Souder stacked the committee with his favorite House jesters but many of the participants did not perform as Souder would have liked. I doubt he expected such a strong argument on the Anti-prohibition side.
Rep. Eleanor Norton ( D-DC ) came out of the gate blazing making some strong points.
I would think, though, that the fact that we have eight to 10 states moving ahead to legalize medical marijuana would have caused far more vigorous federal research and leadership than we have seen thus far.
...When it comes to medical marijuana, we are about a serious matter and one that, frankly, I think our government could have found the answer, one way or the other to, long before now. But the greatest objection I have is not about this medical controversy.
...It is putting young people in jail for smoking pot. Wherever you stand on these matters, it doesn't seem to me that we ought to ruin a kids life by giving him a record for smoking pot.
There's plenty more of that kind of talk while Souder can only whine. "We fought a war and said federal law prevails. You don't have a right to nullification. Now, how we enforce those is another question," he said.
Not registered to vote or no longer living where you are registered? NORML has launched a new site, smokethevote.org, where you can change your address or register for the first time. They have also started the first ever political action committee of its kind, NORML PAC to award pro-cannabis candidates financial help with their campaigns. And while you're at the site, check out Mark Fiore's flash animation -- the War on Drugs featuring John Walters and a cast of thousands.
Across the pond, there's an excellent op-ed piece in the Belfast Telegraph on cannabis policy. Features editor Eamonn McCann looks at the politics of legalization in Ireland and makes some good points about how people perceive public support for it. He asks why, with so many people agreeing privately that it makes sense, don't they come forward to change the laws?
Using a survey done in Vermont and Rhode Island he illustrates this odd anomaly. On the question of whether medical marijuana should be legal, 71% in Vermont and 69% in Rhode Island said yes. However, when asked if they thought the majority of voters agreed with them, 37% and 60% respectively thought they were not. It doesn't make sense. As McCann says:
The only explanation I can think of is that the relentless promotion of untruth about marijuana has so clouded the minds of ordinarily intelligent people that even thinking on it makes them feel dizzy.
This reinforces my long-held belief that rational discussion of drugs problems will continue to be impossible while marijuana remains tainted by illegality.
Although probation would be the norm for a first offense in Ohio, prosecutors asked for a prison sentence, arguing that a priest should be held to a higher standard than others. Fortunately, Judge Patricia Cosgrove declined to make an example of Rev. Arko, citing letters she received from parishoners attesting to Rev. Arko's positive contributions to their lives.
The Reverend loses his calling, the parishioners lose a good pastor and the informant, who ruined the peaceful existence of this church, is accused of stealing credit cards and checks from Rev. Arko and the parish.
Is civil society served here? It seems a harsh sentence for a gardener and and his flock, not to mention it could not have occurred if cannabis were legal.
Rather an understatement in light of a 70 percent increase in marijuana and a 78 percent increase in opium poppies They also seized a record amount of drugs and arrested two cartel "kingpins" among many smaller dealers with no effect on the flow of drugs into the US. The lesson is obvious. The more they interdict and eradicate, the more production goes up to compensate.
Under the Bush administration, the total cost of enforcing the prohibition has risen to almost 40 billion dollars. This criminal waste of your tax dollars has resulted in the wholesale poisoning of large tracts of the planet with herbicides and given us the largest prison population in the world. It has done nothing to eliminate the availability of street drugs nor the problems of drug abuse.
It's time to admit the War on Drugs has failed miserably and to reallocate the resources spent on punitive measures to harm reduction programs instead.
The Drug Policy Alliance and other advocacy groups could be barred from communicating with supporters about the political actions of federal officials up for re-election. That's the goal of a Federal Election Commission (FEC) draft opinion to be voted on later this month. The proposal, broader and more punitive than an earlier one also condemned by the Alliance, would represent one of the worst assaults on the freedom of speech and association ever proposed in the United States. It would severely hamper our ability to communicate urgent drug policy reform messages to you in the future.
The chilling effect of the FEC proposal on free speech cannot be overstated. Adoption of the draft opinion would rework and expand the definition of "expenditures" to include any communication that "promotes, supports, attacks, or opposes" a candidate for federal office. This would give Members of Congress who are running for re-election a green light to introduce and pass harmful drug policies right before Election Day while restricting the Alliance's ability to run advertisements in a newspaper or send out emails alerting you to their actions. The FEC draft opinion is especially nefarious because it seeks to change the rules for nonprofit advocacy in the middle of this important election year.
