Open Thread

Presented for your perusal without my comment, because I’m on vacation… Drug Policy Wonks Propose Two Pathways For Legal Marijuana. “As a handful of states gear up for marijuana legalization ballot initiatives in November, drug policy experts Mark Kleiman and John Hudak explain how laws can be easily reformed.”

“Forty years from now we will know if cannabis legalization was a good thing or not,” says Kleiman. “There are too many effects, too many long-term things, too many cross interactions, too many unknowns. Everyone in the world says they know if cannabis legalization is a good thing or bad thing, except for the six of us who study it for a living.”


Don’t get me started…

Trump, in answer to police chiefs, says there is ‘no noticeable partnership’ between feds and local police

In response to a question from the International Association of Chiefs of Police about improving the “important” partnership between federal and local law enforcement, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump recently wrote that, “Currently, there is no noticeable partnership between the federal government and state and local law enforcement.” He then added, “That will dramatically change in a Trump administration.” […]

Asked about their number one law enforcement and criminal justice priority, Trump wrote that his administration “will be focused on restoring the rule of law in the United States. Selective enforcement of laws has led to a more dangerous society and the vilification of local law enforcement must come to an end.” Asked about plans to lower crime, Trump wrote, “the law of the land will be enforced, starting with federal statutes that encompass illegal immigration, drug trafficking and human trafficking.”

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94 Responses to Open Thread

  1. DonDig says:

    .
    I guess if ‘the six of us who study it for a living’ thought they knew what the outcome might be, they would be putting themselves out of business, wouldn’t they. Can’t risk that. Their livelihood requires them to muddy the waters. A few thousand years of use isn’t enough study to determine that it won’t destroy society. Ugh.

    • Dr. Zig Zag's toking buddy aka NCN says:

      A few months ago, couch regular Freeman posted a link to BOTEC. I sent them a very cynical fart of an e-mail telling them that “sans the endocannabinoid system” they were nothing but propagandists for prohibition.

      Try finding info on the ECS through BOTEC OR the “Reality-based” b.s. website.

      I got an e-mail from bradrowe@botecanalysis.com asking me for info on the ECS. Talk about a tasty LOL! I didn’t bother to reply.

      The GANG OF SIX depends on the endocannnabinoid system being kept a secret. Their income depends on a growing body count whether they want to accept that fact or not.

      Troll-boy with his testicles in a bedside jar? Tool for Big Pharma or just another sad brain-dead authoritarian follower?

      • Freeman says:

        Dude I’m so amused you got a response! I’ve known others who tried and failed, like Dr. James MacRae, apparently a player in the WA medical cannabis scene. That’s so cool! Now that you’ve posted his email, I’m sure someone here with extensive ECS knowledge could direct bradrowe to a few good sources of information.

        But this idea that Dr. Nark I.R. k’Lieman is some sort of authoritarian follower ignores all evidence that he’s got the heart of a communist dictator (check his comment about Brett at the bottom). I checked all of Brett’s comments going back several posts before he was re-restricted, and as always they were polite, non-argumentative and on-topic. It’s clear Dr. Joseph A.R. Stalin simply doesn’t like his viewpoint and, intellectual coward that he is, would rather suppress it than engage it or simply ignore it and let others debate it’s merits. No surprise after having slaughtered most of his own online community in the Great Purge.

        • NCN says:

          I changed gears there at the end. The last part was intended for and aimed at our current entertaining (paid?) troll.

          I suspect that ignorance of the ECS is a carefully chosen position for BOTEC and is in no way amenable to positive scientific news on the endocannabinoid system. Otherwise, I’d love to fill them in.

          My #1 source for everything cannabis is PubMed.gov.. If BOTEC’s not aware of that little research gem, I’d be really surprised. I highly recommend it to anyone.

        • Freeman says:

          Yeah, I suspected as much. I knew you know k’Lieman better than that, but I saw it as a good opportunity to rant on his latest bit of ugly behavior.

  2. thelbert says:

    the trolls are getting nervous. i wonder what is bothering them.

