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.

Today’s Stupid Stoner Story doesn’t actually involve any real stoners.  But the cops in this story were trying to bust stoners…

(Metro UK) In a triumph of covert police work, undercover officers in North Carolina arrested another undercover officer from a different force after buying drugs off him.

The entirely drug dealer-free drug deal occurred when undercover officers from the Statesville Police Department met a man interested in selling them some marijuana. The man was an undercover deputy from Iredell County Sheriff’s Office.

Statesville is the county seat of Iredell county.

The Statesville officers apparently became suspicious that the drug-dealer was, in fact, an undercover deputy – so they rang the narcotics unit of the sheriff’s office to check. They were told that the dealer was definitely not an undercover deputy.

They promptly arrested the man, before officers from the sheriff’s office arrived and confirmed that the man was, in fact, and undercover deputy. He was then released.

Sheriff Phil Redmond told the Statesville Record & Landmark: ‘We had several large-scale operations going on at once, and the wires got crossed on this one.’

Statesville Police Chief Tom Anderson said: ‘It was a learning experience. Fortunately, nobody was hurt.’

Well, no one except the taxpayers of Iredell County, North Carolina, who just paid for at least three to five officers’ time wasted trying to bust people for selling a weed.  Did you know that only 13% of all burglaries and car thefts result in an arrest by police?  Only 46% of all violent crimes are solved by police.  Meanwhile, one county cop is trying to fool some other city cops into buying some weed and some more county cops have to sort it all out.  Anybody feel any safer?

Gosh, if only there were a quick an easy way to simultaneously raise revenues and cut law enforcement and prison costs, with the additional benefit of protecting children and creating new jobs.  I’ll sit here and try to think of that solution; in the meantime, check out this story from the New York Times:

COCOA, Fla. — A year ago, the Brevard County Schools ran a robust summer program here, with dozens of schools bustling with teachers and some 14,000 children practicing multiplication, reading Harry Potter and studying Spanish verbs, all at no cost to parents.

But this year Florida’s budget crisis has gutted summer school. Brevard classrooms are shuttered, and students like 11-year-old Uvenka Jean-Baptiste, whose mother works in a nursing home, are spending their summer days at home, surfing television channels or loitering at a mall.

Nearly every school system in Florida has eviscerated or eliminated summer school this year, and officials are reporting sweeping cuts in states from North Carolina and Delaware to California and Washington. The cuts have come as states across the country are struggling to approve budgets, and California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, declared a fiscal state of emergency on Wednesday.

In Florida and California, for example, government revenues have fallen so precipitously that, even after receiving federal stimulus dollars, local officials have been forced to make deep cuts to school budgets. Officials in many other states, considering summer school a frill, despite research showing it can narrow the achievement gap between poor and affluent children, have spent their stimulus money elsewhere.

In Los Angeles, where school officials are still working to remove hundreds of millions of dollars from a $5.5 billion annual budget, they cut $34 million last month by canceling summer school for all elementary and middle school children except the disabled. That left 150,000 students without summer classes, and parents scrambling for child care.

Dang, I had just about almost figured out how we could raise state tax revenues and eliminate wasteful government spending with just one small policy change, but then I was distracted by a phone call from my weed-dealing friend who just bought a new Jet-Ski and the red police D.A.R.E. Corvette driving down the street.

Last week, a bill was introduced in the state General Assembly to allow patients registered with the state to possess, grow and use the drug for medicinal purposes.

Patients would be protected from being refused employment, volunteer positions, organ transplants and child custody rights.

What the bill wouldn’t do, however, is legalize marijuana for just anyone.

Most patients would have to be suffering from debilitating, chronic or even terminal illnesses that marijuana is scientifically proven to help, and their doctors must recommend it as a necessary treatment option.

via – The Fayetteville Observer “Medical Marijuana Fight to legalize moves forward“

[As more states push for medical marijuana, they take the template of the law from other states and revise and improve the statutes.  The protections for employment stem from cases in Oregon and California where patients have been fired for failing workplace urine screens.  The protections for transplant patients follow the sad cases in Washington State and Oregon of deserving organ transplant candidates using medical marijuana who are kicked off the transplant list for being "drug abusers". -- "R"R]

Help us end the 21st century prohibition! Join NORML today!