This is aimed at drug policy reform and other politically progressive NGOs but can and will be used against anyone with a cause that displeases this administration.
Since the Insta-Pundit insists on keeping this story alive, I'm weighing in on his "Kos Kontroversy".
Kos may have said it badly, but he was right about this part. Those men were there by choice, knowing full well what they were facing. No one lied to get them to enlist and they made more in one day than the reservist, who was told he would get an education for a few weekends of training exercises a year, did in a month.
In contrast, the four men who died so horribly applied for this job.
You are assessed in the field by the BSC leadership and at initial training by staff. If you do not appear to be a team player or have attitude problems, we will terminate the process. Quiet professionals are what we seek as long term partners in this work.
Blackwater Security Consultants is focused on moving forward in the market with the best human resources who will receive a market setting standard for fair pay. BSC understands it can only be as good as its resources and top notch performers are what we seek to provide on the market. If this sounds acceptable to you and is the type of work you seek, then submit your resume today.
The title of this post also comes from that site. It sounds pretty clear to me and I think Glenn Reynolds should post the family history of every man lost in this war so far, as he did for these four high paid soldiers-of-fortune before he starts throwing any more stones.
Despite months-long surveillance of Paey's activities, there was never any evidence that he resold the painkillers. Nonetheless, he is now charged with drug trafficking for self-medicating because his doctors would not or could not prescribe him appropriate levels of medication.
To be fair, prosecutors did offer a couple of rather generous (for a prosecutor that is) plea agreements, which he rejected on the firm belief he should not be charged with a crime for attempting to resolve his medical problems on his own. As this excellent editorial points out, neither he nor any chronic pain patients who have been forced to doctor shop and worse to get sufficient amounts of medicine belong in jail.
This is an abuse of our criminal justice resources. Paey is not a man who belongs in prison. What he and other pain patients need is a health care system that will respond to their affliction. (Paey now has a morphine pump in his back to dull the pain. His wife says, ironically, it provides him with more narcotics than he was getting from the Percocet, which is 98.5 percent Tylenol.)
We agree. Personally, I think the agency has outlived any usefulness it may have ever had, but that aside, it's clearly long past time for the DEA to get out of the business of harassing and imprisoning the chronically ill citizens of this country and their caregivers.
"We will fight," said a demonstrator on the outskirts of the eastern city of Jalalabad. "They will either destroy our harvests or kill us. We will not let them do this even if they send planes and tanks."
Farmers took their complaints to their local authorities saying they needed the income since a quarter of century of warfare has destroyed the infrastructure needed for other crops.
They said they would stop growing the opium poppies if the central government provided assistance to rebuild their roads, schools and hospitals.
Local officials refused to comment about the protests and said the opium eradication policy was decided by Kabul.
Meanwhile the central government, at the urging of the US, is planning to start eradication attempts this week in an effort to head off the annual harvest which is about to begin. The plan appears to have been concocted at last week's conference in Berlin, where western nations as predicted offered only 4.5 billion in aid rather than the 28 billion Afghanistan requested as being necessary to rebuild the infrastructure.
Once again our governments' solution is to spend money on destructive rather than constructive policy which will do almost nothing to eliminate the poppy harvest and will only cause further suffering for the indigenous Afghanis trying to scratch a living from land, too long devastated by warfare.
The people are, some three years later, still without a stable government or even decent roads. Is this what the Bush adminstration meant when they called the war Operation Enduring Freedom? Free to do what one might ask.
I'm listening to Air America as I post this. My favorite counter-culture hero Barry Crimmins is on "The Majority Report" with Janeane Garofalo and they're talking to Kos. I like the format and they're talking about the brouhaha Kos had with the BPAC of the blogosphere that ended with Kerry pulling Kos' link from his campaign site. I think Kerry was an idiot to alienate the Kos crowd and I would love to blog it at the DetNews as I listen but there's no way I can muster up the energy right now.
I'm really enjoying the Detroit News gig though. I was a little nervous at first; I'm not good at 'group' but my fellow bloggers have been nice and I thought it interesting in reading the bios that an admiration for Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain ran a common thread across our political spectrum. I'm looking forward to some civilized debates in the near future.
