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Ask yourself, do marijuana users, who can be found in the wee hours of the morning, staring at the “white noise” of a blank TV screen – off the air for hours, be competent drivers? Every druggie has laughed about having found themselves in that position.
What is this television channel in the 21st century that goes “off the air”? John, it’s called the digital transition – your old Magnavox console with the built in 8-track and turntable won’t pick up our fancy-schmancy hi-def 24-hour digital channels, dagnabbit!
John provides a cut-n-paste of a study that says pot smokers are 3 to 7 times more likely to cause an accident. He’s kind enough to provide footnotes to these esteemed scientist’s work. But John’s been hammered in his comments section, by me and quite a few well-educated people, pointing out every flaw in his argument and every deficit in his scientific claims. There is a simple explanation: John’s scientists are pure as the driven snow and our scientists are “druggies” with a self-serving agenda bankrolled by evil world dominating billionaires.
[I]n fact, those who leave comments, claim it’s just the opposite.Of course they’re users, trying to tell you that they’re fine to drive, … and they’ll refer to “studies”, proving just the opposite of what is only common sense, that using marijuana doesn’t impair drivers … so where’s the truth? [T]here are seemingly competent scientists who are also users, and will evidently produce ‘studies’ to further their agendas, and/or those who pay them, and don’t forget; behind the scenes, there are also wealthy men and organizations willing to bankroll anything to further their goal of legalization.
And the next claim will make Dr. Earleywine and every other scientist who’s ever tried to get a grant to study the medicinal properties of cannabis fall out of their chair:
These scientists, … they’re also a concern, for those attempting to find the truth. Truth is, they’re under pressure: 1) if academics - they need to be a published author, (being published in the scientific and research field means more respect and impacts tenure issues) … 2) how better to get more grant money than to produce something controversial?
Oh, yeah, the money is just flowing for controversial marijuana studies. Can’t you just stick to the standard reefer madness lines like “This ain’t your father’s Woodstock Weed”?
Understand also that the marijuana of this generation is not the same as their parents smoked!
Pot then, had a THC content of 1 – 3%. Now, the THC content is surging up to 25%. (That too will be covered in future articles.) One can expect an increase of physiological and psychological problems with higher dosages.
Sure, the flower children were all smoking barely-above industrial hemp ditchweed. That explains Laugh In, “be-ins”, massive afros, bellbottoms, and the Grateful Dead. all that lousy weak pot our parents were smoking.
I could cite the studies that show heavily-stoned drivers drive no worse than a .05 BAC driver, or that we tend to drive slower and leave more room, but also tend to wander a bit in the lane. John would just say those are druggie scientists. It doesn’t matter because nobody’s advocating for people to be allowed to drive stoned. Making marijuana legal is not going to increase any smoking and driving, because the idiots who would do that are doing that now. When marijuana is legal, police will still be able to bust drivers who demonstate impairment or poor driving.
So many of these prohibitionist fears are based on the notion that making marijuana legal will mean suddenly people will start smoking it. Out of nowhere we’ll have increased healthcare costs, lost productivity, impaired drivers, psychotic teenagers, and rampant crime. You can only buy into that if you don’t know that 22 million people are smoking pot this year, 14 million monthly, 3 million weekly. If the projected harms of legalized marijuana exist, we would have seen them by now because so many people have been smoking marijuana for so long!
Don’t smoke and drive, don’t drive impaired. It’s all we ask of beer drinkers and they are far more dangerous drivers.
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Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 1:19 pm | By: Radical Russ
My favorite locksmith-turned-prohibitionist, Portland’s own John English, has penned four more anti-pot screeds in the online Examiner. Some people cringe when they read tripe like John’s, but I jump for joy. Not only does John provide irreplaceable blog fodder, but the idiocy of his writing and fallacy of his reasoning illustrate how desperate prohibitionists are becoming. Anyone who tortures logic and the English language as John does should be brought up on war crimes charges (or at least given a job app for the CIA).
In “Medical marijuana and the rule of law“, John delivers the tired “snake oil salesmen” argument that medical marijuana is akin to the bottles of “cocaine toothdrops” from 1885 and Bayer Co. heroin bottles from the same era. Yes, John, cocaine, opium derivatives, and even cannabis were sold for medicinal purposes around the turn of the 20th century… just as they are now. Cocaine is a Schedule II drug; doctors in any state can prescribe it. Morphine, oxycodone, and other opioids (admittedly, not heroin) are also Schedule II and Schedule III, prescribable by physicians. These drugs have safety ratios between 1:6 and 1:20, meaning they’re therapeutic (medicinal) if you take dosage level “1″, but if you take six-to-twenty times that dose, you’ll likely die.
