Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 6:13 pm | By: Radical Russ
Me, thirteen years ago at the top of the World Trade Center
Eight years ago today I was living in an alternate reality. I was Mr. Buttondown Corporatedude, commuting across town in Boise, Idaho, teaching computer software to corporate audiences for a company called New Horizons. On that particularly unremarkable Tuesday morning, I was scheduled to teach an advanced course in Microsoft Project.
I arrived at work at 7:46am Mountain Time. By then, it has been one hour since the first jet hit the World Trade Center and 44 minutes since the second jet hit. But I drive to work without any radio and was a bit late, so I go straight from the prep room to my classroom to set up. On the way, I notice two co-workers intently studying their internet connections and mentioning something about a plane hitting a building in New York, but nothing that catches my attention more than it being a small plane and a tragic accident.
My class begins at 8:30am. By now, all flights have been grounded and President Bush has addressed the nation about the terrorist attacks over an hour ago. A half hour prior, Todd Beamer and the heroes of United 93 are fighting their hijackers and crash-landing their jet outside of Shanksville PA and the South Tower (upon which I stood for that photo five years before) has collapsed. The North Tower collapses just two minutes before I begin my presentation.
I teach my sixteen corporate project managers until first break at 10:30 am. None of us have any idea that our nation is under attack. Nobody from our sales staff or management bothers to tell any of us, though they know, as they were huddled around a television in the break room. At break, nearly every teacher and student has gathered in this room to watch the news reports. President Bush gives a statement six minutes into the break. It is clear that we are at war. I am devastated; I had served my state and country from 1985-1990 in the National Guard and have always been a proud American.
Then comes a moment that crystallized my disdain for the corporate world. Thinking back today, I realize this is the moment where a part of me realizes that I cannot be Mr. Buttondown Corporatedude for the rest of my life. Our company president announces that due to the attacks, any students who wish to leave will be given vouchers to re-take their classes.
In other words, for us teachers, the show must go on for any students that don’t want to re-take the classes, and as luck would have it, my project managers had all come in from out-of-town, and all sixteen decide to stay. I had to spend the rest of September 11th, 2001, trying to teach advanced software skills when all I really want to do is watch the news and cry.
Every time I think about September 11th, I have to pull myself back from conspiracy thinking and my urge to jump whole-hog into the 9/11 Truth movement. I think there are far too many unanswered questions about 9/11, but I’m overloaded as it is fighting prohibition without adding another huge cause to my agenda.
But about that prohibition and 9/11, just remember: if the attacks were indeed masterminded by Bin Laden and the Taliban out of the caves of Afghanistan, the money that fueled their activities was earned through the sales of opium for heroin, which is only massively profitable due to its prohibition. And today, the money that fuels the murderous activities of Mexican Cartels (who’ve killed quadruple the number of people killed on September 11th, by the way) is attributable to prohibition.
Drug prohibition is a terrorists best business opportunity. When you support prohibition, you support terrorism.
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 8:20 am | By: Legalize-SaveLives
Ending the prohibition is not about wanting to get high, it’s about protecting our families from a very real danger. In the coming years the violence committed by the cartels will no longer be constrained to south of the border, we’re going to increasingly see it move through our cities and non-smokers are going to ask how can it be stopped.
We need them to know that there is only ONE option to rid us of these people and prevent them from returning – end the prohibition and license reputable businesses to legally produce and sell marijuana to adults with prices low enough to undermine the cartels.
These videos make this point graphically clear. Be aware that they contain extremely disturbing but very real images of what’s happening right now as a result of our prohibition. Every day the cartels brutally murder an average of 17 people.
Officials with the Gwinnett County Police Department said they seized 457 pounds of marijuana and a cache of guns from a Lilburn home
Investigators with the department’s drug task force said they received an anonymous tip from a citizen who was concerned about possible drug activity at the house.
457 pounds of marijuana worth $2,118,293.00 was located and seized, according to police. Five weapons including a M16 and AK 47 assault rifle were also confiscated along with a large amount of ammunition.
