"I'm FBI Special Agent Leatherface, open up!!!" (credit: CBS Boston)

(CBS) FITCHBURG, Mass. – The FBI accidentally raided the wrong apartment last Thursday, cutting through the apartment door of a central Massachusetts woman and her three-year-old daughter with a chainsaw, in a botched effort to seize guns and drugs.

No. When you send paramilitary urban assault troops into an apartment building to initiate violence with guns and chainsaws and someone innocent is victimized, that is not called a “botched effort,” that is called “collateral damage”.

Within moments, the chainsaw had cut through most of her door, and someone on the FBI’s arrest team kicked the rest of it in.

“That’s when I heard the clicking of a gun and I heard ‘FBI, get down!’, so I laid right on down.

And they said get your dog, so I got her and at the same time I am laying in her urine because she did pee on herself at the same time.”

[The woman] says the agents told her not to move, so, fearing she’d be shot if she did, she stayed put on the floor while her daughter screamed for her in the other room.

This woman is lucky her dog wasn’t shot.  Can you imagine laying in dog piss with an automatic weapon to your head while your toddler screams in terror at the black masked armored soldiers invading through your chainsawed front door?

Mistakes are inevitable in police work and when that work is an armed raid of a civilian home, mistakes cost the lives of cops, citizens, and pets.  This is why this tactic must be an absolute last resort.  We cannot accept this mayhem in the name of stopping people from doing drugs when we know this prohibition never stops people from doing drugs and creates most of the violence people attribute to drugs.

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1. Boston Freedom Rally goes off without arrests in the Boston Common last Saturday
2. Montana medical marijuana registry numbers down by 15% following new “repeal lite” law
3. Colorado ACLU backs the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol effort
4. Michigan’s Attorney General decides that landlords can outright ban medical marijuana in their properties

Daily Toker Tunes

• Roots Monday: Julia Lee and Her Boy Friends – “I Didn’t Like It The First Time (The Spinach Song)”

Grassroots Activism

• Kelly Maddy on the upcoming Cannabis Revival in Joplin, Missouri, this Saturday

Radical Rant

• Latest FBI arrest numbers show marijuana is once again the majority of the “War on Drugs”

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• Electric Tuesday: Melodramus – “Generation Same”

CelebStoner.com Entertainment Report with Steve Bloom, co-author of Reefer Movie Madness: The Ultimate Stoner Film Guide

• 22nd Annual Boston Freedom Rally takes place this Saturday
• Sarah Palin did cocaine and Michigan “Fab Five” basketball star Glenn Rice, according to new book
• HIGH TIMES loses to Wall St. Journal in NYMSL Championship

Patient Perspectives

• Federal medical marijuana patient Elvy Musikka discusses being harassed by Oregon State Police
• Mike Mullins and Jennifer Valley from Stoney Girl Gardens
• Joey Nieves from Ontario, Oregon’s 45th Parallel patient co-op

A 45 year-old Oregon woman has told police that raided her home last week that she has been sending pounds of marijuana to Boston. Elizabeth Saul from Grants Pass Oregon, a town in the Southern part of the state, admitted to police that she shipped marijuana to Boston in rented freight containers full of old furniture and made $300 dollars profit on each pound. She told them she has made about $125,000 this year from selling Oregon weed to the East Coast.

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Oregon Marijuana Makes It’s Way to Boston

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1. Utah Attorney General welcomes legislative action to create medical marijuana law, just completed colon cancer treatments and “understands”
2. Korean rapper Crown J. gets 8 months in Korean jail for using marijuana… in Atlanta, Georgia.
3. Michigan reaps $8 million in medical marijuana program profits in just two years
4. Grants Pass woman rolls over in Portland-to-Boston trafficking scheme

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• Roots Monday: Ian Moore Band – “Champagne and Reefer”

NORML Legal Committee

• Keith Stroup, NORML Legal Counsel and Founder, on Aspen Legal Seminar, Kentucky v. King, Washington State’s employment discrimination case against medical marijuana patients, update on federal legalization bills

