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

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

A study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology that calls for a “more balanced drug policy” from law enforcement and lawmakers asked the simple and profound question, ‘why do law and policy makers treat illegal drugs as if they were more harmful than the worlds most abused drug, alcohol?’ 

Jan van Amsterdam of the Laboratory for Health Protection Research in the Netherlands and psychiatrist Wim van den Brink said that law writers’ failure to recognize that ”alcohol abuse is more harmful for public health and society than illicit drug use” was “unjustified.” 

The authors pointed out the fact that, in absolute numbers, alcohol abuse is vastly more prevalent in society as a whole than drug abuse.  The overwhelming majority of people seeking health assistance for addiction problems are alcohol abusers.  The report also reiterated what a study by the National Institutes of Health found, that alcohol is as addictive as heroin and crack cocaine. 

The authors said that alcohol’s “high harm score” required that it be given a higher relevance in determining drug policy.  The authors of the study called on legislatures to assume a balanced approach as they write laws, and highlight harm reduction instead of criminalization.

The Centers for Disease Control attributes 80,000 deaths each year to alcohol.  Last year 800,000 people were arrested in the US for possessing cannabis.

cross posted at mLaw

As American adults take action on their awareness that cannabis, though demonized by propaganda from industrialists with a financial stake in preserving prohibition and politicians who have depended upon using scare tactics to forward their political careers, is substantially safer than America’s most used drugs (tobacco and alcohol), policy creators are expressing concern that today’s youth simply will no longer be cowed into submission by the reiteration of factually biased and medically disproven scare tactics.

America’s youth, just like adults in the US, are fully aware that what they have been told by parties that desire to maintain the prohibition of cannabis over the course of 75 years amounts to factually inaccurate, unsubstantiated propaganda.

The wielders of this three-quarters-of-a-century old propaganda are now coming to the realization that the youth in America can actually educate themselves on the issue of ending cannabis prohibition, can effectively and honestly assess the differences between the prohibited substance cannabis and alcohol, tobacco and other drugs that are widely prescribed by physicians in the US, and have determined that the vast majority of what they have been told by police authorities, political leaders, their churches and schools, is not simply wrong, but is intentionally misrepresentational and supports agendas beyond the oft repeated mantra of prohibitionists; “it’s all about the safety of the children.”

In recent public statements, President Obama’s ‘drug czar’ expressed alarm that teen use of cannabis has gradually increased at the same time teen use of alcohol and tobacco have gradually declined. A recent study from the National Institutes of Health found that teen use of cannabis has grown over the past years, but use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, both prescription and illicit, has declined. In the case of alcohol usage by American teens, use has declined to its lowest point since the federal government began tracking alcohol use by minors forty years ago.

Some have analyzed this change as being a positive expression of today’s youth’s ability to decide for themselves whether to use legal drugs that are promoted constantly in American media and culture or to use cannabis, a substance that has been demonized for 75 years by American media and culture. The study results can perhaps signify that America’s youth are aware of the very real dangers of tobacco addiction and alcohol abuse, and are choosing marijuana, a drug that they know presents less risk. Choosing a less harmful drug over more harmful drug could and should be met by our leaders as a very positive sign that indicates a thoughtful choice made by weighing the facts.

The leaders of America’s drug war, when faced with these statistics have instead concluded that the study rather shows that today’s youth are falling under a type of mystical spell that is causing them to “forget” all the propaganda now that adults in this country have demanded that recreational cannabis use be legal.

In recent statements, Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the federal agency that performed the survey, opined that teens’ new attitudes about the dangers of tobacco and alcohol compared to cannabis reflect that our young people’s thoughtful choice is rather a reaction to the fact that recreational use of cannabis is no longer prohibited in Washington and Colorado and that “the deterrent” of illegality “is no longer present.”