I can’t write like Russ so I’m just going to post what I commented on the article and what I’m currently sending to my legislators and all the community and family groups I can find in Atlanta and Georgia:
Wow, this is right here in Atlanta! These people are here in our city, they make pot easy for kids to buy and they bring guns and violence and home invasions right into our communities. It’s only a matter of time before it’s our door that gets kicked in and it’s us who are tied up and brutalized and killed.
What are our legislators doing about it? The police made one lucky catch here but there are many more of these people in our city right now with their pounds of weed and their guns. They’re here to make money. They’re here because the federal prohibition on marijuana has driven the price of pot up so high that these people can come here and get filthy rich selling their weed to anyone with money. And they don’t care how young their customers are or who gets injured or tortured or killed in the process.
We HAVE to take action on this. The prohibition was supposed to keep us safe but it does not. It’s been in place for seventy years and it does NOTHING to reduce the amount of marijuana smoked by teenagers and it does nothing to prevent violent people from coming here and getting rich from selling pot. If the prohibition worked then after seventy years stuff like this wouldn’t be happening!
The prohibition itself is the reason they’re here. They come because there’s no competition for what they’re selling. And every arrest by our police officers, and every bust of every illegal seller just clears the way of competition for new people to come here and do the exact same thing!
The prohibition HAS to go. We have to force these people to leave and we have to prevent new ones like them from wanting to come here. And the ONLY way we can do this is by ending the prohibition and issuing licenses for reputable businesses to legally produce marijuana and sell it to adults with after-tax prices set too low for these people to compete.
That’s what we have to tell our legislators! Senator Chambliss, Senator Isakson, Representatives Price, Kingston, Westmoreland and all the rest. We must write to all our legislators and the candidates running for next year’s elections and tell them that they must act NOW to make our families safe.
Don’t let your kids get arrested for buying pot from these people and don’t leave your family in danger of being beaten or killed by them. Tell our legislators that they have to end the prohibition and take control of the marijuana market, that they have to allow it to be legally produced and sold to adults and that they have to regulate it and tax it. The prohibition is an archaic failure, we must end it before it ends us.
Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 9:20 am | By: Radical Russ
Forty-one percent (41%) of likely U.S. voters think the United States should legalize and tax marijuana to help solve the nation’s fiscal problems.
However, nearly half (49%) oppose this idea, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
These results show little difference from a survey conducted in February that asked Americans about legalization only. At that time, 40% said marijuana should be legalized, but 46% disagreed.
Over half of Democrats (52%) support the idea of legalizing and taxing pot, but only 28% of Republicans agree. Most GOP voters (65%) are against the idea, as are 37% of Democrats. Unaffiliated voters are more evenly divided: 41% are in favor of the idea and 47% are opposed to it.
Adults between the ages of 18 and 40 are much more likely to support legalizing and taxing marijuana than those over 40.
The new survey also shows that nearly half of voters (46%) believe marijuana use leads to use of harder drugs. Thirty-seven percent (37%) do not see marijuana as a “gateway” drug.
That “gateway drug” argument sure is persistent, isn’t it? I guess I could give it a positive spin: at least if you’re relying on the “gateway drug” argument to show how awful marijuana is, you’re tacitly admitting that the marijuana itself isn’t so harmful.
The only three effective tools left in the prohibitionist’s rhetorical arsenal are:
Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to use of harder drugs.
If we legalized marijuana, our streets would be filled with stoned drivers!
What about the children? For God’s Sake, won’t somebody think of the children?
So it is up to us to educate our friends and family and elected representatives. We need to have people who bring up “gateway drug” laughed out of the room like people who insist the moon landing was faked*.
We’ll deal with “stoned drivers” and “what about the children” another time. For your peers that shoot you the “gateway drug” argument, you could tell them that the Institute of Medicine debunked this theory in 1999 and every study subsequent to it has agreed. Or you could point out that the “gateway theory” is a logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning (that since this came before that, this caused that). But if your peers were swayed by logic and reason, we wouldn’t have 46% of them believing the “gateway theory”.