Only cannabis, marooned in Schedule I (but not its synthetic 10x more potent cousin, Marinol, which is in Schedule III) is not prescribable by doctors in any state (not even medical marijuana states; it is only “recommended”) and its safety ratio is 1:1000.
But that’s not the shocking stuff…
The rule of law is intrinsic to the survival of the society in which people function.
Hedonists, pursuing their lusts, often step over the lines … not only of propriety, but of legality as well, becoming criminals.
Pedophilia, as well as drug use are examples of this. Society has determined that these practices are so destructive that they must remain illegal, yet there are groups that disagree; both groups have organized and also attempted to change the laws by hiring lobbyists in D.C.
One issue, obviously more repugnant, yet in ways, pedophilia and the pro-legalization movement are not so different. Both harm the innocent and those unable to foresee the ramifications of their actions.
Yes, NORML and NAMBLA*, ideological equals in John English’s mind. NORML wants to smoke joints, NAMBLA wants to fuck boys. Could it be any more obvious?
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Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 11:20 am | By: Radical Russ
The Examiner family of online newspapers is now featuring the retired locksmith (and thus, drug policy expert) John English as a regular columnist. It seems his entire series of columns is dedicated to pushing reefer madness.
Effects on the fetus, though scientifically difficult to evaluate, for a variety of reasons, the detection of metabolites in meconium establishes fetal drug exposure. The effects on the babies after birth is obvious.
Judging from his various cut’n'pastes from scientific articles I doubt he understands, I think his argument is that women who smoke a lot of pot while pregnant risk harming their babies, so we should lock them up. Wait’ll he sees the statistics on fetal alcohol syndrome!
In “Who Populates the Prison System“, John claims to debunk the idea pushed by “pro-drug advocates and their financial backers (Soros, Sperling, et al.)” that the prisons are filled with non-violent marijuana possessors:
# The massive numbers of people in prison for marijuana, are / were smugglers and distributors.
# These skewed facts ignore that when a person actually is incarcerated for simple possession, invariably it’s because they’ve cooperated and been allowed to plead to a lesser charge!
John doesn’t understand, though, that a “smuggler/distributor” of marijuana can be a pot possessor who made the mistake of keeping his two separate strains in two separate baggies, or keeps Ziploc sandwich baggies in his home, or owns a postal scale, or grew more than one plant, or keeps a legal firearm. He also doesn’t realize that folks on parole or probation who get busted for possession technically go back to prison for their original crime, not the pot possession, so they don’t show up in statistics as pot prisoners. But it is refreshing to see him admit that there are “massive numbers of people in prison for marijuana” as he beats up his strawman.
The marijuana user is in a constant state of depression interspersed with “short bursts of feeling almost normal again.” The user, when he’s reached out and achieved that “high,” he has a temporary reprieve from that constant, marijuana-induced state of depression, but it returns as the “high” fades.
That’s the cause, the scenario . . . ; users seek, the non-depressed state, they perceive as a “high”. They’re wrong; it’s the state they were in before – it’s the absence of depression. Over and over, they’re drawn into the ‘fog of marijuana addiction’ which has caused them to perceive it wrongly. The user has unknowingly, only taken a step down a rung, on the ladder of normalcy!
So I’ll bet when John learns that the suicidal/homicidal Columbine shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and just about every high-profile school shooting you can name in the past twenty years involved depressed teens who were prescribed SSRI anti-depressants, he’ll be eager to pump out a few columns about how we should be locking up people in possession of Paxil, Effexor, Celexa, Prozac, Zoloft, Luvox, Anafranil, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, etc.
In “Addiction to cannabis and mental disorders“, John reveals the insidious evil of marijuana – the “potheads” are seducing our youth into their debauched lifestyle (I guess we’ve been borrowing strategy from the “gay agenda”):
The most convincing reason why potheads must remain criminals, why marijuana must remain illegal, is their targeting of children. That behavior in and of itself reveals that they suffer from a deep psychological insufficiency, a need to draw children into becoming like them – whether it’s a need to justify their own beliefs or some other motivation, it doesn’t matter! They’re damaging future generations and doing so intentionally.
