBS News; Carol Anne Riddell, Education Reporter, WNBC-TV, New York City, and Elizabeth Cohen, MPH, Medical Correspondent, CNN, examined the “double jeopardy” that untreated co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders pose for our nation’s youth.
As for drug free zones...
Just like our drug laws in general, drug free zones are useless. However, if you regulate the market like most porn shops, 99.9% of city land would be a drug free zone in the sense there would be no street dealers operating around schools and homes.
The war on drugs is crime on both sides.
Why is the Federal Government so negative on pot? They know that millions of Americans have used marijuana, and seem to like it -- much like people use alcohol. They know that there is a recreational user base for it, not much different to alcohol and tobacco. But despite the health risk of tobacco, and many studies against it, it is still free to use. Even though you never read among health or medical media news about a "marijuana madness" or many people going to doctors for any such side effects.
With the wild popularity among their people, they should be interested in hearing about or discovering data supporting safe, controlled marijuana legality. Governent should be interested in finding a fair balance between safety and freedom. Instead of spending money to build prisons, with some missing medical treatment or the healthy stripped of their lives because of stupid old-fashioned laws, the economy would improve, even if some money shifted to other things. It is a crime against humanity to maintain laws just so that people will not lose their jobs or industry. Why would anybody rather lock people up instead of making them a customer? The war on drugs misuses data, like making forced rehab evidence that their was a patient with a problem. The only information coming from the DEA is a negative information smear compaign, along with the puppet media. The drug war is an obvious onesided scam!
What is the government hiding or trying to cover-up? People don't have a right to make people slaves just so that can have their industry or trade?
Prisons are big business in AmeriKa
The reason we've seen the building of an excessive number of prisons in America in the past few decades is because the idiotic war on drugs led to mandatory minimum sentencing which led to the extreme number of prisons that have continuously been being built to house what is an extreme number of prisoners.
The U.S. leads the world in incarceration rates. Most of those incarcerated are imprisoned for drug charges. Mandatory sentences has kept prisoners incarcerated longer than every before in America and longer than anywhere else in the world. Therefore, even though incarceration rates might go down the prison populations do not.
But, if private prisons weren't big business there would be no one building prisons. What kind of statement does this make about America? Well, coming from a country that allowed Bush to steal the presidency not once but twice it just verifies the obvious stupidity and apathy that rules this nation.
Gore and Kerry cut from the same cloth, pander to scared voters
I hope you aren't one of those folks with the head screwed tight in the fudgesocket who thinks Bush ruined the world and Kerry was going to make everything alright. They both pander to grandma and grandpa who are scared and want tough laws on jaywalking and pot smokers. I agree with what you say about prisons though.
Everyone in the know realizes Cheney runs the country anyway and Bush is his puppet. I suspect when Dick isn't chugging beer and "peppering" the face of his hunting party, he's sitting in the basement of the white house, wearing a dark suit with a turtleneck and stroking a white cat. "So, Mister Bond, we meet again!"
The cloth is necessary for the lie
So Bush Jr. and company are "Austin Powers?" I do know that we live on an overpopulated planet and people are fighting to servive. There are only so many resources mother earth has to offer, especially without uspseting a natural balance.
So the USA has to spend on the future. It is very possible that within 10 years the world will be suffering from catastrophie. So do we fight to live or are we going to be forced to fight to live? That is the question. One can imagine the necessity of excess built prisons to house the unrest. Pot just gets in the way! That is why is is illegal to use worldwide, except for very few places.
Pot Prohibitionists Must Go!
People who prohibit pot are the same people who, over the last eight-or-more years, have made a career out of opposing environmental protection laws while assuring everyone that guzzling SUVs are a ‘lifestyle choice’ and that there will be plenty of cheap gas forever.
There can only be one solution. Marginalize or quarantine these people who prohibit pot, and the human species will have a better chance of surviving through controlling these same social pathologies that also led to global warming.
We don’t need more prisons. All we need is to release the drug convicts and replace them with pot prohibitionists. From there, it’s a simple process of attrition as the U.S. penitentiary/gulag system slowly shrinks to its optimum, antebellum size.
And the reason there are so few places on earth where pot is quasi-legal is due to alcohol/drug prohibitionist Harry Anslinger’s racist inclusion of cannabis as one of the drugs cited in the 1961 Single Convention. Pot doesn't get in the way.
Finally, any idea that pot is some decadent drug that affects the energy and resolve of a nation is a feature of fascist political theory, one that is historically correlated with Adolph Hitler’s brutal assault on the partying, freedom-loving, 1920s Weimer Republic and its pot smokers (See 2005 DVD Legendary Sin Cities: Paris, Berlin, Shanghai).
Giordano
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