The theory survives because it fits a pattern familiar to most people. They understand that the falling-down drunk who’s loaded on scotch was once probably a guy who drank a beer or two. They understand that the chain smoker was once probably a guy who had a cigarette now and then. They understand that the right-wing talk radio host who was downing 30 illegal Oxycontin a day probably started on one or two a day. They also realize — accurately, I’ll admit — that the crack addict and heroin junkie probably smoked a joint or two before they moved on to the hard stuff.
So the way you attack this is to flip the perspective. They’re looking at all the hard drug addicts and noting that almost all of them used pot. You need to make them see all the marijuana users and show how few actually use hard drugs. Here are your three rhetorical attacks on the “gateway theory”:
Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 6:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
The amazing thing about marijuana is its ability to addle the brains of people who don’t smoke it.
Then they’ll summarily reject the best science in the universe, which says unequivocally marijuana is safe, even medically beneficial. Facts don’t count, somehow.
Neither does policy failure. If it did, I’d mention 85 percent of high school seniors surveyed said marijuana is “easy to get.”
Waste of time, such data. Blowing billions remains important to marijuana prohibitionists. They are as dissuaded by failure as they are dismissive of fact.
There must be a reason.
In 2005, I found a Nixon-era study that illuminated some of it.
“Many see the drug as fostering a counterculture, which conflicts with basic moral precepts as well as with the operating functions of our society,” the report said.
In other words, rational drug policy is an afterthought; pot is a skirmish in the culture war. To defeat it is to defeat the counterculture. Liberalism. Whatever.
For them, a Pyrrhic victory over the ’60s, however destructive, is preferable to a pluralistic country in which people live by values anathema to them.
That opening line is going to be my new signature line for email. Brilliant. It’s not the marijuana the prohibitionists fear, it’s the late 1960’s. Students protesting war, questioning authority, people actually living free, exploring sexuality, accepting diversity, expressing themselves, rejecting hierarchy and the status quo. Marijuana is a threat to all of that and more – it threatens the very paradigm of nature as man’s “domain”, a “resource” to be extracted and refined, rather than man as a part of nature, co-equal to all things from redwood to paramecium.
How many times have I heard the prohibitionist in his tirade against medical use of marijuana say, “We don’t chew willow bark for pain, we take an aspirin!”, as if the willow bark were somehow harmful or ineffective without the factory synthesizing it into pill form. Why don’t we chew willow bark, or drink a tea, or rub an aloe vera leaf on our sunburned skin? It’s almost as if we’ve been trained to think of nature as an enemy to be defeated, tamed, organized, instead of a mother who provides everything we need in natural form.
We also have professionalized health care as if it is something we require a trained expert for, rather than understanding our own role in our own health. You can’t be trusted to just smoke an herb and feel better, a doctor has to evaluate your condition and recommend a factory-synthesized remedy for it.
This rant is not to diminish the power of Western Medicine. If something’s really wrong with your health, Western Medicine has the best technology and pharmacology science can provide to help save your life. The problem is that the paradigm of Western Medicine isn’t very good when things are right with your health. Western Medicine is all about fixing what’s broke, not keeping it from breaking in the first place.
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 5:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
"Can you see it, Stone? Marijuana dispensaries as far as the eye can see!" "No, Keller, I don't, but I sure smell something skunky..."
[T]he 64-year-old [Michael Douglas] is adamant that making cannabis legal would boost America’s flagging economy and make the world more peaceful.
He says, “It’s an interesting issue with all of these troubles that are going on… and trying to resolve things. It’s an interesting thing that’s being raised again.
“I’m questioning it. We’re trying to get a lot of money for health and education and I’m wondering… you look at these gangs, and I look back at Prohibition. When we didn’t allow alcohol, what did we have? We had gangs. We had big gangs. It’s something that needs to be discussed a little more. It’s an economic issue and a violence issue.”