  3. Servetus says:

    “Forty years from now we will know…”[?]. In forty years, a lot of people will likely be dead, including Mark Kleiman. He is saying he will never know, nor want to know, nor will his five compadres know, all of whom will never question their first premise that marijuana is evil—it just has to be bad—otherwise Kleiman and all other prohibitionists will look like total fools:

    “There are too many effects, too many long-term things, too many cross interactions, too many unknowns.” — Mark Kleiman

    ***
    “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Donald Rumsfeld

    ***
    Dunning-Kruger Effect — “The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of those of low ability to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their ability accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.”[1]

    Dunning and Kruger have postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in those of low ability, and external misperception in those of high ability: “The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”[1]

    ***
    “Just say know to drugs.” – Timothy Leary

  4. Why Does Trump Want A Police State?
    https://youtu.be/hzS5BOE-qD0

    New Yorker: President Obama should declare end to ‘War on Drugs’
    http://tinyurl.com/z6b5v4w

    Leaving things to Donald or Hillary scares the shit out of me.

  5. Freeman says:

    40 years? Is that all? Shhhiiit… I got more experience than that, I’m guessing that’s barely median among the couchmates here. Then there’s representative samples like Tommy Chong (78) and Willie Nelson (83), both famously very heavy long-term tokers for well over 40 years, both healthy, happy, and doing live paid performances before enthusiastic audiences well into their senior years. If you suspect they’re outliers then shows us some counter-examples. Then there are the Jamaican studies, gotta be plenty of 40+ year heavy users in that dataset.

    “too many effects, too many long-term things, too many cross interactions, too many unknowns”??? Always so vague. Pin ’em down for details and they mumble bullshit about “self-reported diagnosable use disorder” as though it weren’t blindingly obvious to everyone else that that would apply equally to caffeine or chocolate if subjected to similar prohibitions and then studied through surveys. The real data’s there, dudes. It would appear that “the six of us who study it for a living” can’t find that, the endocannabinoid system, or their hinies with all twelve (assumed) hands.

    Have a great vacation Pete, we got this!

  6. Spirit Wave says:

    While legalization is a supposed mystery, prohibition (and law abuse in general) is seriously destructively obvious.

    We know that legalization of cannabis cannot be worse than the legality of alcohol, so (again) there is no justification for sustaining the unfair (so, by definition, unjust) prohibition in this case.

    Unethically selective reasoning to legitimize prohibition to some degree is not relevant expertise.

    Just some quick and obvious points on the issue here, but I could not help but express them under repetition for emphasis.

    • Frank W. says:

      “We know that OOF legalization of OW cannabis cannot HEY be worse than CRUNCH the legality of alcohol so OW there is no NOT THE TAZER”…
      LEOs have their own obvious points they express under repetition for emphasis.

  7. Tough Shit Hippie says:

    The drug war is raking in billions! It is a great boon to the economy.
    Too bad so sad that your keyboard peckings and link postings were all for naught.
    Enjoy the drug war because it is going to be here for a long time to come.

    • darkcycle says:

      Here….have a legal West Coast toke. Soon to be legal in ALL PACIFIC COASTAL STATES.
      That bridge is nasty….do you really live under there?
      Ha. The dirty fucking Hippies were right:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvpC8H8yJBg

    • Servetus says:

      Hippie scapegoats?

      The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices — to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children and the children yet unborn. – Rod Serling, epilogue in an episode entitled “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” from the The Twilight Zone.

    • Freeman says:

      The tables have only recently started to turn. The millions of us who choose to enjoy cannabis regardless of the demands of oppressive tyrants are just now beginning to flex our political muscles, and there’s going to be A LOT MORE of that to come. Modern-day Anslingers have their futures written on the wall before them.

      Come back and troll us again after the November elections, TSH, when several more states LEAP onto the legalization bandwagon.

      • jean valjean says:

        I work with high school age kids and I can say that almost universally they are in favor of freeing the weed, regardless of whether they partake themselves. The Clintons, Trumps and Liemans (Liemen?) will not hold the status quo for much longer.

        • Freeman says:

          Great point Jean. The generation(s) behind us are having none of this drug war that the generation(s) that came before imposed on us. The prohibitches will need to wait at least two generations before they have any hope of the pendulum starting to swing the other way.

        • allan says:

          when my now mid-20s kids were in HS my unofficial surveys of their peers ranged in the 80% range of thinking cannabis prohibition as “stupid.” All those hours (days, weeks, months, years…) of scouring the wwwebly seas for prohibitches to pillage actually paid off. Huzzah! to us!

