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What policymakers don't understand is that ... 95% of the people that smoke pot do so like other people have cocktails in the evening....
Too many lawmakers fundamentally believe that everybody who smokes
marijuana, for example, has a problem with drugs ======= Prevent truth decay, be aware of drug war propaganda. Be quick in what you stand for and slow in what you fall for. ======= "A lot of people try drugs, but
only some of them become addicted" ======= Turn
the drug market over to drug stores. Drugs are too dangerous to be
controlled by criminals. ====================== Glaucoma
Smoked
marijuana has been shown to lower intraocular pressure (IOP) in subjects
with normal IOP and patients with glaucoma. The duration of the
pressure-lowering effect is 3 to 4 hours.
======================= A positive drug test does not indicate
whether an employee was impaired or intoxicated on the job, nor does it
indicate whether an employee has a drug problem or how often the
employee uses the drug. Thus most tests do not provide information
relevant to job performance. ===================== Why
can't we ever have balanced treatment of the marijuana issue? Why can't
we hear from the millions of adults who enjoy marijuana in moderation
with no harm to anyone including themselves?
=========================== A French government study has heaped fuel on
the debate over the safety of cannabis by listing it as the least
dangerous of all potentially addictive drugs. It also concludes that
alcohol is among the most dangerous.
The
study, commissioned by French health minister Bernard Kouchner, was
carried out by a panel of 10 French and foreign scientists headed by
Bernard-Pierre Roques of the René Descartes University of Paris. The
panel searched the scientific literature for information about
psychological and physical dependence, neural and general toxicity and
social hazards such as aggressive behaviour caused by various legal and
illegal drugs. The team then grouped the substances into three
categories of dangerousness. Cannabis was the only drug put in the least
dangerous category.While cautioning that no drug they assessed was "completely
free of danger", the researchers gave cannabis a rating of
"weak" for social hazard and addictiveness, "very
weak" for general toxicity and zero for neurotoxicity. In the most dangerous category, they included
heroin and other opiates, and cocaine. Alcohol was also placed in this
category because of its
strong toxicity, its potential as a social hazard and its "very
strong" addictiveness. In the middle category they placed
stimulants such as amphetamines, hallucinogens and tobacco--largely
because of its "very strong" addictiveness and toxicity.
The
authors point out that governments base their decisions whether or not
to criminalise a drug on its ability to induce dependence. They conclude
that the official classification for some drugs is incorrect.
Debora MacKenzie
From New Scientist, 27 June 1998 ================================= The purpose of being a registered voter was dead long before I was legally allowed to vote, and until there are candidates who speak for the people and their opinions, the number of registered voters will continue to fall. The simplest reason to legalize Marijuana (and all recreational drugs for that matter) is too save the lives of people that are taken everyday in a war ("The Drug War") that the U.S. government is waging against it's own citizens.
So because we choose to partake in an alternative form of inebreation,
other than the deadly alcohol that is pushed upon us, we must live in
constant fear that the cogs and gears of our OWN government will come
raid our little peace of freedom and add to their own overflowing
cornocopia of wealth, corruption, and deceit. Ahhhh...... ========================== War on Property, War on Intelligence,
War on Freedom, War on America. The issue is not whether drugs should be
legalized, as if the act would require some kind of permission from the
benevolent bureaucrats, but whether the government ever had the moral
right to illegalize drugs to begin
with. ======================== Most
of the cash in America is tainted with drugs. Thomas Jourdan, chief of
materials and devices for the FBI, says 85 to 90 percent of the bills in
the United States are covered with measurable amounts of cocaine. "Any time you take a bunch of money and
let a dog sniff it, he will find cocaine on it,"
said Terry Hall, laboratory director for Toxicology Testing ======================== Evil
Drug War Prison Labor Camps!
The Majority
of the 2 million
U.S. prisoners are incarcerated due to the Drug
War! Drug crimes (24%), drug-related crimes (such as robbing to get
money for drugs that are expensive because of the drug war), drug trade
crimes, drug-related parole violations, etc.. The USA has 5% of the
world's population and 25% (2 million) of the
world's 8 million prisoners.
As of the year 2000 the USA again had the world's highest
incarceration rate! 5 to 17 times higher than all other Western (long
democratic traditions) nations. Almost 4 times higher than it was in
1980's. ======================== "The
first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people
tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes
stronger than their democratic state itself.
That, in essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an
individual, by a group, or by any other controlling power. Among us
today a concentration of private power without equal in history is
growing." President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
======================= A specific gravity test tells the lab if the
applicant has recently drunk copious amounts of water.
It's called a "dilute sample," and Staton said most
companies treat them as positives. ======================== The
'gateway' thesis that has long been a basic principle of drug policy in
this country was disproved by a study by the private, nonprofit Rand
Drug Policy Research Center in Santa Monica, Calif.
Americans may use marijuana at an earlier age than harder drugs,
but only because it becomes available at an earlier age, said the lead
author, Dr. Andrew
Morral. Teens who are
predisposed to use drugs do so regardless of whether they smoked
marijuana first. ================= Weapons
Of Mass Delusion =================== It's estimated there are 5 million
people addicted to illicit drugs in the United States, according to the
National Household Survey done by the Department of Human Services.
In 2000, only 800,000 had access to treatment services. ================= "If drug abuse is a disease, then drug
war is a crime." ============================= "The
current war on drugs is like the Vietnam War" Kardaras says.
"It has no clear strategy, unacceptable casualties, collateral
damage, and the body count keeps mounting.
