VIENNA (AFP) – A UN drugs agency warned Thursday against underestimating the dangers of cannabis.

“The international community may wish to review the issue of cannabis,” the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) wrote in its annual report.

“Over the years, cannabis has become more potent and is associated with an increasing number of emergency room admissions,” the report stated.

Ooh, a swing and a miss!  Cannabis has become more potent, but increasing potency does not mean increase in danger, as marijuana smoking is a self-titrating action.  If you have schwag, you smoke a lot and get high.  If you have kind, you smoke a little and get high.  As for emergency room admissions, this myth is taken from the DAWN statistics where they determine if someone has used cannabis prior to admittance, not whether cannabis caused the admittance.  Since cannabis is the most popular illicit drug, it is naturally going to be mentioned more often in the ER.

Cannabis was often the first illicit drug taken by young people and was frequently called a “gateway drug,” in that it could lead to later use of hard drugs.

Steeerike two!  In 1999, US Institute of Medicine shot down the “gateway theory” and many studies that followed found the same thing.  Nowadays no serious scientist even brings it up anymore… but that doesn’t stop cannabiphobic bureaucrats from saying it anyway.

Indeed, many countries allowed the “recreational” use of cannabis, and public perceptions of the so-called “medical” uses of the drug and its recreational use “are overlapping and confusing,” it said.

Hmm, I think that’s a foul tip.  There’s nothing “so-called” about the medical uses of cannabis and if its medical use is “overlapping and confusing” then why did teen marijuana use rates decline in the states that implemented medical marijuana?

It also urged governments to “stimulate” the controlled use of opiate-based painkillers to help “alleviate unnecessary suffering of millions of patients.”

“Although the access to controlled medicines, including morphine and codeine, is considered by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to be a human right, it is virtually non existent in over 150 countries,” the report said.

“The WHO estimates that at least 30 million patients and possibly as many as 86 million annually suffer from untreated moderate to severe pain.”

via The Raw Story | UN agency recommends world stop ‘trivializing’ marijuana dangers.

Yerrrr OUT!  In fact, not only are you out, but your whole team is out, disqualified, and banished from the league!  In the same set of recommendations where you demonize cannabis and its “so-called medical” uses you then remind us access to painkillers is a human right, millions are suffering with under-treated pain, and you recommend we “stimulate” more use of opiates?  Who writes your recommendations, the Opium Poppy Growers Union?

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“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.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963

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.

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So I’m reading the Washington DC newspaper when I find this article on Afghanistan and the Taliban.  It goes into detail about how the Taliban is funding its activities against our troops through trafficking in opium, which is a wonderful poppy that gives us helpful medicines like morphine, but mostly becomes very profitable heroin.  ”In 2007, Afghanistan was the world’s largest opium supplier (accounting for 93 percent of the world’s opium, according to UN estimates),” says the Drug Czar.

Imagine my surprise when I discover that it is an opinion piece and the author is calling for the US to spend 1/100th of the cost of the Afghanistan War and just buy up all the opium!  Imagine my increased surprise when I find the newspaper isn’t the accusedly-liberal Washington Post, but the definitely-conservative Moonie-owned Washington Times!

Washington Times – NATHAN: Ending the Taliban’s money stream
Placed beside the $200 billion Afghanistan has already exacted from American taxpayers, the cost of purchasing all Afghanistan opium hardly seems outsized. Currently, opium gum fetches about $50 a pound. The largest crop in Afghanistan’s history was 8,200 tons, in 2007. A year’s worth of Afghan crop at twice the going rate would go for $2 billion to $2.5 billion. But even if the cost were $5 billion, the price would not seem untoward, especially given the paucity of alternative; and given the fact that opium, corruption, and the rise of the Taliban are single pieces of the same sorry cloth.

Purchasing the whole opium crop of Afghanistan, at whatever price, would take the crop away from the traffickers without cutting more than half the economy out of Afghanistan. If opium crops were pre-emptively purchased, the traffickers and Afghanistan’s most corrosive corruption would be directly confronted. The huge supply could be purchased by Americans who are specially cleared, and be stored in the United States, perhaps by Security Council resolution assigned to the United Nations under American control for future medical emergencies.

Let Afghans produce the world’s opium supply, providing them an agricultural market to stabilize the economy, and take away the majority of the Taliban’s income, and provide for a secure stockpile of emergency medicines?

More and more, even (especially?) conservatives are realizing that prohibition is the most expensive way to deal with the natural appetite for mild-altering drugs.  Imagine if they took this idea to the Mexican cannabis market – make it legal to buy and sell processed cannabis in America, but only legal to grow it commercially in Mexico.  Turn the Mexican economy around by providing them a lucrative agricultural market, take away 70% of the Mexican Mafia’s income, and provide a secure stockpile of medicine for registered patients!

(I know, it should be legal to grow here.  But in this hypothetical, at least 89% of the people arrested for cannabis would be free from harassment.)

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New anti-drug campaign equates smoking pot with terrorism – Haaretz – Israel News
Israel’s Anti-Drug Authority has launched a new campaign featuring Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, aimed at deterring Israelis from smoking marijuana.As part of the campaign, the authority has published a poster showing the Hezbollah leader emerging genie-like from a bong.

Underneath the image, the poster reads: “Hezbollah is clearly planning to flood Israel with narcotics. Narcotics pose a strategic threat to Israeli society. Whoever uses narcotics is giving a hand to the next terrorist attack.”

The Israeli media last week quoted senior Israeli security sources as saying that Hezbollah is planning to flood Israel with drugs in an effort to harm its citizens.

Police and IDF troops on the same day stopped the largest shipment of pure heroin ever to be intercepted on Israel’s border with Lebanon, a total of 32.5 kilograms, with an estimated street value of NIS 30 million.

Gee, Israel’s only five years behind the US effort to link bongs with bombs and tokin’ with terrorism in an ad campaign that was roundly criticized not only for the idiocy of its message, but for the fact that the ads had the opposite of the intended effect – adults and teens distrust these alarmist messages and rates of use and favorable perceptions of marijuana among teens may actually increase.

Plus, how exactly is it that Hezbollah forces these helpless Israeli citizens to take drugs? Doesn’t there have to be a demand for drugs in order for the so-called “flood” strategy to be effective? I also wonder how much of that pure heroin originated from Afghanistan, where we’ve let the Taliban regain power from the profits of the country’s farmers producing most of the world’s heroin? Wouldn’t it be more strategic to focus on terrorists’ production of heroin than to demonize Israeli pot smokers?

Terrorists are making their money from heroin, not marijuana. Even so, a heroin addict is not to blame for Hezbollah’s profit from drug dealing, prohibition is to blame. If that heroin addict was getting a maintenance dose from a government clinic, there would be less profit for Hezbollah.

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