Somehow there’s a “Streets of San Francisco” reference I could use here, but I’m afraid I’d be dating myself again… By the way, I have no evidence that Michael Douglas has ever used cannabis. But Hollywood, the ’70s, superstardom… I’m just guessing. Besides, statistically there is a 30% chance I’m right based on his age group anyhow.
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 12:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
Despite the president’s dismissal, legalization advocates said they saw a flood of public response in the hours and days after his remarks.
“It’s a bittersweet thing when the president dabbles in your subject matter,” said Allen F. St. Pierre, executive director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).
“In [Obama’s] mind marijuana legalization is not a serious concern and he’s got to confront it, so at least he did, and at least the audience chuckled,” he said. “I’ve been here long enough that, had [President George H.W. Bush] been in that same situation, in a hand-picked audience, they would have hissed in 1991. So this is all moving largely in a very positive direction.”
St. Pierre, who has been an outspoken advocate of marijuana for 18 years, said the baby boomer generation is largely responsible for the shift in discussions on marijuana laws.
“That generation is coming to age now,” he said. “They run our institutions, they run our media, academics, businesses and, frankly, our politics. So as that baby boom generation takes over, their proclivities toward reforming laws are much greater than the prior generation.”
While passage of a federal law legalizing marijuana may be years off, momentum toward decriminalizing the drug — relaxing criminal penalties for violators — is generally viewed by advocates as a positive sign.
Remember, folks, it took from 1906 to 1937 to get marijuana criminalized (31 years) and it’s been 72 years of prohibition since then, with the last 37 being referred to as a “war”. There are very few living Americans who can even remember what it’s like for marijuana to not be illegal. We’re asking thousands of bureaucrats and politicians to admit to not only being wrong but openly lying over the past three generations. We’re asking millions of cops and parents to disregard all those sincerely-held beliefs about gateways and addiction and crime and violence.
Legalization will never happen so long as we wait for them to realize how beneficial it would be someday. It will only happen when we force them to admit how harmful prohibition is now.
Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 12:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
Some evidence for Mr. Hutchinson - support for legalization increases about 1% per year since President George HW Bush, and 6%-10% overall since Mr. Hutchinson was Drug Czar.
When it comes to the debate on legalization of marijuana, we can all have confidence in the greatness of our democracy. Ultimately the voters decide the direction of our country. Thus far there is no evidence that the public is in any mood to legalize marijuana or other currently illegal drugs.
Do you think the United States should legalize drugs?
No way
8%
242
Yes, all drugs
47%
1429
Only marijuana
45%
1353
Total Votes: 3024
In Arkansas, a few years back, a statewide ballot initiative could not even get on the ballot because the proponents could not garner enough signatures. Nationwide, recent ballot initiatives have focused on medical marijuana or enforcement policy.
The advocates of legalization are trying to chip away on the fringes of the legalization debate but they know there is not a sufficient popular movement for legalization.
Because a statewide ballot initiative cannot overturn a federal law. Who wants to put a couple of million dollars into a statewide initiative campaign that would be enjoined the minute it passes because of conflict with federal law? Medical marijuana, lowest-priority, and decriminalization aren’t “the fringes of the legalization debate”, they are the only possible tactics at the state and local level under an oppressive federal law.
Parents are in no mood to make another harmful drug more accessible and socially acceptable for the youth.
Uh, 84% of high school seniors say it is fairly easy to get pot. That means in a classroom of twenty seniors (don’t laugh, teachers, pretend our classrooms only have twenty kids per), seventeen of them can probably go out and get a baggie of weed within an hour. Is it your contention that a legalized marijuana market where adults have to go to an over-21 store and show ID will mean those other three hapless kids will finally be able to score?
Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 4:47 pm | By: Radical Russ
Dan Gardner, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, pens a fantastic column where he notes the conservative thinker Francis Fukuyama’s solution to the problem of escalating drug war violence in Mexico. Fukuyama says “of course” legalization is the way to reduce the problem, but politically “it has very little chance of being enacted by Congress, and therefore is not for the time being a realistic policy choice.” Gardner then consults the history books to show people that what is considered impossible today can be reality tomorrow.