          The gate is open and the animals have fled the farm…

        • Mouth says:

          In 2001, a 2 or 3yr old kid that year is currently 18-19 in 2016. Iraq further opened my eyes to the war on drugs. I’ve known far too many toddlers and elementary age school kids (during 2001), who have gone off to war in Afghanistan and once again, Iraq–fighting drug money. Some people have gone to jail for an illegal substance, other’s have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan for an illegal substance . . . I’ve been to two places for illegal marijuana: jail and Iraq (in that order). Illegal Cannabis and other drugs finances terrorism and it is sending our kids to not only jail, but to war–to a war that stared just after I graduated high school and started my first month of college. We millennials have had enough of the War on Drugs.

          Until Evidence Proves that Drug money does’t come from drug prohibition’s black market or until evidence proves drug money cannot buy guns, bombs, supplies etc, I’ll continue to call American Cops what they truly are: Muslim Terrorist Sympathizers. Anyone who does not believe Kleiman is a Muslim Terrorist Sympathizer is a nut job and not right in the head or they are just plain evil and guilty like he is . . . probably they are both: evil and crazy. War makes you bitter and watching young children go to the same old war that started almost 16yrs ago (fighting drug money), enhances that bitterness and further makes me hate those Muslim Terrorist Sympathizer American Cops. If American kops want my respect and cooperation, then they’ll donate a minimum of 80% of their post-taxed income to the victims of terrorism, the USO, veterans etc., or just give up.

          We couchmates have been to the Narco-Terror filled Middle East, been to War Torn Mexico, Gang fueled Central America, high alert for terrorism Europe and America’s horrible ghettos. Enough is enough. We need to legalize all the drugs for the children–for the people who don’t use drugs and never will. I’ve known plenty of drug addicts who have quit on their own and I’ve known plenty of people who have never used any mind altering drug, but I’ve yet to see a dead person come back to life or a blown off arm or leg grow back.

          Our children are going to war for drugs and we are wrecking their financial future in the estimated $5-7 Trillion dollar drug prohibition and it’s overall fallout. This has to end.

  8. Night of the Evil Hitlers says:

    Trump, Putin, W.Bush and Dick Cheney are Hitler.
    Right now they are driving a hurricane towards Louisiana because they hate all people!
    Only Hillary can save us from this scourge of evil Hitlers.

  9. Servetus says:

    Johann Hari interview on the end of the drug war:

    So I think the most important thing is the living example of reform, and of course in November, we’re going to have more states voting on whether to legalise – California is obviously the big prize. It looks pretty certain that California is going to vote to legalise, people are expecting a high turn-out because of the insanity that’s occurring. So you’re going to have, you know, by November (obviously it’ll take a little while for the legalisation to actually happen), but you’re going to have very significant parts of the United States with legal cannabis. Not just decriminalised, but legalised, and that’s a really big shift. And you know, by the way, a big majority of Americans are supporting full legalisation nationally.

    https://www.opendemocracy.net/drugpolicy/johann-hari-benjamin-ramm/moral-disjunction-johann-hari-on-future-of-war-on-drugs

  10. darkcycle says:

    More questionable research on cannabis and motivation.
    http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/stoned-lab-rats-become-too-lazy-tests/all/
    Sure…we’ll just ignore all the other conclusions one might consider…like maybe pure sugar isn’t as rewarding after a bonghit?….did you try Pizza, or Dorito’s? Maybe the rats were watching their weight? Maybe the endocanabinoid system, (as the body’s moderating substance and main feedback mechanism for homeostasis,) is dampening the craving for pure sugar once the animal’s needs have been met? I dunno….ascribing a reduction in an unnecessary activity to laziness is kind of a stretch.

    • jean valjean says:

      Calling groups of people “lazy” is a classic right wing trope: blacks, Hispanics, hippies, “welfare queens,” dole bludgers in Australia etc. the list is endless.

      • allan says:

        they obviously weren’t playing the rats kind of tunes. Everybody knows rats like funk, punk and rasta riddums.

        Whether I’ve been working with farm workers, indigenous people, environmentalists, peaceniks or potheads there have always been those quick to label me and mine and far slower to intelligently debate.

        I’ll take the judge’s response to my necessity defense argument in my fed protest trial over infantile name calling from caca doody heads any day. That judge said, “Mr Erickson you are a well spoken young man and were my hands not tied, you’d walk free.” Instead I shuffled off in shackles for my 3 day stay in TIFCI (a walk in which the 2 fed marshals walking us thru the hallways got into a heated Hiroshima A bomb debate with each other).

