Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2008-04-10

We’ve got a special treat for you on the Stash today. We’re going to be speaking with Carlos Cardona from the band “Omega Project”. He’s got quite a tale to tell about the misadventures they’ve had with law enforcement. We’ll follow-up the interview with one of their tunes, “Grow to Eat”.

Then we’ll speak with Al Byrne from Patients out of Time with a review of the Fifth National Clinical Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics held last weekend in Pacific Grove, California.

We’ve got a lot to cover, so sit back and relax with your favorite strain and enjoy your NORML Daily Audio Stash…

I Am pleased to bring you THE OMEGA PROJECT and their musical hit “Grow and Eat”. Not just a jam band, but classic rock, R & B, reggae, funk - and I do mean the best of those genres - blended into the perfect festival band - and I do mean festival band - they have played Seattle Hempfest, Amsterdam’s Cannabis Cup and the Kauai Freedom Festival. The perfect community-festival band, they not only know how to jam their asses off, their lyrics prove they have something to say. Enjoy today’s interview with Carlos Cardona who plays guitar and lends his big voice to the band. Patience Ahonui slammin’ on rhythm guitar, bass and vocals and Frank Apra setting the pulse with his energetic percussion round out the Omega Project. Visit their website at Omegaprojectmusic.com to sample and purchase their amazing music and check out tour dates. If the Omega Project is playing anywhere near you, round up your friends and get ready for a party with a purpose. If you are lucky enough to be in Santa Cruz, Cali on 4/20 you can hear them play at the WAMM’S (Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana) 15th birthday party. Lucky indeed!

Presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton swung through Oregon this week.  My local weekly newspaper interviewed her about many subjects, including Oregon’s successful medical marijuana program.  It looks like she’s waffling a bit from her earlier statements that she’d end the DEA raids on medical marijuana states:

Willamette Week | “Twenty Minutes With Hillary” | April 9th, 2008
What would you do as president about the federal government not recognizing Oregon’s Medical Marijuana Program as legal?

We’ve got to have a clear understanding of the workings of pain relief and the control of pain. And there needs to be greater research and openness to the research that’s already been done. I don’t think it’s a good use of federal law-enforcement resources to be going after people who are supplying marijuana for medicinal purposes.

So you’d stop the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s raids on medical marijuana grows?

What we would do is prioritize what the DEA should be doing, and that would not be a high priority. There’s a lot of other more important work that needs to be done.

So does that mean that when the DEA finishes up with its important work, then the DEA should be tackling the low-priority issue of raiding medical marijuana states?

Look, Senator Clinton, it’s not a fiscal issue, it’s a medical issue and it’s a states rights issue.  It’s not a question of it being a poor use of federal resources; even if it were an efficient use of federal resources, it would be wrong, period.  Medical marijuana raids do not need to be re-prioritized, they need to be eliminated.

MinnPost - Medical marijuana: A politically risky vote?
Legislation that would allow the medical use of marijuana by chronically and terminally ill patients was sent to the Minnesota House floor Wednesday, setting up a prolonged floor debate and a politically sensitive vote in the final weeks of the legislative session.The Ways and Means Committee approved the bill on a 13-4 vote. Backers don’t expect the final House vote to be so lopsided, but that it will squeak through and go to Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who has all but promised a veto.

Rep. Tom Huntley, DFL-Duluth, chief House sponsor, acknowledges that in an election year when all House members must run, it could be a tough vote for some of his colleagues. “Sure, it could be used against you,” he said. Incumbents who support the bill could face charges by opponents suggesting they are soft on drugs.

Not to worry, said Tom Lehman, a lobbyist for health care organizations, including the Marijuana Policy Project and Minnesotans for Compassionate Care. Twelve states have passed medical marijuana laws and no legislator in those states has ever been defeated for his or her vote on that particular piece of legislation. “That’s fact,” said Lehman. “It’s a good vote in an election year.”

It’s time to get through to these final roadblocks - these governors, first in Connecticut, now in Minnesota - who ignore the overwhelming will of the voters and the bipartisan passage of medical marijuana bills in their legislatures. Let’s get on the phone, Minnesotans and everyone else, and politely tell Gov. Pawlenty that the people want medical marijuana to be legal:

Office of the Governor
130 State Capitol
75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
St. Paul, MN 55155

Telephone: (651) 296-3391
Toll Free: (800) 657-3717
Facsimile: (651) 296-2089
E-mail: tim.pawlenty@state.mn.us

German dealers ‘add lead to marijuana’ - World - theage.com.au
Drug dealers looking for extra profits apparently added lead flakes to packets of marijuana, inflating their value while causing dozens of cases of serious poisoning, doctors in Germany reported today.The lead made up, on average, 10 per cent of the material in the marijuana packets, boosting profits by about $US1,500 ($A1,613) per kilogram, Franzika Busse of University Hospital Leipzig reported.

“One package contained obvious lead particles; this strongly indicated that the lead was deliberately added to the package rather than inadvertently incorporated into the marijuana plants from contaminated soil,” the researchers wrote in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine.

The problem was discovered last year when the first of 29 patients, aged 16 to 33, started showing up in four Leipzig hospitals with abdominal cramps, fatigue, nausea and varying degrees of anemia. One was ill enough to be suffering from hallucinations.

It took eight weeks to uncover a common pattern: all were young, smoked, had body piercings and were either students or unemployed. All regularly used marijuana.

Three patients brought in their stashes. All samples tested positive for lead contamination, with one having lead flakes that were obvious under a microscope.

After two more weeks, an anonymous screening program for marijuana users uncovered 95 other people who needed treatment.

Busse’s colleague, Dr Michael Stumvoll, said in an email that about 200 people had now been identified. The screening was continuing, he said, although it did not appear that the practice was continuing among dealers.

“The medical community, including pediatricians, should consider adulterated marijuana as a potential source of lead intoxication,” the German team wrote.

Once again we see the sad but predictable consequences of prohibition. When your product is illegal, you don’t have to submit to any sort of government testing or licensing program. Unregulated markets will go to almost any lengths to maximize profits, whether it’s a Chinese company cutting corners by using lead-based paints on toys or a German pot dealer adding weight to the pot with lead flakes. On the other side of the coin, when a drug is legal and regulated, these things don’t happen; when’s the last time you heard of anyone going blind from drinking impure whiskey?

Our look at “Stoners in the Mist” got us a mention in the Washington DC gossip blog “Wonkette”.

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin didn’t go nearly far enough when he suggested that smoking pot makes you sell your children. Thankfully we have anti-drug organization Above The Influence, which has created a series of documentaries tracking the behaviors of savage pot smokers on “Cannabis Isle.” Watch as this old white man goes out of his way to stare at two teens smoking pot in a basement by themselves, then spends hundreds of millions of dollars on new technologies to crack down on them. The War on Drugs is in full swing on Cannabis Isle.

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