Our friends in the UK are never content to let their former colonies transcend them in the War on Cannabis.  Where we in America have the “kush” that will lock you to a couch, the Brits have the “skunk” that will give you multiple personality disorder.  Where up in Canada they have electrical inspectors using anti-cannabis regulations to fine indoor cucumber growers, the Brits have police helicopters, battering rams, six cops, and three cop cars dispatched under anti-cannabis surveillance to discover pet rodents.

(Daily Express) ANTI-drugs officers were convinced they had uncovered a cannabis factory when a police helicopter detected a suspicious building.

The onboard thermal imaging ­camera identified what looked like a clear case of a heating system to cultivate the illegal weed.

But police were left glowing with embarrassment when they swooped on Pamela Hardcastle’s semi [like a townhouse for our US readers] – and found the family’s guinea pigs Simon and Kenny being kept warm by an electric heater.

Read more: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/222606/Bungling-drugs-squad-swoop-on-guinea-pig-home-Bungling-drugs-squad-swoop-on-guinea-pig-home-#ixzz1AwPEX010

This woman is hard at work as a teacher when her elderly mother who lives in the adjoining townhouse calls her saying the police are here with a battering ram and they have a warrant.  She has no criminal record and says she doesn’t even have an unpaid bill.  The police have cut the lock on her neighbor’s gate to gain access when she arrives to show them the garage with the space heater and the rodents.

However, even with the embarrassing incident, this story does turn significantly from how it might have transpired in the United States.  Here, drug cops with a warrant wouldn’t be serving it during work hours; it would be late at night in the cover of darkness.  Here they wouldn’t be calling the homeowner and waiting for her arrival having only cut a padlock; they would have knocked, announced, and beat down the door and rushed inside with automatic weapons drawn.  Here they wouldn’t have spoken with the elderly mother; they would have forced her to the ground and cuffed her.

And most likely after discovering they’d burst into a guinea pig incubator, they wouldn’t do this:

Last night Mrs Hardcastle said a senior officer had visited to apologise in person and brought a new lock for her neighbour’s gate.

Howard Marks

The movie “Mr. Nice”, the story of long time English smuggler turned marijuana activist, Howard Marks, opened last weekend in the UK.

See the original post:
Howard Marks Movie Opens in the UK

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A prime example of the UK media’s reefer madness.  Start with a headline like “Death crash pilot ‘had used cannabis’”.  Ooh!  Death!  Crash!  Cannabis!

Next, post a lede that infers that cannabis use has some dire consequence:

(Manchester Evening News) A pilot who died when his microlite aircraft crashed into moorland was found to have traces of cannabis in his system, an inquest heard.

Then give folks the fact that corroborates the inference:

An inquest in Oldham heard that a pathologist found ‘metabolite’ in his blood, which was evidence that Mr Gover had used cannabis before his death.

By this point you’re far enough into the article that the casual reader will have moved on before getting to the full context that shatters the inference:

A pathology report by the RAF Department of Avionics Pathology stated: “The presence of metabolite indicates that he had used cannabis at some stage but not in the hours prior to the flight.

But in case a few have read this far, throw them off the realization that the headline was completely misleading by offering some vague, unsupported fears:

“However, the effects are likely to last beyond this time and may have caused an alteration of judgement or drowsiness.”

Then, deep into the article, finally get to the reality of the story:

Tim Atkinson senior investigator of air accidents said: “The aircraft climbed to 3,000 feet above Saddleworth Moor but took an abrupt and rapid descent north of Delph.

“The picture had been one of very good flying conditions in Manchester but became one of cold with strong winds and poor visibility over the moors. The terrain was the cause of the marked change in wind strength – it had doubled to 30 knots and the crucial thing is that the aircraft doesn’t have the instruments for it to be flown in poor visibility.”

Mmm, nobody does Reefer Madness like the British.  Good show, ol’ chaps!

Do we have to keep re-learning this lesson?

(The Independent – UK) After 40 years of defeat and failure, America’s “war on drugs” is being buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure of billions of dollars and the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people, a suitable epitaph for America’s longest “war” may well be the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be given the right to grow coca in its own backyard.

Prepare to shed a tear over the loss of revenue that eventual decriminalisation of narcotics could bring to the traffickers, large and small, and to the contractors who have been making good money building and running the new prisons that help to bankrupt governments – in the US in particular, where drug offenders – principally small retailers and seldom the rich and important wholesalers – have helped to push the prison population to 1,600,000; their imprisonment is already straining federal and state budgets. In Mississippi, where drug offenders once had to serve 85 per cent of their sentences, they are now being required to serve less than a quarter. California has been ordered to release 40,000 inmates because its prisons are hugely overcrowded.

For the lives and sanity of millions, the seeing of the light is decidedly late. The conditions of the 1920s, when the US Congress outlawed alcohol and allowed Al Capone and his kin to make massive fortunes, have been re-created up and down Latin America.

Mexico’s President has not been afraid to point out to Washington that official corruption is at the root of drug trafficking in the US just as it is in Mexico. “I say we should investigate on both sides. I’m cleaning my house and I hope that on the other side as well the house is being cleaned,” he said pointedly last April before President Obama came visiting.

Part of the problem in ending this prohibition compared to the last one is that Nixon called it “a war”. Americans don’t like losing a war. Back in the 1920s, nobody called prohibition “War on Alcohol”. It was a just a prohibition on alcohol. So when it came time to end that policy, we were just repealing a prohibition. Prohibition was seen as a bad thing and repealing it as a good thing.