Meanwhile the weirdest thing happened in this post. When I took the graphic from google, I used a shot of those little rose in a glass tube displays, and it changed to a mother's day rose today. I wonder how they did that and whether I shoud be worried about it?
Finally for those of you who have been following the Kicking Butts thread, today is five weeks without a cigarette. No way could I give up the wellbutrin and the tobacco in a mint yet, and I still have way bad moments when I really want a smoke, but I think I can say I've won.
Educators For Sensible Drug Policy opposes criminal prohibition of drugs. Not only does it subject otherwise law-abiding citizens to arrest, prosecution and imprisonment for what they do in private, but prohibition is a proven failure as a drug control strategy.
Unfortunately, our schools are often times the battlegrounds upon which the "War on Drugs" is waged, with our children always ending up the victims. EFSDP is committed to combating the Higher Education Act Amendment, D.A.R.E. in our schools, and the drug testing of students who wish to participate in extra-curricular activities.
Teachers are forced to witness the harms of the prohibition on a daily basis while struggling to maintain educational standards with inadequate funds due to state budgets decimated by drug war costs. As they point out:
Our government spends roughly the same amount of money to incarcerate a non-violent marijuana user for one year as it does to pay a teacher to educate an entire classroom for the same amount of time... Which has a more positive effect on society?
I think the answer is obvious. Think about that when the prohibitionists claim they are winning this war.
One might think however, that since Iran forms part of a major smuggling route, and despite the electronic fence and checkpoints separating the two countries, it has something to do with the record poppy crop in neighboring Afghanistan.
Interestingly, the busts come on the heels of the Afghanistan donors conference in Berlin we told you about previously, where Iran signed a regional agreement to crack down on the illegal drug trade.
If you're thinking of giving your sweetheart one of those little roses in a tube that bristle near the cash register of every convenience store, think twice. You might get caught up in an undercover sting. In their relentless drive to waste your tax dollars on nonsensical paraphernalia arrests, and as a culmination of an undercover operation that has been ongoing since January, 23 store clerks in Tennessee were busted for delivering drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanor, for selling the roses.
Apparently crack addicts use these little tubes to ingest their drug and while the sale and purchase are legal, the clerks were arrested for acknowledging they knew they were being used as crack pipes. Are they serious? I understand an addict's second choice is to break a car antenna off and use that. In a way these poor under-paid clerks were preventing that act of vandalism.
According to Sgt. Buddy Rhett, ''We're not asking the markets to quit selling roses,'' he said. ''We're asking them to quit selling roses to be used for crack pipes.''
Does anyone really believe these arrests will stop people from smoking crack and are not just an easy target used to pump up arrest statistics? And why aren't the officers out there solving the burglaries and other petty crimes associated with crack addiction, instead of busting a minimum wage worker for doing his job?
Why would the police act so irresponsibly, you ask? In a clear example of how the war on some drugs and users is more dangerous than the use of said drugs, they did it so they could make a traffic stop to bust his passenger for possession of cocaine. The article does not state the weight of the seized drug, but if it fit in his pocket, it's unlikely to have been a large amount. The court in any event, rightly suppressed the evidence obtained in this outrageous fashion, effectively dismantling the case.
Vega, who had set up at least 114 Colombian drug traffickers, was a key player in the DEA's high-profile Operation Millennium that resulted in the conviction of former MedellÃn Cartel leader Fabio Ochoa. He gained their cooperation with deceit and with the full knowledge and blessing of the DEA, tricked many of these traffickers into paying millions of dollars in "fees' to assure lenient treatment -- which he then pocketed.
He probably thought he had a good deal going at the time but there appears to no honor among thesethievess. Vega claims the government has taken his Miami Beach penthouse, most of his photography equipment, and $1.5 million in his bank accounts.
''They left me with nothing -- after all I did for them,'' he said.
Happy Holiday
Souder's War
Smoke the Vote
Good Reads
God Works In Mysterious Ways
The Envelope Please....
Losing The War
Action Alert
No slackers, ghosters, or whiners need apply.
Long Term Care
Farmers Vow to Resist Eradication
Time Won't Let Me
Teaching Common Sense
Checkpoints
Set Ups
