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Dr. Carl Hart, Dr. Wendy Chapkis, Philippe Lucas, and Paul Armentano (among others) discussing medical marijuana’s future at the DPA Reform Conference in Albuquerque.
Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 11:26 am | By: Radical Russ
JACKSON COUNTY, Miss. (FOX 10 TV) – A Mississippi high school teacher is behind bars and facing fines up to $1 million, all for growing marijuana at his St. Martin home.
Narcotics officers from two agencies searched the home of 51-year-old Patrick Charles Walker on Wednesday, November 15. Walker is a teacher at St. Martin High School.
During the search, agents found marijuana plants growing inside and outside Walker’s home. They also seized marijuana that had been recently harvested, as well as stuff to grow marijuana, like fertilizers, nutrients, fans, and Ultraviolet grow lights.
If convicted, Walker faces a fine up to $1 million and up to 30 years in the state penitentiary.
In other news from Mississippi high schools:
Desoto County, Ms (My FOX Memphis) – A substitute teacher is behind bars after Desoto County Sheriff’s deputies arrested him Monday, for allegedly having sex with multiple underage students.
23-year old Joey Johnson of Horn Lake, Mississippi is charged with multiple counts of sexual battery. Johnson is alleged to have had sex with at least two 16 year old students while working as a substitute teacher at Lake Cormorant High School near Walls, Mississippi.
Johnson isn’t the only Mississippi teacher facing charges. Last week, 22-year old Tyler Bigham, a music teacher at Desoto Central High School was arrested and charged with sexual battery for allegedly having sex with a 17-year old student at a park.
(Smoking Gun) A Mississippi teacher admitted to cops that she had sex with a 15-year-old male student to whom she sent explicit text messages and trysted with in her Jaguar, which bore the license plate “GRRRRR.” Those are just some of the sleazy details in a Biloxi Police Department report detailing Rebecca Dawn Bogard’s alleged sexual assault of the boy, who the 27-year-old educator taught at the Biloxi Alternative School. Bogard… is facing felony sexual battery charges. She has been suspended with pay and is free on $50,000 bail.
LONG BEACH, MS. (WLOX) – A former teacher faces new sex charges. Police say Joseph Eugene Council, 33, of Long Beach confessed to having a sexual relationship with 17 year old girl.
Until May, Council taught band and choir at Pass Christian Middle and High Schools. Council was taken to the Harrison County Jail where he was being held pending $75,000 bond. Long Beach Police say the investigation is continuing and ask anyone with information about the case to call 228-863-7292.
Four different Mississippi teachers involved in sexual relationships with minors. Their bonds were set at values between $50,000 and $100,000 dollars. Mississippi law sets the bar for statutory rape at age 16, so only the female teacher in the Smoking Gun piece might have been charged with rape. But in her case, and the other teacher cases, the charges are set to felony sexual battery, defined as:
§ 97-3-95. Sexual battery.
(1) A person is guilty of sexual battery if he or she engages in sexual penetration with:
(a) Another person without his or her consent;
(b) A mentally defective, mentally incapacitated or physically helpless person;
(c) A child at least fourteen (14) but under sixteen (16) years of age, if the person is thirty-six (36) or more months older than the child; or
(d) A child under the age of fourteen (14) years of age, if the person is twenty-four (24) or more months older than the child.
(2) A person is guilty of sexual battery if he or she engages in sexual penetration with a child under the age of eighteen (18) years if the person is in a position of trust or authority over the child including without limitation the child’s teacher, counselor, physician, psychiatrist, psychologist, minister, priest, physical therapist, chiropractor, legal guardian, parent, stepparent, aunt, uncle, scout leader or coach.
§ 97-3-101. Sexual battery; penalty.
(1) Every person who shall be convicted of sexual battery under § 97-3-95(1)(a), (b), or (2) shall be imprisoned in the State Penitentiary for a period of not more than thirty (30) years, and for a second or subsequent such offense shall be imprisoned in the penitentiary for not more than forty (40) years.
So remember folks, if you’re a high school teacher in Mississippi, growing marijuana plants in your own home is as reprehensible as having sex with your teenaged students. Oh, wait, I’m sorry, it’s worse. The felony sexual battery charges don’t carry a $1,000,000 fine.
Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 9:25 am | By: Radical Russ
(NBC Miami) When you think of the world’s most prolific pot smokers, certain names come to mind: Snoop, Cheech and Chong, Willie Nelson.
How about Irvin Rosenfeld?
The 56-year-old Fort Lauderdale stockbroker will put his name among the greats when he sets a world record tomorrow for weed consumption while lighting up his 115,000th joint.
One of the few people I know can smoke me under a table - Irv Rosenfeld at NORML CON 2006
The best part is that it’s all legal.
Rosenfeld’s pot has been provided by the government since 1982, when he became a patient in the Federal Drug Administration’s Investigational New Drug Program. Grown on a farm on the campus of the University of Mississippi, the weed is delivered to a local pharmacy where Rosenfeld gets it by the bushel.
Rosenfeld suffers from a rare bone disorder called multiple congenital cartilaginous exostoses, which causes severe pain, alleviated by a healthy dose of ganja.
He’s been getting 300 joints every 25 days for the past 27 years, and said he smokes between 10 and 12 per day.