But a “War on Drugs”, in many people’s minds, is a good thing. They see the devastation of drug addiction in street junkies, crackheads, meth freaks and the attendant homelessness, crime, and death. Who wouldn’t want to declare war on that? So when you present to them the idea of ending the “War on Drugs”, it fits into a frame of war and there are only two ways wars end – you win or you surrender. Now you’re asking the average “USA! USA!” American — or mayor or congressman or president! — to surrender, to give up, on trying to cure the ills wrought by drug addiction. You’re asking a proud American to cop to being a loser in a war.

As we move forward I urge all reformers to keep away from the “War on Drugs” metaphor with a ten-foot pole. Saying things like “We need to end this futile War on Drugs!” or “This War on Drugs is a failure!”, while true, put you on the side of calling the USA a loser in a war (ask anyone living around 1972-1979 about “losing” Vietnam and what that did to the American psyche).

Instead, we need to frame our side as proposing the solution to the problems of drug addiction where no solutions have yet been tried. It’s not that the “War on Drugs” failed, per se, it’s that no solutions were ever tried! We frame drug use as something that exists and must be accepted and dealt with, instead of pretending that we can eliminate it. It’s not that America failed to eliminate drug use; it’s that America believed it could eliminate drug use.

In this manner, we frame the “War on Drugs” not as an epic battle that we lost, but that for forty years we’ve been neglecting our responsibility to regulate and control drugs. It’s not that we’re abandoning the “War on Drugs” after forty years, it’s that we’re finally pursuing a “Strategy on Drugs” based in reality. It’s not that we failed at what we’re doing, it’s that what we’re doing has failed.

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Hemp Headlines

1. US Drug Czar Kerlikowske says marijuana legalization is “a non-starter”
2. UK Drugs Advisor Nutt sacked for being honest about marijuana
3. New Hampshire cop’s public stance on marijuana legalization costs him his job

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LONDON (AP) — Britain’s top drug adviser was fired Friday after saying that marijuana, Ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol.

David Nutt’s comments have embarrassed the British government, which toughened the penalties for possessing marijuana earlier this year over the protests of many prominent British scientists.

In later comments to BBC radio’s “PM” program, Nutt accused British Prime Minister Gordon Brown of making “completely irrational statements” about the dangerousness of marijuana.

“I’m not prepared to mislead the public about the harmfulness of drugs like cannabis and Ecstasy,” he said.

Although Nutt’s views have long been public knowledge, the government seems to have been angered by a recent lecture for the Center for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College in London during which Nutt accused former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith of “distorting and devaluing” researchers’ work.

Honesty… is such a lonely word… everyone is so untrue.

It’s getting tougher and tougher for governments to conceal the plain fact that now a majority of people recognize: marijuana is safer than alcohol.  We’re tired of being harassed, locked up, and lives ruined because we prefer not to get hangovers when we party.  We’re tired of every other commercial on the telly being for beer and boner pills, then being told our pot smoking is bad for a “drug-free America”.  We’re tired of being punished for using a natural substance that doesn’t make us cause wrecks, punch people, and puke on your shoes.

This news comes on the heels of our “drugs advisor”, drug czar Kerlikowske, once again saying that marijuana legalization is a “non-starter”.  It’s not a surprising statement, given that Kerlikowske is mandated by law to lie about marijuana.  Three cheers for David Nutt for having the stones to tell the truth based on science!

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Hemp Headlines

1. The 2008 National Survey on Drug Use & Health: American use of marijuana on the rise
2. US Forest Service slammed for racial profiling of Mexican campers
3. UK’s New Scientist: A Better World – Legalize Drugs

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• Degé Coutee from Patients Advocacy Network (http://cannabissaveslives.com)

SO FAR this year, about 4000 people have died in Mexico’s drugs war – a horrifying toll. If only a good fairy could wave a magic wand and make all illegal drugs disappear, the world would be a better place.

Dream on. Recreational drug use is as old as humanity, and has not been stopped by the most draconian laws. Given that drugs are here to stay, how do we limit the harm they do?

The evidence suggests most of the problems stem not from drugs themselves, but from the fact that they are illegal. The obvious answer, then, is to make them legal.

The argument most often deployed in support of the status quo is that keeping drugs illegal curbs drug use among the law-abiding majority, thereby reducing harm overall. But a closer look reveals that this really doesn’t stand up. In the UK, as in many countries, the real clampdown on drugs started in the late 1960s, yet government statistics show that the number of heroin or cocaine addicts seen by the health service has grown ever since – from around 1000 people per year then, to 100,000 today. It is a pattern that has been repeated the world over.

A second approach to the question is to look at whether fewer people use drugs in countries with stricter drug laws. In 2008, the World Health Organization looked at 17 countries and found no such correlation. The US, despite its punitive drug policies, has one of the highest levels of drug use in the world (PLoS Medicine, vol 5, p e141).

A third strand of evidence comes from what happens when a country softens its drug laws, as Portugal did in 2001. While dealing remains illegal in Portugal, personal use of all drugs has been decriminalised. The result? Drug use has stayed roughly constant, but ill health and deaths from drug taking have fallen. “Judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalisation framework has been a resounding success,” states a recent report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington DC.

When the evidence is so completely obvious regarding the need to legalize marijuana and regulate hard drugs, it is hard to avoid invoking conspiracy theory as to why we continue to maintain prohibition.  You’d think some sectors of our economy are in such need of more arrests, more prisoners, more prisons, and more crime and mayhem that they would actively oppose changing our drug policies to protect their profits.  You’d think some sectors of our economy would be at such a competitive disadvantage against a grow-your-own medicine / food / fuel / fiber / plastics plant that most couldn’t survive if we ended prohibition.  You’d think that some sectors of our government that are unwilling or unable to help the disaffected poor need the underground economy and jobs market provided by illegal drugs.

But that would be just crazy conspiracy theory talk, right?

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