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The illegal drug trade requires three things
to exist: a supply of drugs, a demand for drugs and laws prohibiting
their sale and possession. Removing any one of these would cause the
black market to disappear. =============== It is common in late twentieth-century
America for the government to gain criminal convictions by offering
money, leniency or freedom to one citizen in return for incriminating
testimony against another citizen.
=================== More than 11,000 children are
currently incarcerated with adults American Jails. ====================== At
its core, Prohibition is an attempt by the government, in the face of
all evidence, to suppress the basic laws of supply and demand through
criminal enforcement. It means that Americans are forbidden to grow and
to use certain varieties of plants and certain chemical combinations,
even in the privacy of their own homes, and whether or not that use
harms anyone other than the user, or even the user himself. ======================= PRESIDENT
LINCOLN SAID IN 1840:....... "Prohibition
goes beyond the bounds of reasons in that it attempts to control a
person's appetite by legislation and makes crime out of things that are
not crimes...Prohibition laws strikes a blow at the very principles upon
which our government was founded" ============== A friend of ours likes to quote his Rabbi to
the effect: "In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free
society -- some are guilty, while all are responsible." ======================= In
an angry letter to the Federal Bureau of Prisons director, U.S. District
Judge David Hittner said it was "highly inappropriate" to
place Miguel Rocha in a minimum-security facility. "For
a major drug offender to be assigned to a facility reserved for
individuals convicted on business-oriented, non-drug-related crimes is
quite disturbing." =========================
Poisonous
Cotton Conventional (also known as traditional or commercial) grown cotton is ordinarily one of the crops most heavily sprayed with pesticides. To bring this delicate plant to harvest, it is heavily sprayed 30 to 40 times a season in extreme cases with pesticides so poisonous they gradually render fields barren. To create finished goods, fabrics are usually colored with toxic dyes and finished with formaldehyde. Worldwide,
conventional cotton
farming uses only about 3% of the
farmland but consumes 25 percent
of the chemical pesticides and
fertilizers.
In the United States alone,
approximately 600 thousand tons
of pesticides and chemical fertilizers
are applied to cotton fields each season. To complicate matters, insects
are quickly becoming resistant to
recommended rates of pesticide application and ever increasing amounts
are needed be effective. Consumers
and environmental groups are
becoming more alarmed and more
vocal. "When the planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field
in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark
Ages of commerce. Maybe one
thousandth of this aerial insecticide
actually prevents the infestation.
The balance goes to the leaves, into the soil, into the water,
into all forms of wildlife, into ourselves. What is good for the
balance sheet is wasteful of resources and harmful to life."
Paul Hawken,
Ecology of Commerce ====================== Dr.
Steve Epperson, program coordinator of the Utah Humanities Council, and
a former curator at the Latter Day Saints Church History and Art Museum,
and former assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University,
on Thursday (7/15) told attendees of the Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake
City, Utah that the drug war is a "catastrophic moral
failure." Urging
all religious communities to "call this nation and its leaders to
their senses," Dr. Epperson characterized the drug war as racist,
class-biased, corrupting, contemptuous of basic civil rights and
detrimental to the health and education of all citizens. There is a "significant
difference" said Dr. Epperson, "between opposing drug use on
spiritual and ethical grounds and uncritically supporting a failed
public policy." ================ There cannot be any greater injustice than the use of the police force and state violence against the person and property of the sick, dying and disabled, who seek to preserve their lives through the use of a plant. ================ Drug
cases are cash cows. As part of plea agreements, defendants are commonly
asked to make "contributions" to drug education programs,
usually ================== In
a newspaper article, Prof Macleod also expressed contempt for the theory
that soft drugs lead to hard drugs. He said: "To say the least, cannabis is no more destructive than alcohol. That
leaves us with a clear choice; either we treat alcohol as we currently
treat cannabis or we treat cannabis as we currently treat alcohol." He
compared the laws on cannabis to American prohibition in the 1920s. He
said: "Criminals have no interest in drugs as such. They're
interested only in profits. Destroy these and the pushers will melt
away. That will not necessarily end addiction. We
still have alcoholics despite liquor being legal. What we don't have is a drinks
industry controlled by criminals. For the
