The Prince Of Pot Speaks
Freelance journalist Chris Morrow paid a visit to “Prince of Pot” Marc Emery (profiled in the disinformation documentary Escape To Canada) back in February while in Vancouver and posted the video interview on CNN iReport and extended interview on YouTube:
Wal-Mart Fires Associate Of Year, Cancer Patient, For Medical Marijuana Use
Steve Elliott writes on Toke of the Town:
Despite medical marijuana being legal in Michigan, WalMart has fired a cancer patient and former employee of the year who tested positive for the drug, which was recommended by his doctor.
“I was terminated because I failed a drug screening,” ex-WalMart employee Joseph Casias told WZZM-13.
In 2008, Casias was Associate of the Year at the WalMart store in Battle Creek, Mich., despite suffering from sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor. At his doctor’s recommendation, Casias legally uses medical marijuana to ease his pain.
“It helps tremendously,” Casias said. “I only use it to stop the pain. To make me feel more comfortable and active as a person.”
Casias said he went to work every day during his five years at WalMart. “I gave them everything,”…
How Not To Get 35 Years For Pot Possession
Craig Malisow writes on Houston Press:
Smith County (East Texas) judges and juries have long had a reputation of meting out severe, some might say ridiculous, punishment for drug convictions. And Henry Wooten’s case is no exception: the 54-year-old Tyler man was sentenced to 35 years in prison for possessing slightly more than four ounces of pot. Wooten actually got off easy — the prosecutor asked the jury to give him 99 years. (We just hope TDCJ can free up room for this menace to society; maybe the state can release a child molester or serial arsonist to find a cell for Wooten.)
While the sentence may be asinine, we can’t help but feel Wooten brought much of this upon himself — mostly by choosing to be both a pothead and live…
‘Never Get Busted’ Filmmaker Barry Cooper Arrested for ‘KopBusters’ Reality Show
KopBusters is a new project from Never Get Busted Again filmmaker and activist Barry Cooper:
[We] were discussing the thousands of citizens who sent emails to NeverGetBusted asking for help regarding krooked kops in their communities. Formerly one of our nation’s top drug enforcement officers, [Barry Cooper] has first hand knowledge of the korruption the American Drug War produces. He knew the constant flow of emails complaining of civil rights violations, specifically the 4th Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure), were true.
Barry Cooper says his arrest last week was in retaliation for his “KopBusting” and was politically motivated:
As hard as it was on my family for myself to go to jail … it’s nothing compared to how hundreds of thousands of families feel every year, because of those raids. Other families do not have the resources nor the experience or the knowledge to safely make it through a raid, so when they’re raided, they can’t and don’t and won’t fight back. So my family is fighting back for those families.
As far as I know, there’s no other human or family exposing cop corruption. The proof that cops will retaliate if you expose them, is our arrest and the raid they conducted on my home. For that exact reason, other families just take it. This happened to my family because I caught and filmed one of their officers stealing drug money.
The Supreme Court Has Ruled That You’re Allowed to Ingest Any Drug, Especially If You’re An Addict
Here is another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.
For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.
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In the early 1920s, Dr. Linder was convicted of selling one morphine tablet and three cocaine tablets to a patient who was addicted to narcotics. The Supreme Court overturned the conviction, declaring that providing an addicted patient with a fairly small amount of drugs is an acceptable medical practice “when designed temporarily to alleviate an addict’s pains.” (Linder v. United States.)
In 1962, the Court heard the case of a man who had been sent to the clink under a California state law that made being an addict a criminal offense. Once again, the verdict was tossed out, with the Supremes saying that punishing an addict for being an addict is cruel and unusual and, thus, unconstitutional. (Robinson v. California.)
Six years later, the Supreme Court reaffirmed these principles in Powell v. Texas. A man who was arrested for being drunk in public said that, because he was an alcoholic, he couldn’t help it. He invoked the Robinson decision as precedent. The Court upheld his conviction because it had been based on an action (being wasted in public), not on the general condition of his addiction to booze. Justice White supported this decision, yet for different reasons than the others. In his concurring opinion, he expanded Robinson…
Despite Obama Admin’s Promise, DEA Continues Raids On Medical Marijuana Growers
From Raw Story:
On Thursday, a Denver news station interviewed Chris Bartkowicz about his medical-marijuana operation in the basement of his home. Bartkowicz, confident of his compliance with state laws, boasted of its size and profitability.
