cross posted at mLaw

More victims of the DOJs war on medicine.

The White House’s war on medicine; President Obama’s cynical stance of dragging out his and his Justice Department’s ‘analysis’ of how to respond to the citizens in Washington and Colorado who have moved to legalize cannabis for personal consumption by adults using the small-d democratic tools available to them as Americans, while at the same time pursuing providers of medical cannabis with unflinching, dis-compassionate, a-scientific and authoritarian aggression, blitzkreiged into California this week where US attorneys officially demanded the closure of more than 100 medical cannabis dispensaries threatening both criminal and civil actions against the medicine providers and the owners of property that house the pharmacies.

The DOJ warning letters threatened to take enforcement action against the recipients if the pharmacies are not shuttered in 14 days.  The demand letters were sent to 103 medical cannabis dispensaries in Long Beach and Los Angeles County.

A spokesperson for the US Department of Justice, confirming the assertions of the electorate in both Washington state and Colorado who predicated their legalization of cannabis use by adults in their states in part on the theory that selling cannabis as a legal product will provide an enormous benefit for their states in the collection of taxes on the commodity, said in a statement to the press; “All the stores we have seen are generating significant amount of profits.”

In addition to sending the threatening letters to the 103 cannabis pharmacies, Obama’s DOJ filed two lawsuits against particular medical cannabis dispensaries where the federal government is seeking the forfeiture of the property and the assets of the collectives’ owners and landlords.

The complaints filed by the Obama justice department allege that the cooperative owners did not operate medical cannabis pharmacies, but rather, commercial cannabis retail stores in violation of California state law.  The action was joined by Obama’s Drug Enforcement Administration, The Internal Revenue Service, the Los Angeles District Attorney and the City of Long Beach Police Department.

Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell said he was happy to “partner” in the federal crack-down on medicine providers claiming that offering cannabis under doctors’ orders to the sick and dying is in his mind “an illegal operation.” McDonnell did not elaborate on his stated opinion that the provision of medicine to sick patients in his town negitively impacts the “quality of life” for the citizens of Long Beach.

Kris Hermes, a spokesperson for the non-profit medical cannabis advocacy group Americans for Safe Access reacted to the aggressive federal law enforcement sweep of the California pharmacies by pointing out that “thousands of people will be left without safe and legal access” to their medications due to the federal crack-down.

Read the rest of this entry →

The White House has released a “plan to reduce drug use and its consequences” that it says is a “science based” drug enforcement scheme. The administration says its drug enforcement policy will be “smart on crime” instead of “tough on crime” by “emphasizing prevention” and medical interdiction to “break the cycle of drug use, crime, incarceration, and re-arrest.” Obama’s view is that “addiction is a disease of the brain” that can be treated medically and as a matter of law enforcement.

The Obama plan is formulated upon dual overarching assumptions; that if a substance has been outlawed federally, then it is a harmful and addictive substance the legality of which cannot be reconsidered; and, that the use of banned substances is a fiscal drag on the US economy. The website promoting the Obama administration enforcement scheme policy begins by reporting that, “illicit drug use cost our Nation more than $193 billion in lost productivity, healthcare, and criminal justice costs.”

The Obama administration asserts that the federal government cannot imprison every drug criminal in the United States because to do so, the policy paper states, is “counterproductive, inefficient, and costly.” The policy white paper goes on to state, however, that the Obama administration views the movements by citizens in the states to use the democratic process to legalize cannabis for medical and personal consumption are extremist and contradict “a public health and safety approach to drug policy.”

The Obama administration claims that its drug enforcement program is science based, but in the US and around the world scientists and researchers have come to different conclusions from reviewing the science that shows quite clearly that the banned in the US substance cannabis has the ability to provide medical relief to patients.

Researchers from the Psychopharmacology Unit of the University of Bristol in the UK created a scale of the relative addictive qualities of abused substances that was reported in their 2007 paper, “Development of a Rational Scale to Assess the Harm of Drugs of Potential Misuse”. The medical researchers found that cannabis scored as less addictive and less physically harmful than both heroin and cocaine, this is the case even though cannabis is classified by the federal government as more dangerous than both heroin and cocaine. The researchers also found that cannabis is less physically harmful and less addictive than tobacco and alcohol, both of which are legal in the US.