“There is as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail,” claimed Morris Sheppard, a U.S. Senator from Texas.
The 18th Amendment was the constitutional provision banning alcohol. It was passed in 1920. Sheppard made his statement in 1930.
The 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933.
Sheppard wasn’t the only one caught out by history. Far from it.
“They can never repeal it,” boasted Congressman Andrew Volstead in 1921.
“I will never see the day when the 18th Amendment is out of the Constitution of the U.S.,” said Senator William Borah in 1929.
Prohibition’s supporters had good reason to be confident. Legalization wasn’t merely unpopular. It required an amendment to the constitution. “Thirteen states with a population less than that of New York State alone can prevent repeal until Halley’s Comet returns,” Clarence Darrow observed when Prohibition came into force in 1920. “One might as well talk about his summer vacation on Mars.”
I remember growing up in the Cold War when there was an East and West Germany and a Berlin Wall. That wall had existed my entire life, preceding me by seven years, in fact. I vividly recall even as a child marvelling at the numbers of kilotons and megatons of nuclear weaponry and destruction that were mutually directed at the US and USSR. “The Day After” played on my network TV when I was a junior in high school, painting the “what if” picture of nuclear attack in Lawrence, Kansas. That entire balance of power and terror was focused on the fulcrum of the Berlin Wall, where close to one hundred East Berliners died when killed by guards as they tried to cross the wall to freedom in the West.
Then one night I come home at about 3am from a gig in the winter of ‘89. I put down my bass and turn on the TV, and there’s Tom Brokaw with a live “breaking news” report (at 3am?). There are a whole bunch of jubilant white people dancing on top of and hammering away at some wall. I turn up the volume. What? The Berlin Wall? You gotta be kiddin’ me!
Our day is coming. Mr. Obama, tear down this prohibition!
Have you heard of Santiago Meza Lopez? They call him “The Soupmaker.” In January he confessed to Mexican authorities that he had dissolved over 300 dead human bodies in acid. There’s a lot of money to be made in America’s black market for drugs and Mexican suppliers are willing to kill a lot of people to control those markets and capture the gains. Conservative estimates put the death toll of the war between rival Mexican gangs at over 5,000 in the last year alone. When you kill so many people it’s hard to know what to do with all of the rotting bodies. One way to handle the problem is to call in the Soupmaker. Six hundred American dollars per corpse.
Did you know that the United States of America, the Land of the Free, puts a larger portion of its population behind bars than any country on earth? Thanks in large part to the War on Drugs, Americans lock more of their own in cages than do the thuggish Russians or those “Islamofascist” Saudis. As it happens, American drug prohibition and sentencing policies hit poor black men the hardest, devastating already disadvantaged black families and communities—a tragic, mocking contrast to the achievement of Obama’s election. Militarized police departments across the nation month after month kick down the wrong doors, terrify innocent families, shoot lawful citizens, and often kill the family dog.
So why is Obama laughing? To be fair, in 2004, Obama called the War on Drugs “a complete failure.” And he’s much saner about pot than most politicians. He has in the past called for decriminalization of marijuana and his Justice Department has promised the DEA will ease up on medical marijuana dispensaries that comply with state law (though the Feds just cracked down on a cannabis coop in San Francisco). Sure, Obama’s got a lot on his hands these days. But his dismissive snicker reflects a sadly common nonchalance toward America’s disastrous experiment in prohibition. This is a “war” that has not only failed utterly to shut down the market for drugs, but has, on the way, perpetuated the shameful American legacy of racial stratification, eroded the rights and safety of American citizens, and fomented a civil war on our southern border in which knock-on markets for assassins and corpse liquidation specialists flourish. To call this “complete failure” is to put on a happy face.
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. […]
Prohibition helped fuel September 11th attacks
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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