I am now NORML’s National Chapter Outreach Coordinator.  In that capacity, I receive the emails from people all across the country looking to join NORML.  We currently have 64 chapters and 47 campus chapters in 38 states, and 8 international chapters.

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.

HAYESVILLE – Narcotics officers assigned to a two-county drug task force drank beer and ate pizza outside the home of a suspected marijuana dealer after executing a search warrant there, authorities acknowledged Monday.

The incident nearly two years ago became public last week after the prosecutor trying the case that came from that search questioned the officers about the beer and pizza on the witness stand.

No one was drunk that day in July 2007, said Clay County Sheriff Joe Shook, who crossed the state line into Georgia to get the beer because his county is dry.

via – Citizen-Times, NC  “Clay sheriff makes beer run for drug officers”

Not only were they drinking on the job but the sheriff crossed the state line to get alcohol because there’s a Prohibition on Alcohol in his county! Pot? Kettle? Black? Anyone? Let’s see, for a couple of us just smoking a joint and eating pizza in Virginia that would be: 30 days in jail, $500 fine, and loss of drivers license for 6 months. Hopefully we were sitting on the curb outside our car blowing that joint or we’d also get a DUID (driving under the influence of drugs).

Seems fair, right?

ROBBINSVILLE, N.C. — Teachers in this small rural town’s school district are awaiting a state appeals court ruling to see whether they’ll be required to submit to random tests for drugs and alcohol.

Graham County, N.C., which has fewer than 1,200 students, is one of a small group of school districts in the nation attempting to establish random drug tests of teachers and other employees.

The district would be among the “very, very few” to randomly test teachers, American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Adam Wolf says.

School districts in at least four Kentucky counties — Knott, Montgomery, Letcher and Floyd — do random testing, the Kentucky Education Association’s Tim Southern said.

Teachers in Kanawha County, W.Va., came close to being subjected to such testing, but three days before its Jan. 1 start, a federal district court stopped it. The idea is also on hold in Hawaii, awaiting a state board’s ruling.

“It would be in our view a waste of money, because there is no problem that a drug-testing program can address,” said Michael Simpson, assistant general counsel with the National Education Association.

In North Carolina, a lawsuit by the state teachers’ association prevented a 2007 start for random drug testing in Graham County schools.

Former county school board chairman Mitch Colvard says he saw a worsening local drug problem in his job as a paramedic. He pushed for the policy in 2006.

“I think when I put my kids in their hands, they lose their rights,” Colvard says. “My rights are more important.”

via USATODAY.com.

Mr. Colvard, what right of yours is it that we’re protecting with random teacher drug testing?  Your right to invade the bodily integrity of your children’s instructor?

First of all, you must acknowledge that random urine screening is not an exact science.  There are medications and conditions that can create a false positive test.  There are adulterants and supplements that can create a false negative test.  Most drug screening doesn’t bother to detect those who abuse alcohol.  Most of all, urine screening disproportionately detects those who use cannabis over those who use meth, cocaine, heroin, and hallucinogens, as those substances flush out of the system within a couple of days.  

So if your goal is to insure your children are never in a classroom with a drug-addled teacher, then random drug testing is not a good method to achieve that goal.  The tests wouldn’t catch a drunk teacher or a teacher stoned on Vicodin, and those teachers who would fail for meth, cocaine, heroin, or hallucinogens should be so easily detected by observation that a test is unnecessary.  Truly the random drug test exists solely to catch marijuana smokers because without it, there is no obvious signs of marijuana use to detect.

