Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 6:54 am | By: Radical Russ
WASHINGTON (Huffington Post) — The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors Monday.
Two Justice Department officials described the new policy to The Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws.
The new policy is a significant departure from the Bush administration, which insisted it would continue to enforce federal anti-pot laws regardless of state codes.
A three-page memo spelling out the policy is expected to be sent Monday to federal prosecutors in the 14 states, and also to top officials at the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The memo, the officials said, emphasizes that prosecutors have wide discretion in choosing which cases to pursue, and says it is not a good use of federal manpower to prosecute those who are without a doubt in compliance with state law.
At the same time, the officials said, the government will still prosecute those who use medical marijuana as a cover for other illegal activity. The memo particularly warns that some suspects may hide old-fashioned drug dealing or other crimes behind a medical marijuana business.
In particular, the memo urges prosecutors to pursue marijuana cases which involve violence, the illegal use of firearms, selling pot to minors, money laundering or other crimes.
The House began debating a bill (The Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Bill) Thursday that dances on almost every nerve in the social conservative body politic, touching on everything from abortion to needle exchange, gay and lesbian rights, charter schools and medical marijuana.
“We strongly oppose these changes,” declares the Republican committee report. “We do not believe increasing the availability of abortions or medical marijuana will improve the District of Columbia.”
Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting delegate from the District, took GOP members of Congress to task in their presumption to assert authority over D.C. home rule.
“Your lip service to local control, the time for that has run out,” she said. “We have profound disagreements on some issues, from abortion to vouchers. Go home and deal with them there. Allow us to deal with these issues in our own way as a local jurisdiction. I appreciate that the Rules Committee has indeed respected our citizenship and I demand that other members of Congress do so as well.” – The Huffington Post
So, is medical marijuana coming to the District? Stay tuned ..
Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 7:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
(Huffington Post) California’s state finances have gone to pot, and that’s what it should use to pay its employees.
Right now the state is issuing I.O.U.’s to those who work for it. Sacramento says they are worth the paper they’re printed on, but most Californians know that’s true only if they are used to roll joints.
The state’s key available assets are in its farms and fields….and in its prisons and legal system.
Medical marijuana is legal in California. Estimates put last year’s traffic in prescription-approved pot at around a billion dollars. If the state were properly organized to tax that and non-medical marijuana — whose dollar volume is many times greater — it might actually have enough money to pay its employees.
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Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 12:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
(Huffington Post) In an about face, the United Nations on Wednesday lavishly praised drug decriminalization in its annual report on the state of global drug policy. In previous years, the UN drug czar had expressed skepticism about Portugal’s decriminalization, which removed criminal penalties in 2001 for personal drug possession and emphasized treatment over incarceration. The UN had suggested the policy was in violation of international drug treaties and would encourage “drug tourism.”
But in its 2009 World Drug Report, the UN had little but kind words for Portugal’s radical (by U.S. standards) approach. “These conditions keep drugs out of the hands of those who would avoid them under a system of full prohibition, while encouraging treatment, rather than incarceration, for users. Among those who would not welcome a summons from a police officer are tourists, and, as a result, Portugal’s policy has reportedly not led to an increase in drug tourism,” reads the report. “It also appears that a number of drug-related problems have decreased.”
“The International Narcotics Control Board was initially apprehensive when Portugal changed its law in 2001 (see their annual report for that year), but after a mission to Portugal in 2004, it “noted that the acquisition, possession and abuse of drugs had remained prohibited,” and said “the practice of exempting small quantities of drugs from criminal prosecution is consistent with the international drug control treaties,” reads a footnote to the report.
Also for the first time, the report addresses legalization, but argues against it by writing, “Why unleash a drug epidemic in the developing world for the sake of libertarian arguments made by a pro-drug lobby that has the luxury of access to drug treatment?” Unfortunately, that perception exists because it is a report on drugs, not cannabis alone. It would be laughable to exclaim that legalizing marijuana alone is unleashing a drug epidemic in the developing world. Considering how 47% of all drug arrests in America are for cannabis and a large proportion of funds expended worldwide on drug prohibition are spent on cannabis eradication and prohibition, legalizing marijuana would give drug control offices worldwide more resources to deal with the addictive drugs that are unleashing a drug epidemic in the developing world.
One thing we desperately need to do as reformers is to decouple “drugs” from “cannabis”. We also need to emphasize that “legalization” is a very broad term. We need to point out that both morphine and aspirin are “drugs” and both “legal”, but we regulate them very differently. Beer and Bacardi 151 are both “legal drugs”, but you can get one in any supermarket and the other one only at the adults-only liquor store. Alcohol is federally “legal”, but in California you can get spirits in the supermarket, in Utah you’ve got a ton of hoops to jump through, and in some counties in America, you can’t get it at all.
So when we are calling for “marijuana legalization”, it doesn’t mean that we want heroin and crack sold in convenience stores, it doesn’t even call for marijuana to be sold in convenience stores, it doesn’t even mean your local government has to allow marijuana, period. We just figure if we can come up with a regulatory system that allows adults to purchase and responsibly enjoy Bacardi 151 rum, we should be able to regulate something far less dangerous.
Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 2:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
I’ve always said that medical marijuana is a beautiful thing. If I believe that all people have a right to use cannabis, then of course sick people have the same right and should be given the first place in line.
I’ve also said that I hate the line “I’m a patient, not a criminal” because that defines me, the healthy person, as a criminal. I cannot accept that a medical marijuana user sharing a joint with me equals a “patient” and a “criminal”. It’s the same joint, so how is my relative healthiness a crime?
Medical marijuana is a double-edged sword to me. It has been invaluable in opening up people’s minds about cannabis and its uses. It has afforded the kind of political victories for legalization that no other strategy has (and sorry, medical folks who dislike “legalizers”, medical marijuana is legalization.) It has, without a doubt, saved tens of thousands of lives and made hundreds of thousands of lives more bearable.
However, I fear that the medical marijuana strategy may have outlived its usefulness. The medical marijuana bills this year in Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, and now an Arizona initiative are becoming more restrictive. After a dozen years of medical marijuana success, defined as “the sky didn’t fall when we legalized marijuana for sick people”, bills and initiatives should be getting more relaxed, not stricter; more inclusive, not less; and more conditions covered, not fewer. With polls consistently showing mainstream support increasing in states with medical marijuana and holding steady in the states without, medical marijuana bills and initiatives should be getting better, not worse.
What I fear is that the public’s mindset is moving from “marijuana is a deadly addictive gateway drug whose users should be punished” to “marijuana is a powerful medicine that should be used only under strict controls and supervision”. The most recent bills take away the right of a patient to grow their own medicine, substituting instead requirements that medicine come only from dispensaries over which the state maintains a monopoly. They’ve pared down the list of “qualifying conditions” to the point where only the gravest ill, the terminal cases with less than six month to live, who’ve tried and had no success with all the other pharmaceutical drugs, only they have any access. This upcoming Arizona initiative will even electronically track how much medical cannabis a patient purchases and require criminal background checks and fingerprinting that will be forwarded to the FBI!
As fewer and fewer patients qualify for medical cannabis under new, tighter laws, pharmaceutical companies continue to derive and patent cannabinoid compounds and prepare them for dose-regulated delivery by spray, inhaler, cream, and pill. They’ve used their lobbying power for decades to oppose nature’s finest medicine, the biggest threat to their market for benzodiazepenes, NSAIDs, and opioids, because they couldn’t slap a bar code and a 250,000% markup on pot. Soon they will be able to provide all these patients with all the benefits of medical cannabis, but without the pesky “high” and the ability to thwart their profits by growing it themselves.
(Huffington Post) According to USA Today in 2005, there were 1,274 registered pharmaceutical lobbyists in Washington, D.C. — more than two for every member of Congress. In 2003, $143 million was spent on lobbying activities by the Pharmaceutical industry. There are more lobbyists from pharmaceutical than any other industry trying to bend legislators’ ears.
This is big business, and that means that your health care is not in the hands of people who really want to help you, but in the hands of people who view you as a market.
Caveat emptor. You expect to beware in a used car lot. But buying a lemon auto is not nearly as likely to kill you as prescription medicine. Approximately 43,000 people died in car crashes in the U.S. in 2004, and the rate has been declining every year since. 100,000 people die in the U.S. every year from properly prescribed and properly administered prescription drugs, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Florida Medical Examiners concluded that three times more people die from prescription medicine as die from illegal drugs.
What I fear is dispensaries becoming pharmacies and cannabis becoming another pharmaceutical and those lobbyists turning that $143 million toward enacting horribly restrictive medical marijuana laws that preserve their profits by banning home growing. Medical marijuana is beginning to steer marijuana law reform toward treating cannabis like codeine and away from treating cannabis like Coors Light. Whether you and I are busted because we’re “dopers smoking an illegal drug” or because we’re “recreational prescription cannabis abusers”, we’re still busted.
The beauty of medical marijuana is that people can cheaply and easily care for themselves. That’s also threatening to the health care model as it is run today, because cannabis violates that need for the middlemen and bureaucracy to receive treatment. I don’t need to see the doctor every so often to have him re-approve my prescription and I don’t need to see the pharmacist to fill it up. I can grow it and use it when I need it. It can’t kill me so I can’t take too much. It can’t addict me so I don’t need supervision. It doesn’t alter my perceptions and actions to the point that I need strict regulation. (In a sense I liken it to Martin Luther nailing up his protest of the Catholic Church to the church door on Halloween of 1517 – we don’t need intermediaries, we can find our salvation ourselves!)
But now we’re seeing these new bills and initiatives requiring more visits with the doctor, requiring the cannabis to come from dispensaries, and strictly documenting how much is to be used. Cannabis is being forced to fit into the paradigm of health care for profit with all the intermediaries, bureaucracy, markups, and restrictions. Once it is locked into the health insurance – pharmaceutical – medical complex, legalization for you and me will be farther away than ever.