In a war the first casualty is truth; the second is common
sense." ============================= First
of all, there is no war on drugs; drugs are not being brutalized, drugs
are not having their hard-earned property stolen, and drugs are not
having their doors kicked in so that they may be hauled away by a gaggle
of unfeeling thugs. This
is a war on people - American people - perhaps someone you care about. ======================= It is time for decriminalisation. All we
achieve with prohibition is to line the pockets of the drug dealers
and to force desperate users into crime. ==================== Some
judges, like U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein, of Brooklyn, refused to
take drug cases because they oppose mandatory minimum sentences.
Weinstein said that he had a "sense of depression about much of the
cruelty I have been party to in connection with the war on drugs,'' and
refused to handle such matters until Congress afforded judges some
discretion. U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has also questioned the wisdom of
mandatory minimums. "I think I'm in agreement with most judges in
the federal system that mandatory
minimums are an imprudent, unwise and often unjust mechanism for
sentencing'' Kennedy said in 1994 testimony
before a congressional committee. ===================== A
senior Californian judge, James Gray, calling for a serious policy
rethink, put it bluntly: "In the 'war on drugs', victory is now
literally being viewed as slowing down the pace of defeat." "If the price of the drugs hasn't
gone up and the availability has not decreased, what does that mean
about the effectiveness of our efforts to interdict?" he asks.
"It certainly suggests that the producers can expand a bit faster
than we can interdict. That
doesn't necessarily mean you legalise everything, but it does mean that
you're not going to be able to put more and more resources into
interdiction and expect a better outcome than you had the time
before." ====== Ted
Wilson, a criminal law expert in Houston, said officers who lack
probable cause cannot legally pressure a travelers into a consensual
search by threatening to detain them while they get a warrant from a
magistrate. "The law
says you cannot coerce someone into allowing a search," he said.
"Once the officer [without probable cause] is told no, it's
over." ====== As
an American colleague put it, zero tolerance plus zero compassion equals
zero. ====== An
exhaustive March, 1999, report from the prestigious U.S. Institute of
Medicine finds that rather than pot causing hard-drug use, it's the
criminal law that drives people to sources of more dangerous substances.
peddled the scientifically laughable "gateway" theory. ====== Drugs don't cause
crime......Prohibition
does ====== In
1992, the Orlando Sentinel obtained police videotapes of traffic stops
of more than 1,000 motorists by officers in a special drug unit of the
Volusia County, Fla., Sheriff's Department. They showed almost 70
percent of traffic stops and 80 percent of vehicle searches were of
black and Hispanic motorists. Although a Florida
Supreme Court decision requires that deputies stop motorists only for
legitimate traffic violations, only nine of the 1,084 drivers who were
stopped were given a traffic citation. As
part of a settlement of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, the Maryland
State Police agreed in the mid-1990s to collect data on traffic stops.
The results stunned even the ACLU. On a stretch of Interstate 95
northeast of Baltimore, a focal point in police drug interdiction
efforts, black drivers accounted for 17 percent of the traffic but 70
percent of those who were stopped. ====== Imprisoning
people whose only crime is drug use is a terribly expensive mistake.. As
for treatment, very few drug users are addicts. ====== For
one thing, not everyone who used it got addicted. According to the U.S.
Department of Health, most
people who try heroin do not become addicted. ====== The
last generation - the same young people who are often referred to as the
Chemical Generation - were taught to Just Say No with the same
insistence that their predecessors were encouraged to follow the Green Cross
Code or to "Clunk Click Every Trip". And much good it did
them. The War on Drugs is a battle fought with slogans against an unseen
enemy. It is unwinnable, and is waged for reasons which are more
political than practical. Politicians
need enemies and in a cynical world fear is easier to conjure than hope.
Yet, after at least a decade of War, no-one is arguing that drug use is
in decline. Fewer still are calling for society's real killer drugs,
tobacco and alcohol, to be outlawed. Brand-name legal drugs which
alter the state of their users in new and dramatic ways - see Viagra and
Prozac - are fetishised. ====== The government has no right to dictate what an
individual's rights are when he is trying to achieve spiritual peace
within himself. When it
comes to drugs, each citizen must determine for himself what is in his
own best interestes and act accordingly.
The government has been trying to convince us for 90 years that
our best interestes are crimes. ====== In
the crack years of the 1980s, treatment programs were gutted while the
drug-fighting budget quadrupled. News reports said crack was the most
addictive substance known to man, and prisons started to fill with
people who once might have gotten help instead. The number of Americans
locked up on drug offenses grew from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 today. Some
of the experts who called crack the worst drug of all have done an
about-face. "I've
changed my view because of the data that has come in over the last 10
years," said Charles O'Brien, chief of psychiatry at the Veterans
Administration Medical Center in Philadelphia, who in the late '80s
described crack as "by far, the most addictive drug we've ever had
to deal with." What
changed his mind were national surveys that showed 84 percent of people who tried cocaine - either smoking
it as crack or inhaling it in powder form - did not become addicted.
He said he also was swayed by a study he co-wrote of habitual users of
crack who were assigned to treatment. A year after treatment, at least
half tested free of drugs. ====== "(There's
a) negative PR campaign that we're all victims of today," Weiss
said. "The fact is, the rest of the world has taken off with
industrial hemp, and the United States is in a cloud of ignorance." ====== I
want to conclude by quoting Milton
Friedman, winner of the Nobel Economy Prize. In a letter to the
director of drug control policies in the White House, Mr. Friedman
stated: "The path you propose of more police,
more jails, use of the military in The drug war cannot be won by those tactics without
undermining the human liberty and individual freedom that you and I
cherish. Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use that converts tragedy into a disaster for society, for user and non-user alike. Our expeience of the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition on alcoholic beverages. Postponing decriminalization will only make matters worse, and make the problem appear even more intractable." |
Relegalize Marijuana
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Medical Marijuana Now |
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Anthony Kennedy |
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Milton Friedman |
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