Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 10:23 am | By: Radical Russ
Make it more potent for the taste of it! Yeah, that's it!
When it comes to the popular recreational relaxant that is non-toxic and cannot kill you, its increasing potency is a cause for alarm:
(TIME Magazine) 25% of BC Bud is made of the psychoactive drug tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). In contrast, the pot that the hippie generation smoked in the 1970s had only 2% THC content, and most pot consumed in the U.S. today averages about 7% THC.
(Chicago Tribune) One thing has changed: Pot packs a bigger wallop now than it did in the ’70s. Today’s leaves are up to five times as potent. So, says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, still-developing brains, which are “more plastic, more sensitive to being modified,” are exposed to higher doses of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.
(ABC News) With stronger pot, emergency rooms have reported more associated accidents. Just this week, seven people were killed when the driver — drove the wrong way on a New York highway and collided head on with a pickup truck. Although the drivers family has disputed the results, toxicology tests showed high levels of alcohol and marijuana.
(New York Times) “It’s like drinking beer versus drinking whiskey,” said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a government agency and a strong opponent of legalizing marijuana. “If you only have access to whiskey, your risk is going to be higher for addiction. Now that people have access to very high potency marijuana, the game is different.”
(Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics) The new marijuana in the market place is not the 1 percent to 2 percent THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which is the psychoactive ingredient that produces the “high”. Today’s new cultivation methods are producing a drug with up to 30 percent THC, or 3,000 percent higher than the old 1960’s-1980’s available marijuana.
But if it is a popular recreational intoxicant that is toxic and can kill you, it’s increasing potency is a victory for connoisseurs and retailers:
(USA Today) A growing number of states are moving to allow higher alcohol content in beer, despite concerns from some substance-abuse experts.
Alabama and West Virginia have passed laws increasing the legal alcohol-by-volume cap for beer from 6% to as high as 13.9% this year. Similar efforts are underway in Iowa and Mississippi, two states with very restrictive limits on the sale of high-alcohol beer, said Sean Wilson, former president of Pop the Cap, North Carolina’s successful grass-roots effort that raised the state’s limit in 2005.
Vermont raised the cap to 16% and Montana to 14% last year.
The average alcohol content in beer is 4.65%, and in wine 11.45%, according to a 2002 study by the Alcohol Research Group in Emeryville, Calif.
Twenty states still place some kind of limit on the amount of alcohol in beer, Wilson said.
Paul Gatza, director of the national Brewers Association based in Boulder, Colo., said limiting alcohol content restricts flavors and styles because “you can’t put as much malt or other sugars in your beer as you may want to.”
Gatza said consumers of specialty or microbrewed beers, also known as craft beers, “don’t drink to get drunk. They drink to appreciate the flavors.”
Right… and I smoke pot because I appreciate the scents. This is a theme that goes back to the days of Nixon: the idea that people don’t drink to get drunk, they do it to socialize, but pot smokers are only smoking weed to get high. Tell you what, next time there’s a cocktail party, swap out all the beer for O’Doul’s, all the wine with grape juice, and all the cocktails with soft drinks, and let’s see how much the alcohol drinkers can socialize without getting a buzz on.
The reason alcohol drinkers can make this absurd statement is because they differentiate between the “socializing” (getting a buzz on) and the “getting drunk” (alcohol poisoning). They don’t conceive of a similar state for marijuana consumption. In their mind there’s “not smoking pot” and there’s “stoned out of your mind”, with no intermediate step. This is often because marijuana is illegal, so people who may have experimented a time or two did so under conditions that required smoking it all and smoking it quickly. They’ve never experienced an Amsterdam-like nice mellow joint followed by a productive day. So an increase in cannabis potency, to them, means the pot that used to get them “stoned out of your mind” will now get their kids “way stoned out of your mind”.
Meanwhile, having worked for fifteen years in bars every weekend, bars with parking lots full of cars that I can guarantee weren’t all driven by designated drivers, I can tell you that consumers of microbrews are doing it to get drunk. The guy who was pounding 4% beers at $2 a glass will be more than happy to pound 16% beers at $5 a glass, knowing that his $20 in beer money may only get him four microbrews compared to ten tap beers, but he can get drunker quicker and take fewer pee breaks for the effort, and the beer tastes better.
Isn’t it amazing? Here we have a drug we know kills 35,000 people a year directly from ingestion and another 40,000 due to its effects, a drug that is proven to cause serious harm to every organ in the body, a drug at the heart of a vast majority of domestic abuse cases, crimes, and assaults, and not only are states deciding to allow it to be up to four times more potent, but the marketers of the drug are boasting that it also tastes better and the increased potency doesn’t matter. But marijuana that kills no one, is non-toxic to cells and organs, and brings people together in peace and communion, when that becomes up to four times more potent it is serious cause for alarm.