Furthermore, suggesting that cannabis is a dangerous and harmful drug is increasingly becoming disconnected from the broadly held medical opinion that cannabis is a helpful drug that is both pain relieving and curative. In fact, over 20 years ago in 1991, the American Society of Clinical Oncology surveyed 2,430 cancer doctors across the US to find that nearly half supported their patient’s use of cannabis. More recently, the California Medical Association, the state’s largest doctor group called for legalizing cannabis in the US for medical use in 2011. In April 2013, a broad based group of 250 doctors practicing in the state of Illinois called for legalizing cannabis for the treatment of diseases like Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and cancer.

And, this year the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press polled Americans to find that 77 percent of Americans think that cannabis should be made legal as a medicine to treat sick patients. The study also revealed that 72 percent of Americans think that the federal government spends too much money enforcing cannabis prohibition and that 54 percent of Americans support the full legalization of cannabis for use by American adults for recreational purposes. The poll also found that 60 percent of Americans do not agree with the US Justice Department’s attack on medical cannabis dispensaries that prevent the sick from obtaining prescriptions for medication.

As the Obama administration attempts to distract Americans by invoking the term “science based” it continues to threaten and pursue producers and distributors of medical cannabis. As recently as this week the Obama Justice Department sent letters to landlords who lease commercial space to state approved cannabis dispensaries in San Jose, California threatening forty-year jail sentences and forfeiture of the property of the landowners.

A letter received by one such dispensary in San Jose, as reported by the East Bay Express, made unambiguous threats to a landowner who leases property to a pharmacy, stating; “The office has been advised that there is a marijuana dispensary … operating at the real property located at …, which property you own or have under your management control. The dispensary is operating in violation of federal law, and persons and entities who operate or facilitate the operation of such dispensaries are subject to criminal prosecution and civil enforcement actions.”

The Obama administration’s determination that all illegal substances are addictive and can promote addictive disorders approaches enforcing drug laws with a broad-brush-stroke approach that lumps drastically different substances together for the purpose of streamlining enforcement determinations to save money and which is fundamentally a-scientific at its core. Moreover, the Obama administration’s effort to stamp out the sale and delivery of medicinal cannabis to patients reveals an amoral cynicism; one that holds out hope for the sick while moving to crush distribution networks for the medicine by imposing convoluted analysis of federal tax laws and employing aggressive enforcement to withhold medicine from those who need it.

cross posted at mLaw

In a mildly sourced report by the Huffington Post about ‘private’ conversations between a handful of senators and the Attorney General of New York, who is also a co-chair of President Barack Obama’s task force investigating the frauds carried out by the nation’s largest banks against investors in mortgage backed securities, groups including retired teachers and civil service employees, Eric Schneiderman conveyed that he is concerned that his concerns about the public’s growing concerns that the enforcement work group is nothing more than a toothless and supine act of public relations kabuki to cover for the inaction on the part of both federal and state law enforcement officials who, after more than five years, have yet to charge a high level employee of any of the nation’s most powerful banks with crimes that led to the collapse of worldwide banking system, are communicated.

Schneiderman’s critiques come as the statutes of limitation for the crimes committed by the nation’s largest financial institutions in the lead up to the new depression have, in most case, run out extinguishing regulators’ ability to prosecute the criminals.

One of the senators who met recently with Schneiderman, the retiring senator from Michigan, Carl Levin, was concerned to tell the Huffington Post that Schneiderman “expressed similar frustrations that the public has expressed,” and another senator, who was concerned to maintain anonymity, said that Schneiderman “was very clear” that he wanted to convey his “frustration”.