Volkow’s belief that young people cannot assess the relative dangers between the legal and constantly promoted drugs alcohol and tobacco and the illegal but much less harmful cannabis is an indication that the enforcers have come to believe their own propaganda. The theorem being promoted by Volkow can be framed thusly; “If it is illegal, it must be wrong, bad and immoral.” The thought process that Americans both young and old may be currently operating under may rather be; “The illegality of cannabis was unnecessary and wrong, and predicated upon bigoted stereotypes dreamed up by industrialists who sought prohibition and, carried forth for seven decades by supine and captured politicians and police authorities for reasons that had nothing to do with public safety.”

If it’s true that this mindset is behind the increase in cannabis use by teens in America that the study identified, then America’s propagandists are themselves coming to new understandings. One is that propaganda no longer will suffice to brow beat thinking people into subordinating their experiences, and, perhaps more frightening to these custodians of culture, that many Americans now understand that they were lied to by their government to support the private wealth of business owners for seventy five years.

Being aware of the nearly century long history of lying and propagandizing may inculcate an awareness in our youth that they should aggressively question some of our nation’s other ‘preordained’ policy assumptions. I ask young Americans to do the research and find out if it is true when our leaders tell us that “we have to kill children in the Middle East to protect our “special relationships” with outlaw regimes”, that “torture is an effective method to gain intelligence”, or that “big banks can never be held to account for the crimes that they commit”. The list of queries is long indeed.

If government officials like Volkow say to you that these preconceptions are unchallengeable and have a quality of ‘religious truth’ to them, you can simply advise that, “torture is illegal by international standards”, that “occupying sovereign countries for 60 years is illegal by international standards”, and that “fraud is a criminal violation throughout the world”. Maybe if the prohibitionists hear that these things are illegal, they will be “deterred” from supporting these anti-human policy pogroms.

cross posted at the marijuana legalization awareness wiki Read the rest of this entry →

From the ‘choomer in chief’ straight down to the phony fact peddling Frums of this world, all “reasonable people” are trying their hardest to deflect and project in their “very adult discussions” about how to navigate the turbulent waters caused by adult Americans expressing their opinion that cannabis is safe and the drug war is harmful, bigoted and wrong.  In general, both sides of the political perspective are gung-ho about expressing their “concerns for our children” when someone asks what the feds intend to do now that cannabis is legal in the US for the first time since 1937.

Strangely missing from all legacy parties’ analysis of the citizen’s initiatives in WA and CO are the facts that cannabis is a medicine, that cannabis has never in recorded medical history killed anyone, that one out of every 5 deaths yearly in the US is attributable to cigarettes, and that alcohol is involved in 37% of all traffic deaths among persons aged 16 to 20, and that’s not even getting into the deaths, injuries and lasting psychological trauma caused in families where alcohol is the “approved by Uncle Sam” destructive and debilitating drug of choice.

Whether it is to dry dopers like Obama, whose devious targeting of suppliers serves somehow to polish up his “I’m lookin’ real tough” head-fake to propagandized suburbanites, or it is to paid-off-by-parties-that-are-very-interested-that-cannabis-remains-”not legal”-for recreational-use-by-adults squalkers like Frum, why doesn’t anyone point out in these “on-going serious people” confabs that cannabis is safer than America’s legal drugs (alcohol & tobacco).  These “discussions” seem always to devolve into all “reasonable people” agreeing to use discredited faux statistics (whether medical or…wherever one would guess Frum’s boogie-man-misrepresentations to emanate from) for the purpose of instilling fear in Mr. and Mrs. America about cannabis.

If these fake cogitators (but very real cultural custodians) were to be honest, we would be on the way to rescheduling tobacco and alcohol and opening the doors to Amsterdam style coffee shops in every city in the US, given the fear-mongering lies that they proffer as they wring their hands in the face of Americans deciding, knowing and acknowledging that cannabis is both safer than America’s favorite drugs and is also medicine for sick people here in our country (that’s what the doctors really, really say and think).

How about this question for either the fox-enabled republicans or the dominated-by-a-dry-doper by their last 2 presidents democrats:

“When I grew up, I was told that totalitarian dictatorships are the kind of governments that willfully withhold known medicines from their populations, why does our country keep medicine from sick and suffering Americans?”

…cue crickets

cross posted at the marijuana legalization awareness wiki