This is why I think the next eighteen months are crucial in marijuana law reform. We’ve never had higher support for legalization, in part due to the economy. A state needs to break through with legalization for you and me, before the economy begins to recover, before cannabis pharmaceuticals gain widespread approval, before a half-dozen more states enact increasingly restrictive medical marijuana laws, and before cannabis becomes so ingrained in the public’s mind as a medicine that we can’t get them to accept it as a social intoxicant.
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 12:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
NEW YORK (Huffington Post via AP) — The savage drug war in Mexico. Crumbling state budgets. Weariness with current drug policy. The election of a president who said, “Yes _ I inhaled.”
These developments and others are kindling unprecedented optimism among the many Americans who want to see marijuana legalized.
Doing so, they contend to an ever-more-receptive audience, could weaken the Mexican cartels now profiting from U.S. pot sales, save billions in law enforcement costs, and generate billions more in tax revenue from one of the nation’s biggest cash crops.
Said a veteran of the movement, Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance: “This is the first time I feel like the wind is at my back and not in my face.”
“For the most part, what we’ve seen over the past 20 years has been incremental,” said Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief now active with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “What we’ve seen in the past six months is an explosion of activity, fresh thinking, bold statements and penetrating questions.”
“The notion that we have to keep something completely banned for adults to keep it away from kids doesn’t hold up,” said Bruce Mirken, communications director of the Marijuana Policy Project.
As for Obama, the activists don’t expect him to embrace the cause at this point.
“Obama’s got two wars, an economic disaster. We have to realize they’re not going to put this on the front burner right now,” said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, or the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “But every measurable metric out there is swinging our way.”
Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 8:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
Wayne Kramer’s post on returning to Sing Sing prison to perform a concert with Tom Morello, Jerry Cantrell, Billy Bragg, Perry Farrell, and other musicians:
(Huffington Post) The Sing Sing show was a bonus. To say it was memorable would be a massive understatement. As would be understating the importance of reaching out to the people on the receiving end of the greatest failure of social policy in America’s domestic history.
You would have to be living on the moon to not know what a disaster the “War On Drugs” has been. Twenty billion dollars a year for the last 30 years, two million Americans in prison — 60% of them non-violent drug offenders — and you can go out on any American street corner and buy cheaper, higher quality heroin and cocaine than you could anywhere in America 30 years ago. The political expediency of “get tough on crime” along with the sure-fire vote getting “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality has successfully created the highly profitable Prison Industrial Complex.
On Saturday, I asked a corrections officer at Sing Sing what the prisoner population in New York State is right now. “Just over 50,000,” she replied. Then, it occurred to me: When I was imprisoned for drug offenses in the 1970s, the entire Federal Prison population totaled just over 50,000 inmates. Then the C.O. added that, when she started her career in corrections 20 years ago, there were 23 prisons in New York State. As I write this today, there are over 60!
Crime stats have stayed consistent over the last 30 years, but incarceration rates have more than quadrupled. It’s the human cost that has been the most damaging. I’m talking about non-violent drug offenders. Countless families broken up, the marriages destroyed, three generations of kids with fathers (and mothers) in and out of the system. These are mostly brown and black people. People from America’s cities who, as screenwriter David Simon describes them, “Leftover people. People who were necessary in an industrial America but who are of no use to the economy today.” Non-violent drug offenders who are locked up are people who are pawns in urban political gamesmanship. Nobody talks about them. There’s no political will to look at it. There’s no political capital in it. It’s a no-winner. But, there’s certainly money in prison building and guard hiring.
Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 12:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
In an interview with the Huffington Post, Webb said that everything should be considered. And he means everything.
“I think everything should be on the table, and we specifically say that we want recommendations on how to deal with drug policy in our country. And we’ll get it to the people who have the credibility and the expertise and see what they come up with,” said Webb.
What about legalizing, taxing and regulating marijuana?
Webb paused. “I think they should do a very careful examination of all aspects of drug policy. I’ve done a couple of very extensive hearings on this, so we’ll wait to see what they say about that,” he said.
So it’s on the table? Webb flashed a wry grin, laughing mischievously.
The last government study group to look at drug policy, the 1972 Shafer Commission, recommended that President Richard Nixon decriminalize marijuana. He didn’t.
It’s the obvious solution nobody can say out loud. Rep. Rohrabacher said if there was a “blind vote”, marijuana legalization would pass easily. The Senate, the House, and the President all know it, but they can’t say it for fear of the “soft on crime / soft on drugs” backlash they think would result.
That’s where we come in. Enough of the public is still mired in “drugs’r'bad mmmkay?” thinking and can’t tell the difference between heroin and marijuana that the prohibitionists are still able to frighten them with “what about the children?” and “pot is a gateway drug”. We are the ones who have to educate our friends, family, and co-workers about the differences and show them — by example preferably — that they have nothing to fear from legalized marijuana and its users.
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. […]
It’s Official: Obama Admin will not raid state-compliant medical marijuana facilities
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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