Schneiderman’s appointment to co-chair the Obama created work group on mortgage backed securities was announced to great fanfare during Obama’s State of the Union address in 2012, four years after the onset of the new depression and during a time in which the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve had given America’s largest private banking companies trillions of tax payer dollars, nearly interest free loans and 100 percent guarantees on trillions of dollars of worthless securities and debt held by the private financial companies.  In the speech, Obama was keen to express his concern for the millions of Americans who became homeless and jobless due to the illegal actions of these privately run companies (although the president has gone on record stating his personal belief that “no laws were broken” in the run-up to the new depression).

Consumer groups and organizations that serve communities of dispossessed homeowners advised the Huffington Post of their concerns about the appalling track record of the mortgage securities workgroup with regard to enforcement actions, spoke “on the condition of anonymity” because of their concerns about “jeopardizing their relationships” with the state-federal workgroup.  Many homeowner service agencies have received millions of dollars generated out of non-prosecution agreements reached between federal and state regulators and the nation’s largest financial institutions that involved enforcement entities absolving private parties from criminal actions for the payment of “contributions” and fines.

A review of the mortgage securities enforcement work group’s web site  today (April 24, 2013) relates that Schneiderman is joined on the task force by Obama’s hand-picked Assistant Attorney General to lead the Criminal Division of the US Justice Department, Lanny Breuer.  Breuer resigned from government service to work for a Washington DC law firm that defends banking companies and finance companies in January 2013.

In the whirlwind of concerns related by the Huffington Post in its ‘news’ story, no mention of concern was iterated for the more than 3 million families estimated to have been foreclosed upon between 2008 and early 2012, at the time that Obama appointed Schneiderman to head the mortgage securities working group.

cross posted at the demise

cross posted at mLaw

The Seattle Post Intelligencer has reported that the US Department of Justice secured a court order demanding that the state agency in Oregon that oversees the provision of medical cannabis to Oregonian patients who are suffering from serious, and in some cases, life threatening diseases to turn over records that personally identify patients, care givers and suppliers of the medicine.

The search warrant was filed in November of 2012 and requires the Oregon Medical Marijuana Project to turn over the names, addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, and driver’s license numbers of “patients, growers and care givers in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program database files.”

The state officials who register patients and suppliers were ordered by the US Department of Justice to not disclose the existence or contents of the search warrant. The federal demand for patient records was discovered in public court filings.

A spokesperson for the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program was concerned to ensure that Oregon patients understand that the agency’s patient records are stored in a secure location and cannot be accessed without a written request from a patient, in the same fashion that other sick American’s medical records are protected. The agency’s spokesperson said that while the privacy of the state’s medical cannabis patients is of paramount importance, the agency was compelled by the federal government to turn over the otherwise safeguarded patient identifying records.

The federal investigator who sought the demand for the patient’s records from the courts said in his request for the warrant; “I am familiar with narcotics trafficker’s tactics in using the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program to shield their activities…(and I have) cause to believe that the records from the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program will contain evidence of…conspiracy to commit marijuana and trafficking offenses.”

Patients who suffer from debilitating, chronic and terminal diseases have been able to receive prescriptions for medical cannabis from doctors in Oregon since 1998. During that period of nearly 15 years; during the final 2 years of the Bill Clinton presidency and over the 8 year course of the George W. Bush presidency, there are no previous warrants known to have been served upon the Oregon Medical Marijuana Project for patient’s private medical records by the federal government. Read the rest of this entry →

cross posted at mLaw

The recent Senate hearings about President Obama’s declared authority to execute Americans with no trial, charges, lawyer, ability to question witnesses, ability to be informed of evidence (otherwise known as ‘due process’) where Attorney General Eric Holder was questioned were revealing as the Justice Department winds down its ‘review’ of the ballot initiatives in CO and WA that legalized cannabis for recreational use by adults.

The style of legal pettifoggery deployed by Holder throughout the entire drone-American-style debate that ended in spectacular fashion when libertarian senator Rand Paul and a group of brave but clearly marginalized senators filibustered against the a-constitutional notion that a president can assassinate Americans in the US (or anywhere) with no judge,  jury or charges is what anyone paying attention over the past four years would expect. 