The sad thing for Irv is that the ganja the feds grow for him is the schwaggiest of the schwag. This is the marijuana grown by Dr. ElSohly in Mississippi and it’s about 4%-5% THC. They don’t bother to manicure the bud much before grinding, so the joints contain stems and leaves and the occasional seed. So don’t be too surprised when he tells you that smoking it doesn’t get him high.
I’ve also had the pleasure of knowing another of the four remaining IND patients, Elvy Musikka. She has the benefit of being both a federal medical marijuana patient and an Oregon state medical marijuana patient. She can tell you better than anyone the difference between federal schwag and Oregon’s finest, and the race isn’t even close.
What’s really disturbing is that the government set up this “Investigational New Drug Program” in 1978 and to this date they haven’t done a bit of investigation. Irv, Elvy and the other two patients have never been surveyed or studied by our government to determine how these decades of medical marijuana use have affected the humans using it. It might make you think our government never really wanted people to know how effective medical cannabis can be, huh?
Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 8:10 pm | By: Radical Russ
I get the most incredible emails, and I mean “incredible” as in “it strains credibility” to believe this really happens in America.
My name is [Bob]. I’m 23 years old and I’m from … Mississippi. Until this year I had never been convicted of a crime. I had never even had a speeding ticket. I was on my way home from work and I was pulled over. I got caught with a stem on my floorboard. Which probably wouldn’t even register as .01 [grams] on a scale. The officer searched my vehicle 4 times before he even found it. I was arrested and taken to [jail.] My vehicle was impounded. I lost my job and eventually my home. I bonded out and received my court date later in the mail. When I went to court I received an 1100 dollar fine and my license was suspended for 6 months. The funny thing was a repeat offender 2 cases before me only received a 600 dollar fine for simple assault. He also received a set number of hours in an anger management class. His charge was for beating his pregnant girlfriend. I have lost faith in America and our leaders. Marijuana is a wonderful herb and I enjoy the way it makes me feel. Sometimes I suffer with horrible depression and marijuana makes me feel soooooo much better. I’m a musician as well and marijuana stimulates my mind in ways that I never could naturally. … Anyways I figured I would share this with you so you could see how bad we have it down here in Mississippi.
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.
I want a NORML chapter in all fifty states, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. I want double the number of chapters. So I really need your help.
Just this last two weeks, I have received emails from budding activists (pun intended) looking to start NORML Chapters in Colorado, North Carolina, Alaska, Alabama, Florida (Miami), Missouri, Virginia, Idaho, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Mississippi, Vermont, Texas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Kansas, as well as four new college chapter inquiries and inquiries from Australia, Japan, Guam, and Mexico (Cuidad Juarez).
I work to put the people in the same state in touch with each other because the hardest thing about forming a NORML Chapter isn’t finding the guy or gal to lead, it’s finding the other four people to form your board.
So Stashers, if you’re in one of the above-named states or countries and you’d like to get on board with a new local chapter, send me an email to stash@norml.org with the subject “Join a Chapter” and I’ll hook you up.
Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 11:59 am | By: Radical Russ
“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
Today our nation honors what would’ve been this week the eightieth birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of these United States. I was sixty-four days old when an assassin’s bullet cut down Dr. King in the prime of his life. Today I am six-hundred forty days older than Dr. King when he was killed. Tomorrow I will see something few people my age and older thought we’d ever see, yet something Dr. King had dreamed from the start.
There remains a grave injustice to be battled, the most unjust of laws to be disobeyed, a law that by its definition is not rooted in eternal law and natural law: the man made code that declares nature itself to be illegal, the prohibition on cannabis. Yet when I mention marijuana law reform in the context of the great civil rights struggles in America, so many are quick to dismiss me with snickers of derision. ”You just want pot legal so you can get high!” is a common refrain.
Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 9:30 am | By: Radical Russ
reason.tv – Videos > Mississippi Drug War Blues
At 11p.m on December 26, 2001 police in Prentiss, Mississippi raided the residence of Cory Maye, a 21-year-old father who was at home with his 18-month-old daughter Ta’Corriana.
The cops were looking for drugs and smashed through the back door. In the ensuing chaos, Maye hunkered down with his daughter in a bedroom and when the police broke down that door, he fired three bullets, one of which killed Officer Ron Jones. Maye testified in court that the police did not identify themselves until after they had entered his residence; indeed, he testified that they did not identify themselves until after he had fired his shots. Once they did, he said he put his weapon on the floor, slid it toward police, and surrendered.
The police, who refused to talk with reason.tv, tell a different story. They claim that they identified themselves multiple times before entering Maye’s house and bedroom, and that there was no way Maye couldn’t have known who they were. A jury rejected Maye’s case that he was acting in self-defense and he was sentenced to death for the murder of Office Ron Jones.
“Mississippi Drug War Blues” is a story about the intersection of race (Maye is black and Jones was white); the war on drugs; the disturbing increase in the militarization of police tactics; and systemic flaws in the criminal justice and expert-testimony systems.
It is a tragedy in which one man is dead and another may spend his life in prison.
RevRayGreen: I'll post a pic of me and my son....gimme a minute
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.
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 Fri, Nov 20, 2009
waitn for NSL and congrast for spofett.
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; is she incognito like me 
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