argument that soft drugs lead to hard drugs I have only contempt. It
deliberately omits from the category of 'soft drugs' alcohol and
tobaccos. "A
heroin addict who's been a lifelong non-smoker and a total abstainer is
as rare as an anorexic sumo-wrestler. Let's be either consistent or
reasonable. Consistency means placing alcohol and tobacco under the same
ban as cannabis. Reasonableness means recognising that cannabis is no
more harmful then tobacco or alcohol." He
added that he knew heroin and cocaine destroyed lives but described
current laws as a "hopeless failure". He added: "The
policy hasn't reduced the supply. It hasn't curtailed the demand. It
hasn't reduced the number of deaths. It hasn't brought down the number
of drug-related crimes. It doesn't work even in prison. There the addict
can easily satisfy his need and there the innocent can be corrupted and
enslaved." ==================== Despite
record spraying, the acreage devoted to coca has doubled in Colombia
since 1996. Environmentalists complain that aerial spraying of the
herbicide glyphosate is pushing peasant farmers who grow the crop
further into the delicate Amazon River basin. ================== "official" statement made by 'The Commissioner of Narcotics' to Congress, which played a major part in the 'Marijuana Tax Stamp Act' "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others." Harry
Anslinger, U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics, testifying to Congress on why
marijuana should be made illegal, 1937. (Marijuana Tax Stamp Act, signed
Aug. 2 1937; effective Oct. 1, 1937.) ===================== Joe
Califano's Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse released results this
week of a survey that asked 2,000 teens and 1,000 parents about
attitudes and opinions on drugs and drug use. Specifically, teens
were asked which was easier to obtain among cigarettes, beer and
marijuana. While the
overwhelming majority of teens listed cigarettes as the easiest,
marijuana was a clear second.
In fact, nearly nine times as many teens (35%) listed the
prohibited marijuana as easiest to obtain as listed beer (5%), which of
course is legal and regulated. ==================== "it may be that drug users are fools,
maybe they are immoral, but as long as it is legal to drink and smoke
yourself to death, it makes no sense to imprison some of our immoral
fools and not others." ===================== The
only sensible solution is legal supply. The form of supply could vary
depending on the substance involved, ranging from a free market for
cannabis to prescription only for heroin, for example. ================ Based
on a combination of Texas Department of Criminal Justice figures and
U.S. Justice Department figures, there are at least 5,000
people in Texas prisons for marijuana possession alone. (The numbers are extremely difficult to pin down, since
many of those in
for possession probably pleaded down from other charges; this is a
conservative estimate.) ===================== About
Marijuana AKA:
pot, dope, doobie, grass, weed, chronic, ganja, kaya What
is it? Marijuana
is a plant. It's dried and smoked. What
does it do? Smoking
pot can make some people feel like they're relaxed, loosened up, and
giggly. It also makes them a little confused, spaced out, and red-eyed.
Memory loss happens almost immediately. Their heart rate might go up to
dangerous levels. After a few minutes, paranoia sets in, then intense
hunger. Finally, sleepiness. Over
time, the heart problems become more serious, and there's evidence that
pot can cause many kinds of cancer. Increased hunger means major weight
gain, in a bad way. Pot lowers sperm counts in guys, and affects the
reproductive system in girls and women. Pot also turns people into
potheads. Plus,
since it's smoked, pot does all the nasty stuff that cigarettes do, from
causing cancer to being smelly to messing up your skin and hair. Who
uses it? Marijuana
is the most widely used illegal drug in the US. Over 30% of high school
seniors used it in the last year. (Of course, that also means that 70%
didn't...) from www.freevibe.com a
US government website
designed to "educate" =================================== My views are my views, and they do not necessarily reflect those of anyone else .......... but sometimes they do ======================= Corporate
Drug Testing keeps Pot Smokers in the closet.
If these opinions are new to you, don't be surprised.
The purpose behind corporate drug testing is not to catch pot
smokers, but to silence them. Medical
marijuana, recreational marijuana, and industrial hemp directly threaten
the profits of many corporations.
Pot smokers are the natural constituency to raise these issues,
so they must be intimidated and kept quiet. =========================== As far as the cries of "save the children" dealers don't check ID, licensed merchants will. It's really as simple
as that. ====================== Based on eradication data of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the reform organization estimates that Virginia pot growers in 1997 harvested more than 121,600 plants worth $197 million. Nationwide, pot wholesale revenues ranged between $15.1 and 26 billion dollars.. Foward to Tidbits 9 Return to Tidbits
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