If the police are looking for drugs, and if they find drugs on your, it means they get confiscated and you get punished, drugs are illegal.

A little progress doesn’t call for redefining words. It’s like saying there’s a difference between slavery and involuntary servitude because in the latter, if you get caught escaping you only get sent to prison instead of being whipped and beaten. They’re both still slavery.

Plus, the government gets away with WAAAAAAYYYYYY too much bullshit under the guise of “civil proceedings” (when it’s really criminal punishment) for people as smart as the ones who read this website to implicitly sanction such behavior by distinuishing what it really is with a new word. “Civil proceedings” include things like forfeiture, drivers’ license suspensions, and many other punitive actions that should require criminal-law standards of proof and rules of evidence and confrontation. When the government takes away all your money, and your house, and your car because a joint was found in them, it’s not civil, it’s criminal – no matter what they want to call it. And we shouldn’t in any way distinguish criminal from non-criminal when there is no actual difference. Legalize and decriminalize mean the exact same thing. If some drug warriors want to play a game of semantics where both words mean different things (and to define them based on the type of punishment required is fundamentally asinine), I will not play along.

Until I can walk into a liquor store, walk past the liquor section, past the beer, past the tobacco, and go into the “opiates” section or the “marijuana” section or the “uppers and downers” section and buy pre-packaged, 100% pure drugs by the pound, drugs are and remain both illegal and criminalized.

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There are probably 25 million marijuana smokers in the United States alone, as well as millions more who if not smokers now, are still sentimental about it. The oppression to which I refer is for the purpose of keeping these millions of people off balance to minimize their political power. All those 500,000 pot smokers doing time are out of the political process, present but not able to vote. The urine test is the loyalty oath of the Nineties. The hippies are this season’s Jews, this season’s Reds…

Who are these people? We are the yeast that makes the dough rise. And it’s not just us, there’s been people like us for centuries. Before there were hippies, there were beatniks, before there beatniks, there were bohemians. The European counterculture ran away from Nazî Germany. They brought hundreds of thousands of artists and musicians and writers into this country. Before that there were people like George Bernard Shaw and Voltaire and all the way back to Socrates. There have always been that fraction of people who have said, “I want to see the truth.”
– Stephen Gasken

Thank God for Hippies

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“Decriminalize” can mean “legalize,” but it can also mean a partial step that still has penalties — such as in Portugal, where you aren’t sent to jail, but you’re required to attend a tribunal, or in Mexico, where you have to give up your drugs and attend treatment, or in Massachusetts, where you get a fine. And in each of these “decriminalized” situations, selling it will still get your ass thrown in jail.

In Amsterdam, possession is de facto legalized (under certain conditions involving the coffee shops) through a policy of looking the other way. This means that you hae full legal ability to use it and if a police officer comes in, you don’t have to hide, or give up your pot, or promise to attend treatment. (Note that it is still illegal for the coffee shops to acquire the plant, so the Netherlands is only a partial de facto legalization.)

Decriminalization is certainly better than throwing people in jail, but ultimately, the only way that we can get rid of the drug war is to have a legal means of manufacture, distribution, possession, and use. That doesn’t mean unregulated, but it must be legal, not merely decriminalized.

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I think the word “decriminalize” sounds better than “legalize” because the former focuses on less government action/intrusion while the latter sounds like its something libertines would support (which is true). So I always use the word decriminalize rather than legalize. But any distinction between the two is a waste of time and misses the point. It should not be illegal, whether that means we need to legalize it or decriminalize it. Half empty, half full.

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Also, I have no doubt the Calderon people will simply point to this measure after it fails to reduce any violence (which any person with any background in drug policy or economics can tell you) and say, ‘Look, we tried letting people have it and the violence still didn’t go down.’ A lie and a half? Sure, it will be, but what else can you expect from these people

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This could not have happened even a year ago.

Gil Kerlikowske, the United States Drug Czar, has backpedaled on his pronouncement that marijuana “is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit.”

His original statement was made to The Fresno Bee on July 22. But in a little-noticed interview with Komo 4 News in Washington earlier this month, Kerlikowske was given a second chance to address the question.

As pointed out by Jacob Sullum at Reason, the nation’s top official on drugs excused his statement by blaming the weather: continued…

Mexico Decriminalizes Small-Scale Drug Possession
Mexico decriminalized small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and heroin on Friday — a move that prosecutors say makes sense even in the midst of the government’s grueling battle against drug traffickers.

This new “reform” is so bad they’re building 12 new prisons!
davidmalmolevine

The amount that is legal to carry is tiny – five grams or less.

Plus if you’re a grower you’re probably going to jail – this new reform includes mandatory minimums for most growers.

They’re building 12 new prisons in anticipation of all the growers they’re going to be throwing in jail: more links

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Oh, jeez, that was some time ago. I haven’t been back at DS Chat for some time. I ought to stop by and say hello.

Cannabis Palms. Nice ring to it, so long as there’s real palms. That would have to be located somewhere in ‘Margaritaville’, I’m thinking. Shameful this old ‘Parrothead’ hasn’t been in that neighborhood for many a year, too.

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Which movement? Aah, the one that The Farm’s Steven Gaskin is preparing for, the retirement of the boomers. Reportedly Steven has purchased property neear the original farm which is possibly to become a farm for like minded retirees. I’ve long envisioned the perfect retirement home… Cannabis Palms©… in fact George McMahon (CIND) (kap may remember some of these converstaions w/ George) and some of us used to commiserate over at DrugSense’s chat room on Sunday early eves… fffffffpp… ‘ere… about buying up a small town with a medical facility, our own police dept… while simultaneously discussing drug policy and long-tailed rabbit bbq recipes, plus the virtual passing of the burning doobie (which then lead to wishes for transporter technology).

sigh…

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