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• Oregon legislators sneak 2X-4X fee increase on medmj patients into budget

Federal authorities are saying that they have busted a drug ring that was growing marijuana in California under the guise of medical use and selling it across state lines for inflated prices. Federal prosecutors in California unsealed an indictment on Monday that accuses six people of moving medical marijuana from farm fields in Fresno County to the Boston area for sale

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Medical Marijuana Growers In California Get Busted In Boston

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Hemp Headlines

1. T-Mobile sued for denying their network to text-messaging service that serves WeedMaps.com
2. Missoula man commits suicide when pushed by the local police to snitch on other medical marijuana growers
3. Arizona Cardinals owner ponies up $10,000 to defeat Prop 203, Arizona’s medical marijuana initiative

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• Roots Monday: Entire Cities – “Cop Song”

Cannabis Conversations

• San Francisco State University Associate Professor Martin Carcieri discusses the constitutionality of marijuana prohibition

Cannabis Community

• Live audio from Saturday’s Boston Freedom Rally with HIGH TIMES editor Rick Cusick, NORML New Jersey’s Anne Davis, and PhillyNORML’s Chris Goldstein

(Boston Phoenix) Even though it’s a crisp November day, the flower boxes of Mary Jones’s neat little bungalow are overflowing with brightly colored blooms. The bubbly mother of three has her utility vehicle parked in the driveway. Her hair is perfectly coiffed, her blond highlights glimmer in the late-fall sun. She looks like she could be a real-estate broker, and seeing the rock on her manicured finger, I imagine for a moment that her husband is a doctor or a lawyer. Mary would, in fact, be the ideal soccer mom, except that one of her now-grown sons played football, and rather than working in real estate, she grows and sells marijuana.

She’s Boston’s own real-life Nancy Botwin, the protagonist of the Showtime dramedy Weeds.

Mary is no small-time peddler simply adding to her income with a $20-bag here or there. She has dozens of plants, which she methodically harvests every eight to 10 days, scattered throughout the house. She sells her crop to a mature, recreational-using clientele.

Nor, however, is she a ruthless street dealer. Instead, she has a bit of a Robin Hood streak — she gives away her product to those in chronic pain or with severely debilitating disease who can’t otherwise afford it (even paying for delivery out of her own pocket). In doing so, Mary has signed on to an underground, global anti-pharmaceutical revolution that is gaining traction in this country, one which believes that the natural pain relief of marijuana is substantially more effective and less addictive than FDA-approved painkillers like OxyContin, to which the government, doctors, and Big Pharma typically steer sufferers.

Mary’s unlikely path to marijuana advocacy began when, while working in the medical field, a freak accident nearly cost her a leg, and left her with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD), a wretchedly torturous condition for which there is no cure. The National Institutes of Health describes RSD as “continuous, intense pain . . . which gets worse rather than better over time” and as an affliction in which patients can experience “unremitting pain and crippling changes in spite of treatment.”

“They said I’d never walk again,” she recalls.

She was then a patient of the Center for Pain Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and her pain-management treatment was so complicated that her doctors had to work together to coordinate a plan.

“I was on MS Contin and MSIR,” she says — noting two types of morphine, one quick-release and one controlled-release — along with an impressive list of other pharmaceuticals, including Percocet, Dilaudid, Valium, Prednisone, Phenobarbital, Flexeril, Lidocaine patches, Diazepam, Klonopin, and more. Not to mention the stool softeners, anti-nausea pills, and antibiotics for staph infections, all taken to offset her treatment’s side effects.

“I told my doctor [about nodding out at my son's reading group] and he said, ‘That’s good. That’s how we know it’s working. We want you to feel like that, so you’re not aware of the pain. That’s what pain management is for.’ ”

But she grew more and more frustrated with her walking-comatose-like state, until a doctor suggested that she try marijuana to help control the pain. The idea did not appeal to her at first. Since her Catholic high-school days, she’d thought smoking anything, even cigarettes, was “gross.” And she’d always been anti-drug, especially since becoming a mother. But she was desperately unhappy with how dysfunctional she felt while on the pills, so she gave pot a chance. It wasn’t long before she was making the transition from morphine to marijuana.