        Those that attack with labels are all a bunch of caca doody heads anyway… f’ ’em and the corporate whores they rode in on.

        • darkcycle says:

          I am reminded of a quote attributed J.W.D. Henderson, former director of the Canadian bureau of Human Drugs, Health and welfare Canada. As a cannabis researcher himself, he had this to say:

          “The drug is really quite a remarkably safe one for humans, although it is really quite a dangerous one for mice and they should not use it.”

  11. Abbey McPearlstein says:

    As far as William J. Bennett is concerned, that’s a shame. Back in 1989, when he was running the Office of National Drug Control Policy under Clinton’s predecessor, Bennett said “there’s no moral problem” with beheading drug dealers—the preferred method in Saudi Arabia. Although beheading might be legally problematic, he said on Larry King Live, it would be “morally proportional to the nature of the offense.” And Bennett ought to know, since he has a Ph.D. in philosophy. “I used to teach ethics,” he told Larry King. “Trust me.” The following year, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates took Bennett’s logic a step further, telling a Senate committee that casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot” as traitors in the war on drugs.

    Although Rodrigo Duterte is sometimes compared to Donald Trump, he could be taking his cues from Bennett, Gates, and other American drug warriors who heartily endorsed lethal responses to nonviolent actions. …>> ..

    http://tinyurl.com/Budgienado

    • Servetus says:

      Bill Bennett’s career of lies spans the range of moral turpitudes he opposes. Bennett claimed crack cocaine was addictive with one hit, a lie that caused one of his chief associates to resign in protest. As the addiction lie was deconstructed, John Q. Public learned one more time to never trust anything said by the government about prohibited drugs. Like the more flamboyant Donald, Bennett employs dubious source material, and he is a progenitor of the Alt-Right, a man who never lets truth get in the way of his wide-ranging holy crusades:

      Anyone who has witnessed one of Bennett’s Sunday talk show performances knows how much he is addicted to sanctimony, a quality Merriam-Webster defines as “affected or hypocritical holiness.” But as is the case in so many other pillars of the right-wing establishment, Bennett’s intellectual dishonesty is by far his most dangerous quality.

      When Bill Clinton made his first speech before the Human Rights Campaign in 1997, Bennett went on ABC’s This Week to announce a sobering discovery: “This is tough news. It’s not pleasant to hear.” But apparently somebody had to say it: Homosexuality “takes 30 years off your life,” he added. According to the white-haired sage, the typical life expectancy of a gay man was just 43.

      The source of this startling “fact” was “research” by Paul Cameron, a particularly questionable “investigator” who had been thrown out of the American Psychological Association for misrepresenting the findings of others and engaging in dubious research techniques. …

      https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-105367762/bill-bennett-s-other-addiction-last-word

  12. SixHorses says:

    Harvard historian Lisa McGirr

    Did alcohol prohibition of the 1920s ever really come to an end, or did it just metastasize into something far more destructive and difficult to abolish—what we casually refer to as “the war on drugs?” McGirr argues that our national ban on booze routed around its own repeal via the 21st Amendment. Ultimately, Prohibition transformed into a worldwide campaign against the drug trade.

    The ties between drug and alcohol prohibition run deep. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was established in 1930, only three years prior to Prohibition’s repeal. The FBN employed many of the same officials as the Federal Bureau of Prohibition. And both shared institutional spaces as independent entities within the U.S. Treasury Department. “In some ways,” observes McGirr, “the war never ended.”

    http://reason.com/reasontv/2016/08/25/alcohol-prohibition-drug-war

    • DdC says:

      The ties between drug and alcohol prohibition run deep.

      Deeper than the surface… Actually, there is no difference. Booze prohibition kept Riockefeller crude oil fueling cars while Ford’s ethanol went out of business, due to prohibition. Same with Hemp a few years later. Giving Dupont fibers with Rockefeller crude oil business. Then again with Nixon ramrodding the CSA through Congress while America was focused on a two bit breakin at the DNC HQ at the Watergate Hotel. To this day.

      Seems more than obvious that Fat Pharma wants a monopoly the same as the Mississippi schwag farm has by only lowering it to a schedule#2. Also the vast amount of research already in the books that these drug worriers claim we need more of. Just a scam for profits. Nothing complicated except the censored media makes it confusing. From Walters Philanthropy round table collecting tax write off donations to fund prohibitionists groups to Lieman doublespeak keeping the water muddy. Bennett and McCaffrey, they’re all anti-American fascists in need of a life sentence for treason.