When Holder’s reasoning was not specious it was circular. Most frighteningly Holder’s entire defense of the program took as a predicate that America is in lock-down mode because it is in a permanent war state where citizen’s rights are, you know, necessarily suspended for the duration.  Though slimy and lowbrow, the message was clear - Eric Holder advises the President with supreme, one may even say god-like confidence that the US President has a legal right to blow the pancakes out of you and me at any moment, for safety reasons.  We have previously seen Holder arguing in this style.  An example that can’t go unmentioned was his comments last March in Chicago where he asserted that due process was not judicial process; see v2 at the demise for a take on that statement that is informed by recent history. 

This wacky word-play as constitutional analysis has been seen throughout what little the Obama administration has revealed of it’s legal justifications for abrogating provisions of the US Constitution.  The DOJ’s neo-Orwellian re-defining of the word imminance in it’s leaked drone white paper is an example. When both Holder and his former chief of criminal prosecutions Lanny Breuer argued many times that banking criminals deserve to be treated differently than you and me under the law and when the DOJ judged Aaron Schwartz’s actions as terrorism, Holder is helping his boss justify any action, inaction or Constitutional infraction so the president can do as he pleases. 

And I have to point out, for chain-of-command challenged Democrats, progressives and other critics of George W. Bush who are weirdly mum on our current commander in chief: Holder is an employee of Barack Obama, not some sort of free wheeling individualist forming policy in Washington DC.

As Americans look toward the Obama administration’s forthcoming legal analysis of the people supported, ‘small D democratic’, ‘We the People’ rejection of law enforcement’s and private capital’s bigoted and destructive ‘drug war’ in the popular rejection of the prohibition of cannabis, we should remember that in the current Obama government, as  in previous administrations over the past 50 years both Democratic and Republican, what comes first in America is the political and the commercial, not the will of the people.

While this Democratic administration’s efforts to normalize the anti-democratic and anti-free society pronouncements and actions of the previous Republican power holders are most troublesome and far reaching when they normalize extrajudicial extermination, torture and total surveillance, we have seen its pandering to private business owners almost as much as its pandering to the unaccountable national security state.  Whether it is easing environmental standards for oil exploration and environmental degradation or deeming banking felons to be above the law and granting these private parties trillions of tax payer dollars to prop up their ‘businesses’, commerce always comes before the will of the people in Obama’s world.  And the legalization of cannabis for either medical or recreational use is fundamentally violative of that which Barack Obama has decided in his life to protect at all costs.  It is not the moral (medical marijuana), or the logical (the harms associated with cannabis juxtaposed against those of legal tobacco and alcohol), nor the fair (with hundreds of thousands of otherwise productive Americans languishing in jail) – but rather it is where ‘commerce’ and ’public safety’ intersect as politics, what used to be known as fascism.

So now we are being softened up by former DOJ drug warriors who are bought off by industrialists and are being chicken-littled by international ‘enforcement’ entities about the defilement of ‘treaties’ that were written within the thinly veiled racist and population subordinating constructs of cannabis prohibitionism, being primed for the preordained proclamation of Obama’s DOJ: that the will of the people must be bridled for the sake of ‘international obligations’.  The pettifogger Holder, on this one, will seek refuge for his justifying Obama’s predetermination by squealing his solemn ’adherance to international law’.

Consider if you will: Palestine, Kyoto, torture and rendition, black-site prisons, imperial wars, the threat of death from the skies…sacroscant treaties indeed.  It is you and me, friends, who are being ‘convinced’ by this high school level rhetoric and disingenuous gum-flappery, and it is us who will pay the price for our inaction in the face of this neo-fascist policy framing.  As Sinclair Lewis noted, self-deluded Americans are fond of incanting, “It can’t happen here”.

It ain’t hard to figure what Obama is going to do regarding acknowledging the will of the people, honest and thoughtful American adults, with respect to legalizing the use of cannabis.  All one has to do is simply consider the compassionate, the rational, the just, the intelligent, the safe, the science supported, the popularly supported, the equality uplifting, the violence stemming, the patient saving, the public coffer enriching,  the just plain right and correct alternative…and Obama will do the mirror opposite.