I spoke with her son Peter, now 19, who enthusiastically supports his mother’s journey from pill popper to pot user. “Before my mom started smoking, and she was on the pain pills, she was pretty zombied out,” he says. “She stayed in her room a lot. Marijuana helped her be a parent again.”

9/20/2009 -  Chris Goldstein

An estimated 30,000 people were crowded onto the Boston Common at the peak moment of the 20th annual Boston Freedom Rally on September 19th 2009.

That moment was 4:20PM ET.

The thousands celebrated freely under a landmark victory for cannabis prohibition reform. In 2008 Massachusetts decriminalized marijuana possession of less than 1/4 ounce by adults with a Ballot Initiative, Proposition 2. That means you can only get a NON-criminal ticket with a $100 fine for a pot violation. The decrim effort was won because of the hard work of the very same folks who organize the rally:  MASSCANN/NORML.

A Parks Services officer (who strangely had a thick eastern European accent) agreed that 30,000 seemed a likely estimate of the peak attendance.

A police officer, who did not wish to be named, said the department does not officially release crowd estimates for any event. But Boston Police confirmed that there were 3 arrests for distribution and over 100 citations issued for marijuana possession.

Keith Saunders, MASSCANN’s president, told me that over 50,000 people had probably walked through the grounds over the course of the day and encountered the message of marijuana legalization.

Overall, the police were civil although I saw numerous random searches and heard stories of many more. At past events there have been more than 150 arrests for pot possession… but not on Saturday. Without fear of arrest the crowd was polite and almost everyone I saw was openly enjoying marijuana.

An impressive line-up of bands and speakers appeared on two stages. Styles P, a big time reform supporter showed up and did a surprise set thanks to High Times Magazine. Because of some juggling to accommodate the last minute act, the countdown to 4:20 got squeezed. A sea of people were gathering before the main stage and filling in the large hill.

Steve Bloom of CelebStoner corralled the final 60 seconds  holding a clock up on stage and pointing as the hands came together. Looking out from the stage you could see huge clouds of smoke rise up from the crowd. There were dozens of spontaneous circles formed in a surreal organic collage of people. They cheered from across the rolling hills as giant 6-foot long joints were passed around.

Everyone smoked. There really was a quite visible haze over the entire crowd at 4:20. The sweet and fragrant odors of a wide variety of plant strains and hash drifted by, offering this interesting quilt of cannabis.

The crowd was extremely well behaved. There cannot be a finer exhibition of the positive effects of human cannabis smoking than large crowds of people doing it together. Without alcohol available at the event there were no fights, pushing or shoving. But with free cannabis consumption there was dancing, conversation and a genuinely happy atmosphere.

Personally, this was the most wonderful day for prohibition reform I have witnessed. The event itself; all of the people I met for the first time and friends to spend time with made this trip heartening, empowering and just plain fun! The locals really did treat me very well too.

Our country deserves this freedom that Massachusetts already enjoys.

I have seen Victory for Cannabis in Boston. It is sweet and green. It needs to be nationwide.

The first two pics were from my cellphone, this last one is from Derek at PhillyNORML. I’ll have some more blogging about the bands, speakers, backstage and social events from the Boston Freedom Rally tomorrow. Then its off to San Francisco for the NORML conference as I continue my Green September.

Play 9-17-07 AudioStash MP3
Also included: Speeches from the Freedom Rally Stage from Keith Saunders of MASSCANN/NORML, Danny Danko of High Times, Steve Hagar of High Times, Keith Stroup, Steve Bloom of celebstoner.com and music from Ben Scales.

I took this shot of Keith Saunders of MASSCANN in ’07