      If you outlaw tennis shoes the prisons will fill with athletes and kids. If you outlaw beer the prisons will fill with rednecks. The big difference is there are thousands of products made with Cannabis. Most a threat to Wall St, the sponsors of the Drug War. Just as Nixon predicted, if you outlaw cannabis then the prisons, rehabs and probation’s will fill with blacks and counter culture Nixon protesters. As it has. If you outlaw the Bible then the prisons will fill with religionist… If you outlaw lying, then the prisons will fill with politicians and drug worriers. Humm, I have to think about that one… Maybe prisons can be useful.

      Al Capone and Watergate

  13. “Alcohol Prohibition Was a Dress Rehearsal for the War on Drugs” – Harvard historian Lisa McGirr on how our national ban on booze never really ended.
    https://youtu.be/FOBcRTWLGAs
    http://tinyurl.com/jntnuc3

  14. Servetus says:

    Do the cannabinoids in marijuana improve night vision? Anecdotal evidence of cannabis ingestion improving night vision in Jamaican and Moroccan fishermen now has a potential ally in tadpole vision studies:

    A multidisciplinary team including researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute has improved our understanding of how cannabinoids, the active agent in marijuana, affect vision in vertebrates.

    Scientists used a variety of methods to test how tadpoles react to visual stimuli when they’ve been exposed to increased levels of exogenous or endogenous cannabinoids. Exogenous cannabinoids are artificially introduced drugs, whereas endogenous cannabinoids occur naturally in the body.

    They found that, contrary to what they expected, activating cannabinoid signaling in tadpoles actually increased the activity in their retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), which are responsible for transmitting information about light detection from the eye to the brain. Previous studies found that cannabinoids typically work to reduce neurotransmission, not increase it.[…]

    What the researchers found is that one class of cannabinoid receptor, known as CB1R, plays a role in the suppression of chloride transport into the RGCs. When the receptor is activated, chloride levels are reduced, which hyperpolarizes the cell, making it able to fire at higher frequencies when stimulated.

    For the tadpoles, this meant they were able to detect dimmer objects in low light than when they had not been exposed to increased levels of cannabinoids. The team used software developed with McGill physics and chemistry professor Paul Wiseman to detect behavior changes in the tadpoles.[…]

    Therapeutic use of cannabinoids is becoming increasingly accepted by the medical community, and the need for an accurate and thorough understanding of these chemicals’ role in the brain is greater than ever.

    The full research paper was published in the journal eLife on Aug. 8, 2016, and was made possible with funding from Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé, Épilepsie Canada, and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council CREATE Neuroengineering Training Grant.

    AAAS Public Release: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-08/mu-rfn082516.php

    • DdC says:

      Hummm. I was on a softball team in Florida. I played short stop in PA. This was a corporate sponsored team and they put me on 3rd base. I hadn’t played many night games and it could have been a few lights missing. But it seemed when I got off work at 3 and smoked a joint. At 7 when the game started I noticed a slight vision problem that wasn’t there if I worked overtime and didn’t smoke a joint until after the game. or was it a problem in day games. So I assumed it might have a negative effect at night. Now it seems it was probably the lights at that field. Power went out last night and I still banged into the wall getting the flash light. It makes sense that everything is kept in its DNA parameters by the ECS. So night vision or obesity or diabetes or anything out of whack should be helped by Cannabis. Bringing it back to where it once belonged jojo,

  15. Hitler Stole all the Nutella says:

    If Trump and Putin are Hitler how will Hitler steal all the Nutella?

  16. Reich Winger says:

    Don’t be hating on Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
    She is hot as fuck and it is not her fault that Hilly Billy pays better than Bolshevik Bernie.

  17. thelbert says:

    some stupid people think that you have to advertise an herb that sells itself. http://cannabisnews.com/news/28/thread28889.shtml

  18. thelbert says:

    here’s the donald, tashkin, that is:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJmQ16cGBHU

  19. never trust a shithippie says:

    We need hard labor re-education camps for those inbred right wing redneck scum.
    They have no right to be called Americans for they are uneducated scum who work at unskilled manual labor jobs.
    Hillary will fix those untermenschen vermin.

  20. strayan says:

    What if we give women the right to vote? How will we know whether suffrage is a good thing or bad thing? There are too many effects, too many long-term things, too many cross interactions, too many unknowns… BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH.