“I’m definitely living the dream now,” he told 9News.
The following day, the dream was over.
Drug-enforcement agents raided his home, placed him under arrest, and carried off dozens of black bags of marijuana plants and growing lights…
[continues at Raw Story]
When 70 Percent Support Marijuana Legalization, Starbucks Got The Message
Steve Elliott writes on New Junkie Post:
A remarkable scenario played out in the American media recently, and beyond the import of the story itself is the quantum shift in public perception that it illustrates.
A pro-cannabis group based in Colorado called for a nationwide boycott of coffee giant Starbucks after activists spotted a Starbucks logo on the website of a virulently extremist anti-drug organization. After intense negative publicity ensued, Starbucks actually felt moved to issue a denial.
Once Mason Tvert of Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recation (SAFER) called for the boycott, it took only a couple days until Starbucks denied funding the Colorado Drug Investigators Association (CDIA). Starbucks further said they officially took no position on the marijuana issue, one way or the other.
That doesn’t sound so remarkable until you realize that the…
The War on Drugs: What a Joke!
From American Drug War’s YouTube, a collection of clips about prescription pharmaceuticals, marijuana, and the hypocrisy of the War on Drugs:
Cheech And Chong On Fox News
Stoner-comedy legends Cheech and Chong somehow got an interview on Fox News, where they called for marijuana legalization. By the end, Fox & Friends host Gretchen Carlson seems to have had her mind blown.
From Spas to Banks, Mexico Economy Rides on Drugs
From Reuters:
At a modern factory in a city whose main claim to fame is an image of the Virgin Mary revered for granting miracles, Mexican pharmaceuticals firm Grupo Collins churns out antibiotics and other medicines.
But the United States contends that the company in Zapopan is not what it seems. The U.S. Treasury put Grupo Collins on a black list in 2008, saying the firm supplies a small drug cartel in western Mexico with chemicals needed to make methamphetamines.
Grupo Collins, which has denied any connection to organized crime, is one of dozens under suspicion of laundering money for the nation’s booming drug business, whose growing economic impact now pervades just about every level of Mexican life.
Mexican cartels, which control most of the cocaine and methamphetamine smuggled into the United States, bring…
Pot Potato
From The Stranger:
A Bill to Decriminalize Pot Is Popular with Voters—So Why Won’t the Legislature Pass It?
Stoners get caricatured as layabouts who talk in circles, shrug off their responsibilities, and leave hard work to other people. But when it comes to reforming pot laws in Washington, it’s not stoners embodying this stereotype.
As this year’s legislative session begins, one of the bills still kicking around from last year’s session—after it stalled in the state house without a hearing—is a measure that would decriminalize marijuana. The bill would replace the existing penalty for possessing pot (up to 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine) with just a $100 citation, like a parking ticket. A fiscal report by the state’s Office of Financial Management shows the measure would save $11,283,360 a…
U.S. Waves White Flag in Disastrous ‘War on Drugs’
Hugh O’Shaughnessy writes in the Independent:
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.
The “war”, declared unilaterally throughout the world by Richard Nixon in 1969, is expiring as its strategists start discarding…
Graham Hancock on Marijuana & Consciousness
Graham Hancock’s view on Marijuana and its effect on human consciousness. This echoes his essay The War on Consciousness included in the disinformation anthology You Are STILL Being Lied To. You can read that article here.
Push for Looser Pot Laws Gains Momentum
From WSJ:
A push to legalize marijuana on the West Coast is picking up steam as Washington lawmakers and pot proponents in California and Oregon propose separate measures.The Washington state legislature will hold a preliminary vote Wednesday on whether to sell pot in state liquor stores, though even its authors say the bill is unlikely to pass. The same day in California, backers of a well-funded ballot measure to legalize marijuana are expected to file more than enough signatures to put the initiative before state voters in November.