I guess we better not tell them that the marijuana tastes better these days.
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 4:19 pm | By: Radical Russ
I know this is bound to shock you, but there is some Reefer Madness in Alabama. This latest epidemic is courtesy of Robert DeWitt, writing in the Tuscaloosa News.
(Tuscaloosa News) America’s drug laws sprang from the social problems caused by unregulated drug sales. Powerful narcotics like cocaine and heroin were sold over the counter during the 19th century and addiction became a nationwide problem. Enforcement usually involved society’s fringe elements or dregs until the 1960s counter-culture movement made pot and LSD its mascots.
That’s most certainly not true. In the 19th century you could buy any drug you wanted and there was about 1% of the population who had an addiction problem. Today all those drugs will get you thrown in jail and we have about 1% of the population with an addiction problem.
The most recent shift in attitudes seems to me as much a product of weariness with the war on drugs. Federal state and local agencies pour billions into enforcement and the problem seems to grow every year. The taxpayers bear the burden for a growing prison population and the attitudes of the people convicted never seem to change. It seems like an exercise in futility.
I have nothing to gain from the legalization of drugs. I have no desire to venture beyond the bounds of 12-ounce cans of American-style lager and the occasional gin and tonic, margarita or bloody mary.
In other words, you don’t care about marijuana legalization because your choice of a much more dangerous drug is already legal.
I smoked pot six to eight times in my college days and never liked it. It always left me with an unpleasantly disconnected feeling that I compared to being dipped in candle wax. So I can’t in any way empathize with people who want to smoke legal marijuana.
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 3:28 pm | By: Radical Russ
The New York Times has a nifty interactive map based on data from the 2006-2007 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health (more data here). It provides a drop-down menu to choose which dataset you’d like, which I naturally used to choose “Percent of people 12+ who have used marijuana in the past year”. Based on that information, your Top Five Stoner States are:
Rhode Island (16.12%)
Vermont (15.75%)
Alaska (13.79%)
Oregon (13.12%)
Colorado (12.99%)
Surprised that California isn’t in that list? Me, too. I’m not at all surprised by Vermont, Alaska, Oregon, and Colorado, but stunned that Rhode Island came in at #1. I’d caution that this represents everyone from the once-a-year-at-a-concert toker all the way through the daily Stasher. If frequency and amount used were considered, I’d be willing to wager we here in Oregon are, uh, higher than #4. Curious about your Bottom Five?
Utah (7.17%)
Iowa (7.32%)
Mississippi (7.79%)
Texas (7.92%)
Alabama (7.96%)
That #1 result for Utah shouldn’t surprise anyone with its majority Mormon population that even rejects coffee drinking. Another category where Utah is number one is consumption of Jell-O, which was named the official state snack. Oddly enough, the one time Utah lost its Jell-O crown was when Iowa briefly overtook them. So I wonder, is there some sort of yin/yang thing going on between cannabis and gelatin snacks? If you’re too high does it make it tough to follow the Jell-O recipe, or is it that you get such munchies you don’t have time to wait for Jell-O to set? By the way, does anybody have a recipe for ganja Jell-O; maybe that’s the solution?
I also thought it would be interesting to look at the Top Five States for Binge Alcohol Drinking:
North Dakota (32.02%)
Wisconsin (28.84%)
Minnesota (28.75%)
South Dakota (28.34%)
Rhode Island (27.92%)
Apparently Rhode Island is the place to get your drink on and your smoke on. But for the other Top Five Stoner States, binge drinking rates fall somewhere in the middle of the country from Oregon (21.71%) and Alaska (22.74%) toward the lower range and Vermont (25.57%) and Colorado (26.15%) toward the upper range. Unsurprisingly, Utah (15.64%) is at the bottom of this list as well. I suppose if Jell-O vodka shots aren’t bumping that number up, ganja Jell-O won’t likely work, either.
Remember Principal Ricky Nichols from Moulton High School? You know…the one who put a NARC in his small high school and caught a teen boy selling dime bags to his friends? Nichols even participated in the raid at the boys home. That boy was Webster Alexander and through my efforts and the efforts of magazines like Cannabis Culture, High Times, and Rolling Stone and local media coverage his sentence was reduced from 26 years in an Alabama state prison to one year in the local county jail.
After that former sheriff deputy, part time national guardsman, and sometimes high school principal Ricky Nichols went off to serve two tours in Iraq. When he came back he decided that high school kids smoking pot were terrorists and instituted Operation Bounty Hunter where he would pay students $100 to snitch on each other.
Somebody cue John Lennon… instant karma’s gonna getcha!