So if the problem then is teachers who use marijuana teaching your children, but in practice you can’t determine their past marijuana use by simple observation, what exactly is it that you’re intending to protect your children from?  What harm from marijuana is going to befall your children when the harm from marijuana to the instructor is so slight you have to confiscate his urine to even determine if he uses marijuana?

Here’s an idea: why don’t you take the money you were going to spend on getting hard-working underpaid teachers to pee in a cup and spend it instead on, oh I don’t know, up-to-date history books, pencils, globes, microscopes, paper, and some teaching assistants?  Unless you think your kids are more interested in the metabolites in the teacher’s pee than the lessons in the teacher’s head.

http://www.digtriad.com/news/most_popular/article.aspx?storyid=117396&provider=top
Gibsonville, NC — “It’s not about getting high whatsoever,” says Rocky Hoveland of his previous medical marijuana use. He and other members of the North Carolina Cannabis Patients Network are gaining steam behind their efforts.

The group now counts more than 150 people who currently use or would benefit from medical marijuana in the Tar Heel State.

Hoveland is a tree cutter who suffers from arthritis, joint pain, and broken bones. He says legal painkiller drugs are often too strong for him, or cause adverse reactions in his body.

But addiction counselors like Rebecca Austin aren’t convinced. She helps teens and adults break drug habits at the Ringer Center in Greensboro.

“I don’t buy it,” says Austin of medical marijuana use. “While it may alleviate symptoms, it also compromises the immune system. So while we may have a short term treatment, we may have long-term effects.”

Rebecca, can you explain to me why the AIDS Action Council, AIDS Treatment News, Canadian AIDS Society,  and the San Francisco Mayor’s Summit on AIDS and HIV all support legal access to medical marijuana and thirteen states legalized the use of medical marijuana for the treatment of HIV/AIDS?  Why would they recommend an herb that you think “compromises the immune system” for people with Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome?  Get yourself a copy of Paul Armentano’s pamphlet on Emerging Clinical Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids so you, too, can learn: “Clinical trial data indicates that cannabis use does not adversely impact CD4 and CD8 T cell counts, and may even improve immune function.”

Austin also worries about disregarding marijuana’s addiction risk. “The message that that gives to teens and others is that marijuana is safe in all instances and I think that’s a very dangerous message to send.”

Ah, yes, marijuana’s dangerous addiction risk.  The drug so addictive that a full one-third of the people entering rehab for marijuana dependence haven’t even used marijuana in the past thirty days.  The drug so powerful that a full 9% of its users report some symptoms of dependence, as compared to “alcohol (15%), cocaine (17%), heroin (23%), or tobacco (32%).”  A drug whose symptoms of dependence include irritability and sleeplessness when withdrawing, as opposed to delirium tremens, hallucination, intense craving, and perhaps death.

We wouldn’t want to send a medical marijuana message to the kids, would we?  Why, in the last twelve states where we sent that message, teenage use of marijuana decreased.

Hoveland other medical marijuana supporters aim to send a message to state legislators to allow safe and legal access to the drug.

The NCCPN is seeking a bill that would allow patients and doctors to do marijuana research. Members claim they’re teaming up with local state representative Earl Jones, who has supported similar legislation in the past.

We interviewed Rep. Jones on the June 2, 2008 Daily Audio Stash.  I am convinced that like Michigan in 2008, North Carolina in 2009 can be the state the introduces medical marijuana to a whole new section of the country.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another great song with a video to boot!  Jump, Little Children  is a band formed in 1991 in the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Known for their unique sound, energetic live performances, and willingness to interact with fans, the band built a strong following over their fourteen years. They played their final show on December 30, 2005 in their adopted hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.  A couple of their tunes were featured on the shows Everwood and Scrubs.

You can find out more about the band and check out their other albums at the website http://www.jumphq.com.  Buy the Vertigo album here.

News 14 | 24 Hour Local News | HEADLINES | Proposal studies medical marijuana
RALEIGH — A state lawmaker wants North Carolina to study and potentially legalize medical marijuana.