Its not about the suffering of the afflicted, its not about the wasted future of those unfairly prosecuted, its not about the will of the people, its not about free market capitalism, its not about saving public works and the social safety net, its about one thing – the reason America exists in the mind of our current corporate sycophant and careerist narcissist: its all about the burnished legacy of an amoral former user.

Hail to the chief.

Washington State’s highest elected officials and law enforcement officials met with their federal counterparts, US Attorney General Eric Holder and top officials from President Obama’s Justice Department, earlier this week to discuss the state’s program for implementing the will of the public, who late last year voted to legalize cannabis for recreational consumption by adults.

The governor and the state’s attorney general expressed their vision for constructing a statewide system that will allow for the public’s demand that cannabis be legal be actualized and that would make the legal product available in the consumer marketplace.

Attorney General Bob Ferguson told reporters that the intention of the state’s lawmakers and law enforcers is to “move forward in implementing I-502.” Ferguson reportedly conveyed to the federal officials that, “We have assembled a legal team in the Attorney General’s Office, and I have made legal implementation of this initiative a top priority.”

The federal officials, however, did not approach the meeting expressing their honest intent to use their offices to ensure that the ship of state will do all it can to facilitate will of the public. As has been widely reported, Attorney General Holder made no public statement regarding the meeting, and nowhere in the reporting about the meeting did the US Attorney General make any statement whatsoever with respect to the intentions of the federal government to facilitate, encourage, support or cooperate with state authorities in their expressed goal to bring to fruition the will of Washington’s people.

Silence on Holder’s behalf, as identified quite clearly in all reportage of this meeting between honest state authorities (who have a vision to bring the public will to fruition in a rational way that takes serious account of public safety) and dishonest federal officials (who are not interested in the will of the public but are sycophantic to the prison industrial complex and to drug warriors who carry out the bigoted ‘war on drugs’ that imperils public safety) can only indicate that Obama’s justice department’s plan is to go ‘full bore’ in implementing the enforcement scheme that it has used in California: let cannabis be legal but, make it impossible for users, even the sick, to access the legal product.

The editors of mLaw equate the federal government’s aggressive attack on our nation’s sick patients, many of whom have lifelong debilitating diseases that cause unbelievable pain and discomfort, to what has historically taken place with respect to abortion rights in the US.  Politicians, on both the state and federal level, who personally disagree with the will of the people as expressed in court rulings as in the case of abortion rights, have abused their power to limit the ability of pregnant women to be able to access abortion services even though abortion has been a legal medical procedure in the US for 50 years.

Obama’s Justice Department’s cynical and calculated attack on medical marijuana dispensaries in California and elsewhere is as bigoted, small minded, rooted in brute political calculation and, in a word, immoral as the abusive power wielding that anti-abortionist politicians have practiced over a half a century that has led to abortion, a fully legal medical procedure in the US, being unavailable to patients in 98 percent of America’s counties in 2013.

The lack of criminal prosecutions for the vast and coordinated illegality and fraud carried out by financial services companies and the nation’s largest banks that led to the New Depression, and the abandonment of our nation’s cherished legal requirement to afford due process to citizens accused of a crime illustrate that the Obama government has continually demonstrated its fealty to industry and the national security state and shown a predisposition to ignore, abandon and frustrate the will of the people as expressed through the ballot.

We have a Democrat in the white house who has used all of his power and the power of the state to make it impossible for sick Americans to access beneficial medicine, a stance that is anti-science, anti-patient, anti-small-d-democracy, anti-human and at the same time, pro-private prison complex, pro-racist drug war and pro-private drug company profits. In light of Obama’s vigor to make it impossible for sick Americans to access medicine, and, of much less import but still of significance, for adults to use cannabis recreationally, many Americans are now, quite reasonably asking, “who does this jackass work for, anyhow?”

cross posted at mLaw