(Montgomery Advertiser) MOULTON — A former East Lawrence High clerical aide who is married to the school’s principal has turned herself in after allegations that she gave alcohol and marijuana to a 16-year-old student and had sex with him, authorities said.
The student said in a statement to authorities that he and Nichols also had sex several times between March and June at the Nichols’ home.
Ricky Nichols said he didn’t know about any of the allegations until about a month ago when told by the boy and his mother.
What’s the emoticon for schadenfreude? And what’s with all the older women in high schools bedding teenagers and giving them weed? And why was I not informed about this in 1984?
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 10:16 am | By: Lynnette
Thank you for contacting me with your views concerning the legalization of marijuana. I appreciate your comments and I welcome this opportunity to share my thoughts.
As you know, marijuana is currently considered a controlled substance in the United States and the purchase, possession, use, sale, or cultivation of this drug is prohibited by federal law. Supporters of legalizing marijuana contend it can be effective when treating medical conditions and argue that resources are unnecessarily spent enforcing the federal ban on the drug. In response, several states have recently approved marijuana use for medical purposes or have taken steps to decriminalize its possession.
Recently, Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts introduced two bills regarding the medical and personal use of marijuana. The Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act, H.R. 2835, was introduced on June 11, 2009. This legislation would re-classify the drug as a schedule II substance, which would allow marijuana to be used for medical purposes. He also introduced the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act, H.R. 2943, on June 18, 2009. This legislation would eliminate most Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to 100 grams of marijuana for personal use. Currently, both bills are before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
While I am a proponent of fiscal responsibility and the elimination of wasteful spending, I do not believe that the legalization of marijuana is an effective approach to our health and budget issues. Also, I will not support legislation that encourages any form of drug use and compromises the safety of our children. We must keep our streets safe and promote healthy lifestyles through our actions.
Again, thank you for contacting me. I appreciate your thoughts and value your input. Please do not hesitate to contact me or my office regarding this or any other matter that is important to you.
Sincerely,
Bobby Bright
Member of Congress
Question: Since we’ve spent $7 billion annually on enforcing marijuana laws and the net result has been that 84% of our children have “easy” or “fairly easy” access to marijuana and 22 million Americans will smoke marijuana this year, do you feel marijuana prohibition is fiscally responsible and not “wasteful spending”?
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Warren Edson from NORML Legal Committee and Colorado NORML reporting on Colorado Board of Health hearing and the rapid growth of dispensaries and registered patients in the state.
Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 2:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
Sheriff Gene Mitchell said a Huntsville teenager, who gave birth to a child in a bathtub at a Lawrence County residence, has been arrested after the child tested positive for marijuana.
Mitchell said Kimberleigh Ann Duffey, 19, 6313 Marsh Ave., Huntsville, has been arrested for chemical endangerment of a child.
“We were notified by the Lawrence County Department of Human Resources after the positive test,” Mitchell said.
He said the child was born at a residence in Lawrence County near the Trinity community in December. The sheriff said DHR has take custody of the child.
“It’s a reckless and selfish act for a mother to use drugs while pregnant,” Mitchell said.
Duffey is being held in the Lawrence County Jail on bail of $15,000.
OK, so we separate a newborn infant from her young mother for “chemical endangerment” from a chemical that is non-toxic and not proven to cause serious harm to the infant. Cannabis has been used since the dawn of time by expectant mothers for relief from the nausea of morning sickness and treating general pain and is safer than anything else she could take for the same symptoms. And why do you suppose the woman was giving birth at home in a bathtub instead of a hospital; could it be that she feared hospital staff would detect the marijuana and take her child?
Meconium (the dark, tarry material passed from the neonate’s rectum in the first days after birth until milk or formula-based stool appears) is the specimen of choice for assessing in utero exposure of the neonate to maternal drug abuse
Meconium is preferred over urine for testing
Meconium documents multiple use over an extended period of time, covering the last 4-5 months of pregnancy
Urine testing can only indicate drug use over the last 1-10 days, depending on the drug
Cannabinoid (marijuana)
Negative effect on attentional behavior and on visual analysis/hypothesis testing
No effect on global IQ
Now compare that to the effects it lists for cocaine, opiates, amphetamines, and benzodiazepenes, which include “intracerebral hemorrhage, small neonatal head size, reduced birth weight, fetal death, ADHD, tremors, and seizures” for the infant and “complications during pregnancy, premature labor, and ruptured uterus”.
Is society or that infant better off being put in foster care and having the young mother go through life branded as a “drug criminal” and “child abuser”?
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 10:55 am | By: Lynnette
Thank you for taking the time to contact me. I welcome the opportunity to respond to the issues that are important to the people of North Alabama.