You know who’s targeting children, John? Pot dealers who aren’t required to check IDs, a million of whom are teenagers themselves. You know who else targeted children? Alcohol and tobacco companies with their “Budweiser Frogs” and “Joe Camel”, but since those drugs are legal, we were able to set strong advertising restrictions on those products, create effective anti-youth drinking and smoking educational campaigns, and reduced teen drinking and smoking to the lowest levels ever recorded.
In “What is wrong with smoking marijuana for medicinal purposes“, John cites a video of “Nathan Edelman” (he means Drug Policy Alliance’s Ethan Nadelmann), which is actually video of former NORML Director Richard Cowan taken way out of context to illustrate our alleged secret agenda of telling pot smokers to lie about how marijuana helps them medically so we can legalize all drugs (and, naturally, recruit the children into our debauched lifestyle).
When considering at this question, one must take into account two related issues: 1) that the whole plan to make marijuana legal was published in “High Times.” They issued a call, compelling users to come forward saying that pot helped their suffering.
And there’s another part: 2) that a survey showed that medical marijuana cardholders had been smoking pot for an average of 17 years! That in itself, brings the whole system under more suspicion – - – for what if, marijuana does cause one to think their “medicine” helps their condition when it is instead, actually causing or contributing to it?
Then, there’s two further question that needs to be asked:
1) What weed is smoked without the particulate matter, tars, and (over 400 chemical compounds in the smoke) not causing harm? The doctor’s oath is “First, do no harm.”
2) If people who were already breaking the law using an illicit drug for 17 years before the system allowed this pseudo-legal use, do they have the credibility to allow us to believe this actually helps?
If you were nauseous, in chronic pain, spastic, prone to seizures, or were losing your eyesight to glaucoma, and you smoked a joint 17 years ago and found it helped you medically, would you choose to live in misery for another 17 years until it became legal to use, just so you could have some credibility in John English’s view?
You can read more of my responses to John English in the comments sections of his articles in the hyperlinks above. Feel free to leave some of your own comments, too.
Missippi Hippy: Guess what... I'm gonna be a new... ummmmm well, my pet piggie Ganja is in labor and they ain't mine in the same sense. See what your wife [...]
RevRayGreen: days they didn't talk back..or act disrespectful..
RevRayGreen: feel so lucky my son is 18 going 19 and my daughter 16 going on 17..relish the days that can't talk back
Urb Age: Congrats Spof thats awesome. My little Clara is about to hit 20 months. Im not the activist I used to be, but its made me a better man.
Urb Age: Heck I was gonna go up there, but just not feeling well this weekend..Dang it, I hate it when that happens..
RevRayGreen: wishing I was hanging at NORML cafe...
JohnH: Just a quick comment about tokin' and sperm motility....been tokin since age 14 and have 8 kids ranging in age from 30 to 9...(what can I say, I found 2 [...]
slash5city: really ..oprah 35 yr or more in the closet toker ...outed ....o my god !!
SneakerPimp: that would be huge news just imagen the headline
RevRayGreen: maybe Oprah smokes and keeps it on the DL...
SneakerPimp: and good afternoon
mr reuben: I could do without seeing Rob K. on tv. But Bruce and Eithan get a big thumbs up from me.
SneakerPimp: waitn for NSL and congrast for spofett.
mr reuben: I don't respect her opinion bluzguy.
Missippi Hippy: Something about the last year in a contract... folks become more ballsey... and Oprah has big ones.
Adam: Oprah won't actually go off air for over a year, 2011 sometime. Maybe with here leaving the network soon, she'll be more likely to speak out about MMJ.
The Bluzguy: She promotes movies, turns books into best sellers overnight, and millions respect her opinion. Please contact her!
Missippi Hippy: I totally disregarded it Spof... My wife and I had 5 youngins
Adam: I'm rolling a fat joint, Everyones invited,Spof, Russ,MH,NORML, and MPP.
Missippi Hippy: Oprah announced her last show earlier this week
The Bluzguy: Campaign continuing...www.orprah.com/contactus Urge a show to discuss medical cannabis!
MrSpof: Oh, and about weed smoking hurting sperm motility? The wife and I are going to have to call bullshit on that one
Adam: @Russ, I take offence to the REMF's remark. Again, insulting remarks get us no where. I just don't understand why!
MrSpof: Much thanks for your kind thoughts to me and mine. And, as further good news, I think Russ has squared aware a good idea to dramatically boost the sound quality [...]
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. […]
Stash for Tue, Aug 4, 2009
waitn for NSL and congrast for spofett.
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; is she incognito like me 
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