  21. Will says:

    .
    .
    Regarding Kleiman’s “too many unknowns” with respect to cannabis legalization, let’s let a particularly brilliant example of blatherspeak sum up the conundrum (with Mr. Kleiman nodding vigorously in the background);
    —————————
    “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

    Donald Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense, February 12, 2002

    —————————

    Yeah, what he said…

  22. jean valjean says:

    A British ex-cop and LEAP member calls it as he sees it:

    “The argument Woods heard more than any other from his colleagues was: yes, the war on drugs is hard to win, but just because lots of people burgle houses that’s no reason to legalise burglary, so we shouldn’t legalise drugs just because so many people take them. By now it’s hard to remember that Woods was ever a policeman. He tucks into “this bog-standard reply” as if it were a banquet. “There’s two answers to counter that view. For one, burglars are a tiny number of people. As any police inspector or sergeant will tell you, you can decrease the amount of burglaries in a town of 25,000 people by half by catching two burglars. And by catching burglars, you reduce the demand for that crime, so to speak. But by policing drugs, you don’t reduce the demand. You have no impact on the demand whatsoever.”
    …..”The drug policy Woods wants is both simple and radical. Heroin should be prescribed by doctors to addicts, and every other drug sold under strictly regulated conditions. Even crack? “I went into the police believing that message, ‘One smoke of crack and you’re addicted for life.’ I remember seeing Nancy Reagan on TV saying that, and it’s literally a load of crap. There is no evidential basis in that statement at all.” Contrary to drug war propaganda, he says, only a small minority of drug users ever develop a problem, regardless of which substance they take. Across the board, the figure is roughly 10% – the same percentage of gamblers who become problematic, interestingly – the only exception being heroin, where it is 25%.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/26/neil-woods-undercover-cop-who-abandoned-the-war-on-drugs

  23. allan says:

    and by-the-by mates, it remains a pleasure to sit witchu all even if I’m doing so far less these days. I love the level of couchified cognitive harmonics Pete maintains.

    Also… I took in another tenant. She’s another model… some times the universe is sooo kind. I was joking with her the other day about having to get the house sprayed for these infestations of naked ladybugs (as she walked by in the buff).

    sigh…

  24. SixHorses says:

    Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Catholic priest, doctor of moral theology and consulting editor of The Catholic Herald.

    The effects of President Duterte’s war on drugs will be catastrophic

    The drugs trade is inherently violent because it is illegal. The way to tame it is to legalise it.

    The government of the Philippines, in taking on the criminals, using the same methods of the criminals, risks the worst of all outcomes: fighting the war on drugs and losing it. When that happens the criminals take over the government.

    But when the drugs trade is legalised, taxed and regulated (like the alcohol and tobacco trades) then the criminals lose control of their fiefdom and are put out of business. Moreover, when drugs become legal, addicts can be recognised for what they really are: sick people needing medical help, rather than criminals.

    http://tinyurl.com/TheChurchOnOurSide

  25. Mouth says:

    That Mark Klingon guy didn’t offer to show us the 1000 page invisible document proving how liquor stores finance the Bloods and Crips of California–or all the other gangs and in other states and countries. re-Watched Spice 1’s ‘Welcome to the Ghetto’ music video last night and his lyrics provided more thoughtful commentary on why prohibition is a disaster. Rap artists are far more educated than his panel of six. That son of a mosquito (which meant Mark K used to be larva) doesn’t realize I was paid to study drug legalization and prohibition when I was in Iraq–watching our enemy be financed by dope money and then using my Army money to study art, legalization and architecture in Holland which was a pretty safe place (not even the guy who tried to mug me had a weapon)–then heading off to Paris where full armored French Soldiers with grenade launchers on them, guarded that big metal tower they have–and witnessing the Taliban plant bombs in the bathroom of Printemps (Dec 2008) as a warning to France: “Get out of Afghanistan”. Thank God there have been zero terrorist attacks in France and Paris . . . I love that place. Drug Money has been known to buy computers, smart phones and internet that can ‘inspire’ loan wolves and drug money has been known to help buy weapons and airplane tickets back from Syria, once training has been accomplished. Thank God the 2008 Mumbai Terrorist attacks (With special guest stars: the DEA) was not real and just some Existential live street performance.