In your message, you express support for judicial drug reform. Specifically, you would like to see our nation change its policy regarding the use of marijuana. A bill that might interest you is H.R. 5843. This legislation, which was introduced by Rep. Barney Frank in the 110th Congress, would eliminate federal penalties for the personal use of marijuana. Currently, H.R. 5843 has not been introduced in the 111th Congress. Should the House of Representatives consider this bill, I will remember your concerns.
I appreciate your views on this issue. Sharing your opinions on legislation will help me better serve the people of North Alabama.
Sincerely,
Parker Griffith
Member of Congress
The office of Representative Parker Griffith of the 5th District of Alabama
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 10:35 am | By: Lynnette
Thank you for contacting me regarding H.R. 5843, the Act to Remove Federal Penalties for the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults.
As you may know, H.R. 5843 would decriminalize marijuana sale, possession, and personal use under federal law. I remain consistently opposed to legalization or decriminalization of illegal drugs. Having been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Judiciary Committee, H.R. 5843 currently awaits further action.
Though we do not agree in this instance, I am glad you have taken the time to contact me. Please do not hesitate to do so in the future if you have concerns about this or any other issue. With kind regards, I am
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Loretta Nall with an interesting tale of President Obama’s college friend, Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama, asking people online during his gubernatorial campaign about which policies they’d like to see enacted, much like Obama’s “Open for Questions“.
RevRayGreen: MASS TWEET THIS -@ChuckGrassley Truth is Chuck you follow Nixon's CSA full of reefer sadness. btw Chuck, Marijuana is not a drug.
RevRayGreen: @ChuckGrassley http://bit.ly/55Ejsi Truth is Chuck you follow Nixon's CSA full of reefer madness. btw Chuck, Marijuana is not a drug.
SneakerPimp: one last thing Puff puff pass to any one who wants it
SneakerPimp: i wanna here about the imminent MiniSpof sounds like time for some
SneakerPimp: im estatic and excited for NSL today.
SneakerPimp: mountain time wake n bake
SneakerPimp: oh yea also wake n bake
SneakerPimp: its central im high as a kite everybody
SneakerPimp: ill grab that WUD
WakeUpDead: @Russ, I dont think that wireless is going to work out for the show, it was choppy and studdered just like last week. Hardline may be the only way. Puff [...]
WakeUpDead: A MINI Spof, Lock up your Weed, in 18 years that is. Really Man congrats! Greatest days of my life when my kids were born, hell yeh, great news [...]
BenJaMin: Late night Stash!!!
SneakerPimp: heres a bong rip for spof
RevRayGreen: errr test over....
RevRayGreen: on hold..
RevRayGreen: @RR I'll try and lob a call to you.....
SneakerPimp: where is the first field of cannabis gonna be?
SneakerPimp: !
Radical Russ: Breaking News: MrSpof's wife's water just broke! A MiniSpof is imminent!
SneakerPimp: oh russ its not my fault that i dont understand choppy word:stoned:
SneakerPimp: @Mrspof congratulations tell us all about it tommrow
Radical Russ: OK, test over. Sorry. Only needed a half hour. Be back tomorrow afternoon.
slash5city: don't forget to watch CCS live on u-stream 8 pm west
thaistik: Local Crime Stoppers notice.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Pot shop burglars sought
Crime Stoppers is looking for information on the suspects who police say burglarized a medical marijuana dispensary and stole cash, drugs [...]
Marijuana-Related Health Costs Minimal Compared To Those Of Alcohol, Tobacco; California Medical Association Says Pot Prohibition Is A "Failed Public Health Policy"; Oregon: State NORML Affiliate Opens First 'Cannabis Café'. […]
American Medical Association Calls For Scientific Review Of Marijuana's Prohibitive Status; Dutch Marijuana Use Lower Than European Average, Study Says […]
"Truth In Trials Act" Reintroduced In Congress; Maine: Voters Approve Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Measure; Colorado: Breckenridge Voters Overwhelmingly Decide To End Pot Penalties. […]
Some of the nation’s top athletes discuss why today's pros are turning to cannabis — and away from alcohol and painkillers — off the field, and question why pro sports leagues are continuing to sanction those who do. Moderator: Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com * Toby Grear, MMA fighter * Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmm […]
Cannabis Law Reform's Missing Link: Law Enforcement Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper; LEAP and NORML Advisory Board; Author of Breaking Rank Putting the Mexican Cartels Out of Business Mexican drug cartels now employ over 100,000 soldiers and are responsible for nearly ten thousand deaths per year. Their largest source of income is marijuana. […]
Not Your Father’s Woodstock Booze: States push for higher potency beer
sounds like time for some 
mountain time wake n bake 
don't forget to watch CCS live on u-stream 8 pm west 
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