Newshawk: http://www.cannabisnews.com/ Pubdate: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2004 The New York Times Company Contact: letters@nytimes.com Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298 Author: Eric Schlosser Note: Eric Schlosser is the author of "Fast Food Nation" and "Reefer Madness." Cited: report by a Canadian Senate committee http://www.cannabislink.ca/gov/senatesumm.htm Cited: ONDCP's open letter to America's prosecutors http://www.norml.org/pdf_files/whitehouse_fax.pdf Cited: 1972 commission http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/nc/ncmenu.htm Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis - Canada) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal) MAKE PEACE WITH POT Starting in the fall, pharmacies in British Columbia will sell mar1juana for medicinal purposes, without a prescription, under a pilot project devised by Canada's national health service. The plan follows a 2002 report by a Canadian Senate committee that found there were "clear, though not definitive" benefits for using mar1juana in the treatment of chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and other ailments. Both Prime Minister Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, leader of the opposition conservatives, support the decriminalization of mar1juana. Oddly, the strongest criticism of the Canadian proposal has come from patients already using medical mar1juana who think the government, which charges about $110 an ounce, supplies lousy pot. "It is of incredibly poor quality," said one patient. Another said, "It tastes like lumber." A spokesman for Health Canada promised the agency would try to offer a better grade of product. Needless to say, this is a far cry from the situation in the United States, where mar1juana remains a Schedule I controlled substance, a drug that the government says has a high potential for abuse, no accepted medical uses and no safe level of use. Under federal law it is illegal to possess any amount of mar1juana anywhere in the United States. Penalties for a first mar1juana offense range from probation to life without parole. Although 11 states have decriminalized mar1juana, most still have tough laws against the drug. In Louisiana, selling one ounce can lead to a 20-year prison sentence. In Washington State, supplying any amount of mar1juana brings a recommended prison sentence of five years. About 700,000 people were arrested in the United States for violating mar1juana laws in 2002 (the most recent year for which statistics are available) - more than were arrested for heroin or cocaine. Almost 90 percent of these mar1juana arrests were for simple possession, a crime that in most cases is a misdemeanor. But even a misdemeanor conviction can easily lead to time in jail, the suspension of a driver's license, the loss of a job. And in many states possession of an ounce is a felony. Those convicted of a mar1juana felony, even if they are disabled, can be prohibited from receiving federal welfare payments or food stamps. Convicted murderers and rapists, however, are still eligible for those benefits. The Bush administration has escalated the war on mar1juana, raiding clinics that offer medical mar1juana and staging a nationwide roundup of manufacturers of drug paraphernalia. In November 2002 the Office of National Drug Control Policy circulated an "open letter to America's prosecutors" spelling out the administration's views. "mar1juana is addictive," the letter asserted. "mar1juana and violence are linked . . . no drug matches the threat posed by mar1juana." This tough new stand has generated little protest in Congress. Even though the war on mar1juana was begun by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, it has always received strong bipartisan support. Some of the toughest drug war legislation has been backed by liberals, and the number of annual mar1juana arrests more than doubled during the Clinton years. In fact, some of the strongest opposition to the arrest and imprisonment of mar1juana users has come from conservatives like William F. Buckley, the economist Milton Friedman and Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico. This year the White House's national antidrug media campaign will spend $170 million, working closely with the nonprofit Partnership for a Drug-Free America. The idea of a "drug-free America" may seem appealing. But it's hard to believe that anyone seriously hopes to achieve that goal in a nation where millions of children are routinely given Ritalin, antidepressants are prescribed to cure shyness, and the pharmaceutical industry aggressively promotes pills to help middle-aged men have sex. Clearly, some recreational drugs are thought to be O.K. Thus it isn't surprising that the Partnership for a Drug-Free America originally received much of its financing from cigarette, alcohol and pharmaceutical companies like Hoffmann-La Roche, Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds and Anheuser-Busch. More than 16,000 Americans die every year after taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen. No one in Congress, however, has called for an all-out war on Advil. Perhaps the most dangerous drug widely consumed in the United States is the one that I use three or four times a week: alcohol. It is literally poisonous; you can die after drinking too much. It is directly linked to about one-quarter of the suicides in the United States, almost half the violent crime and two-thirds of domestic abuse. And the level of alcohol use among the young far exceeds the use of mar1juana. According to the Justice Department, American children aged 11 to 13 are four times more likely to drink alcohol than to smoke pot. None of this should play down the seriousness of mar1juana use. It is a powerful, mind-altering drug. It should not be smoked by young people, schizophrenics, pregnant women and people with heart conditions. But it is remarkably nontoxic. In more than 5,000 years of recorded use, there is no verified case of anybody dying of an overdose. Indeed, no fatal dose has ever been established. Over the past two decades billions of dollars have been spent fighting the war on mar1juana, millions of Americans have been arrested and tens of thousands have been imprisoned. Has it been worth it? According to the government's National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, in 1982 about 54 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 had smoked mar1juana. In 2002 the proportion was . . . about 54 percent. We seem to pay no attention to what other governments are doing. Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium have decriminalized mar1juana. This year Britain reduced the penalty for having small amounts. Legislation is pending in Canada to decriminalize possession of about half an ounce (the Bush administration is applying strong pressure on the Canadian government to block that bill). In Ohio, possession of up to three ounces has been decriminalized for years - and yet liberal mar1juana laws have not transformed Ohio into a hippy-dippy paradise; conservative Republican governors have been running the state since 1991. Here's an idea: people who smoke too much mar1juana should be treated the same way as people who drink too much alcohol. They need help, not the threat of arrest, imprisonment and unemployment. More important, denying a relatively safe, potentially useful medicine to patients is irrational and cruel. In 1972 a commission appointed by President Richard Nixon concluded that mar1juana should be decriminalized in the United States. The commission's aim was not to encourage the use of mar1juana, but to "demythologize it." Although Nixon rejected the commission's findings, they remain no less valid today: "For the vast majority of recreational users," the 2002 Canadian Senate committee found, "cannabis use presents no harmful consequences for physical, psychological or social well-being in either the short or long term." The current war on mar1juana is a monumental waste of money and a source of pointless misery. America's drug warriors, much like its mar1juana smokers, seem under the spell of a powerful intoxicant. They are not thinking clearly.
That's it, I'm going! Seriously, this makes a lot of sense. The problem with getting something like this passed here is that there are billions of dollars at stake. Think about the money spent funding local, state and federal law enforcement departments. The advertising dollars. The dollars spent on trials. The dollars spent housing the inmates convicted or processing their cases through parole offices. There is no way that all these people are going to let this go through without a fight.
They need to try some Jamaican Red Hair or some MAUI WOWWEE! That sh*t is the bomb yo! Oh hey and when you go and get that stuff from Walgreen's, can also pick up a few things for me? Get some sour cream and onion chips with some dip, man, some beef jerky, some peanut butter. Get some Haagen-Dasz ice cream bars, a whole lot, make sure chocolate, gotta have chocolate, man. Some popcorn, red popcorn, graham crackers, graham crackers with marshmallows, the little marshmallows and little chocolate bars and we can make s'mores, man. Also, celery, grape jelly, Cap'n Crunch with the little Crunch berries, pizzas. We need two big pizzas, man, everything on 'em, with water, whole lotta water, and Funyons. .... Wait, what were we just talking about?
Funions......bully....man!!!!! If Canada wasn't too cold and there was no real football (that long field is just too wierd), I'd be headed up there.
Sorry guys...one. day. late. story (this from the city's 'conservative' paper....love the descriptions
off topic but i found this funny http://www.missblackwidow.com/drugs.html Results of experiments with Spiders and Drugs Scientists at the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have turned their attention from the mysteries of the cosmos to a more esoteric area of research: what happens when you get a spider stoned. Their experiments have shown that common house spiders spin their webs in different ways according to the psychotropic drug they have been given. Spiders on mar1juana made a reasonable stab at spinning webs but appeared to lose concentration about half-way through. Those on Benzedrine - "speed" - spin their webs "with great gusto, but apparently without much planning leaving large holes", according to New Scientist magazine. Caffeine, one of the most common drugs consumed by Britons in soft drinks, tea and coffee, makes spiders incapable of spinning anything better than a few threads strung together at random. On chloral hydrat, an ingredient of sleeping pills, spiders "drop off before they even get started". Nasa scientists believe the research demonstrates that web-spinning spiders can be used to test drugs because the more toxic the chemical, the more deformed was the web. The scientists believe their previous work on the goemetry of crystals will help them to devise computer programs that can analyse web-building objectively in order to predict the toxicity of new medicines. "It appears that one of the most telling measures of toxicity is a decrease, in comparison with a normal web, of the numbers of completed sides [of a web]; the greater the toxicity, the more sides the spider fails to complete", the scientists say. Paul Hillard, spider specialist at the Natural History Museum in London, said researchers first discovered the effects of psychotropic drugs on spiders during experiments at the end of 1960s. The researchers fed caffeine to spiders in hope of making them spin webs in the late evening rather than the early dawn. The result was eccentric webs rather than earlier spinning, he said.
Great find...thanks. It relates (in my mind anyway) because these are the types of tests that, among others, could help us to provide a rational, logical framework for regulating the distributrion of drugs. We need a drug policy that is based on science and healthcare.