Guilford County Rep. Earl Jones filed the bill. Wednesday, a former U.S. surgeon general testified in favor of it as well. From 1993-1995, Dr. Joycelyn Elders was the country’s top doctor. Nearly 20 years, later she’s here in North Carolina advocating medical marijuana.

“We’ve been using marijuana out there as I said for 5,000 years,” Elders said. “It’s safer than an awful lot of medications than we have out there on the market.”

But opponents say that’s not the case.

“When you consider the carcinogens in marijuana alone, it’s multiple to that of smoking so this is not really a safe drug to take,” said Mark Creech from the N.C. Christian Action League.

Let me help educate Mr. Creech.  First of all, don’t give me that nonsense about marijuana not being a safe drug to take:

An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.

The Florida report analyzed 168,900 deaths statewide. Cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines caused 989 deaths, it found, while legal opioids — strong painkillers in brand-name drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin — caused 2,328.

Drugs with benzodiazepine, mainly depressants like Valium and Xanax, led to 743 deaths. Alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug, appearing in the bodies of 4,179 of the dead and judged the cause of death of 466 — fewer than cocaine (843) but more than methamphetamine (25) and marijuana (0).

Second of all, your assertion about the carcinogens in marijuana being “multiple to that of smoking” is way off base:

While cannabis smoke has been implicated in respiratory dysfunction, including the conversion of respiratory cells to what appears to be a pre-cancerous state [5], it has not been causally linked with tobacco related cancers [6] such as lung, colon or rectal cancers.

Furthermore, compounds found in cannabis have been shown to kill numerous cancer types including: lung cancer [9], breast and prostate [10], leukemia and lymphoma [11], glioma [12], skin cancer [13], and pheochromocytoma [14].

…[T]he medical potential of cannabis has been obscured by the potential negative impact of using a smoked medicine [17]. Those who deny the validity of “medical marijuana,” cite that marijuana smoke contains four fold more tars than does tobacco smoke [18]. … Are the biological consequences of smoking cannabis and tobacco similar?

Smoke from tobacco and cannabis contains many of the same carcinogens and tumor promoters [20,21]. However, cannabis and tobacco have additional pharmacological activities… that result in different biological endpoints. …[D]espite potentially higher levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons found in cannabis smoke compared to tobacco smoke (dependent on what part of the plant is smoked), the THC present in cannabis smoke should exert a protective effect against pro-carcinogens that require activation. In contrast, nicotine activates some [pro-carcinogenic] activities, thus potentially increasing the carcinogenic effects of tobacco smoke [24].

And for the hat trick, your point is completely moot, Mr. Creech, if we simply vaporize the cannabis:

Concern about the respiratory hazards of smoking has spurred the development of vaporization as an alternative method of medical cannabis administration. Cannabis vaporization is a relatively new technology aimed at suppressing respiratory toxins by heating cannabis to a temperature where cannabinoid vapors form (typically around 180-190°C), but below the point of combustion where smoke and associated toxins are produced (near 230°C). The purpose of this is to permit the inhalation of medically active cannabinoids while avoiding noxious smoke compounds that pose respiratory hazards.

Of particular concern are the carcinogenic polynuclear (or “polycyclic”) aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), known byproducts of combustion that are thought to be a major culprit in smoking-related cancers. While there exists no epidemiological evidence that marijuana smokers face a higher risk of smoking-related cancers, studies have found that they do face a higher risk of bronchitis and respiratory infections (Polen et al. 1993, Tashkin 1993).  This risk is not thought to be due to cannabinoids, but rather to extraneous byproducts of pyrolysis in the smoke.

In principle, vaporization offers medical cannabis patients the advantages of inhaled routes of administration: rapid onset, direct delivery into the bloodstream, ease of self-titration and concomitant avoidance of over- and under-dosage, while avoiding the respiratory disadvantages of smoking. Compared to other proposed non-smoked delivery systems using pharmaceutical extracts and synthetics, vaporization also offers the economic advantage of allowing patients to use inexpensive, homegrown cannabis.