Activists have also been busy in Washington state, with one group filing a marijuana-legalization initiative last Monday to put the issue on the November ballot. Activists in Oregon, meanwhile, say they have collected more than half of the signatures they need by July to…
Mexican Journalist Killed in Apparent Drug Hit
From Reuters:
Mexican police said on Saturday they found the body of a crime reporter abducted last month by apparent drug traffickers, the third murder of a journalist in recent weeks.
The remains of radio journalist Jose Luis Romero were discovered wrapped in plastic near the city of Los Mochis in the western state of Sinaloa, a hotspot in Mexico’s drug war.
The latest victim in an upsurge of attacks on the media, Romero was kidnapped on December 30 at a seafood restaurant. His hands and a leg were broken before he was shot to death, police said.
Across Mexico, a war between rival cartels for control of the multibillion dollar drug trade has killed 17,000 people since President Felipe Calderon launched his anti-drug campaign at the end of 2006.
Attacks on the media have…
California Assembly Panel Votes To Legalize Marijuana
From The Huffington Post:
Since marijuana was criminalized more than 70 years ago, no panel of federal or state lawmakers has ever voted to reverse the ban and legalize it. That streak ended on Tuesday, when a California Assembly committee voted to approve AB 390, sponsored by Assembly Democrat Tom Ammiano, which would legalize, regulate and tax marijuana in the state of California.
The bill passed the Public Safety Committee by a 4-3 vote and now moves to the Health Committee before coming to the Assembly floor for a full vote.
“This historic vote marks the formal beginning of the end of marijuana prohibition in the United States,” said Stephen Gutwillig, California state director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Making marijuana legal has now entered the public dialogue in a credible way. Decades…
Mexican Drug Gangs Worship “Saint Death”
From The Times Online:
She was yet another desolate victim of the endless drug wars ravaging the northern Mexican borderlands, one of more than 2,600 people murdered in Ciudad Juarez last year. When police found her body in a residential area close to the Rio Grande river, there were two distinctive signs that she had been caught up in the bloodsoaked feuding between the rival Juarez and Sinaloa cartels.
First, her head had been crudely hacked off — a trademark cartel warning to rivals. Second, her torso bore a distinctive tattoo of a cackling skeleton dressed in suggestive female clothing.
Police recognised it at once as Santa Muerte — best translated as Saint Death, a macabre feminine icon who has replaced the Virgin Mary as an improbable source of unholy comfort to Mexico’s…
California Judge Orders Police to Return 60 Pounds of Marijuana
From the L.A. Times:
With the debate on medical marijuana still at a full boil in Los Angeles, a judge Friday ordered the return of 60 pounds of pot to a man after his attorneys successfully argued that a state law gave him the right to transport it.
Saguro Doven, 33, was initially charged with possession of marijuana for sale and transportation of the drug, a violation of the state’s health and safety code.
The marijuana was bundled in individual bags that were tucked inside a larger duffel bag when Doven was pulled over on the 101 Freeway by a California Highway Patrol officer, according to court records.
But defense attorney Glen T. Jonas argued that his client was a member of a Venice-based medical marijuana collective and that he was authorized to transport…
The Secret War Over Ecstasy
Oliver Hockenhull writes on h+ magazine:
A documentary maker reveals the startling history of Ecstasy. In the 1960s some psychotherapists were treating alcoholism and neurosis with LSD — and in 1957 a Catholic church monsignor in Vancouver even wrote a prayer for LSD trips. (”We humbly ask our Heavenly Mother the Virgin, help of all who call upon her to know and understand the true qualities of these psychedelics…”) But after LSD was made illegal, psychiatrists struggled to keep MDMA (Ecstasy) from suffering the same fate for the next two decades…
MDMA was promoted in the 1970s by a senior research scientist at Dow Chemicals, but in 1985 it was still declared a Schedule One drug — illegal with no medical use — though it’s been shown to dramatically enhance psychotherapy, especially…