    • Servetus says:

      Johann Hari has a new article at Alternet linking drug discrimination to racism in France:

      The Intersection of the War on Drugs and the Jihad Attacks on France: In France, there are many ways in which the pool of violence caused by drug prohibition bleeds into homegrown jihadism.

      France is just like the United States in that it uses small marijuana busts to harass Muslims or anyone of darker skin color. It’s actions are a sad indicator that France has fallen on hard times, an empire no more.

      • Mouth says:

        It’s like throwing a tennis ball at a brick wall: it will bounce back to hit you. I understand why ISIS is filled with hate: we fucked them over in Iraq and did all the wrong things. Bitterness bites like a snake. Discrimination, harassment and dumb laws helps to create them, while dumb drug laws help to finance the new creatures’ bloodbath.

        Until I see a Honda Civic smuggle $20,000 in oil in the glove compartment, I’ll maintain my belief that drugs are by far the best source of revenue, especially when Obama’s drones tend to shoot semi-trucks more often than small cars. And I can barely squeeze one ‘for ransom hostage’ under my seat, yet one can stash a few well compressed cakes under the seat.

        John Travolta’s ‘From Paris With Love’ . . . a great movie utilizing reality to make a wonderful plot. The vase parts are the best. Cops should be forced to watch it: this is what happens when you cannot complete your job 100% at eliminating 100% of the illegal drugs and users. If we are going to keep it illegal, then I say we should force cops to work 24hr shifts, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and cut their pay in half until they are successful . . . fraud is getting paid in full for doing far far less than half the work, while promising total results.

  26. Will says:

    .
    .
    All in good fun, right? Except I suspect the uber-moralists will be none too pleased;

    HIKEA: Building furniture while high on LSD

    http://tinyurl.com/gwsoklu

    • NorCalNative says:

      When I was a young pup I worked as a lumberjack in a sawmill. I spent all day next to two saws that could cut a tall man in half.

      I was good at LSD so I spent a day working on a head rig tripping. I couldn’t wear safety glass or much clothing because sweat. No goggles, no shirt, frost on the ground, and me on LSD versus a saw.

      Micro-dosing would be a smart move for labor workers, but be careful if you go full-steam. It’s not a move for beginners.

      • Frank W. says:

        Maybe in your century… I wouldn’t feel safe giving any dose of LSD to the loggers in my part of Oregon

      • jean valjean says:

        Not sure why anyone would choose to trip in an industrial environment, but hey. Recipe for a bummer for most of us, quite apart from the safety issue.

        • NCN says:

          My worst LSD trip? Falling asleep watching the Grateful Dead at Winterland on New Years Eve. Now that was a “bummer.”

    • DdC says:

      In the early 70’s they blacked out a Steeler game and some friends and I drove to Cleveland to watch it. First we did some acid and headed down the pike to Ohio. About 35 mph on the 60mph turnpike. Picked up a Jesus freak with his pamphlets he left in the car as he made his escape at a truckstop we gassed up at. Made it to the friends JCU dorm to watch the game. It was against Oakland, known as the immaculate reception when Franco Harris caught the deflected ball and ran it in for the win. Most in Oakland think of it as the immaculate deception. We all were sure it was our doing driving all that way. Someone once ask me how far I had gone with drugs? Concerned it was more than pot. I said I hitch hiked to SF once tripping and stoned, that’s about as far as I’d gone at the time. If it wasn’t for hippies the rednecks would still be silent. The price of freedom!

      LSD Microdosing: The New Job Enhancer In Silicon Valley And Beyond

      How an Army of Deadheads (And Their LSD) Invented Silicon Valley

      Thank God for Hippies

      HISTORY: WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES BY STEWART BRAND
      Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair. The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution,,,

  27. SixHorses says:

    J. A. Tucker at Newsweek thinks it may be time to bring back Opium Dens:

    We live in denial about what the war on substances—alcohol, pot, opium, flakka—is doing to our societies. We deny the extent of the abuse that prohibition has engendered, and we live under the illusion that whatever problems there are can be dealt with through more force, though we have 100 years of experience to prove otherwise.

    You might think that the advent of a drug that turns a nice college kid into a face-eating double murderer would cause a serious rethinking. How much better if this kid had an opium den to inhabit when he felt stressed?

    http://tinyurl.com/NewsweekOpiumDens

  28. Vast Right Wing Conspiracy says:

    This just in – Adolf Hitler-Six Million, Donald J. Trump-zero

    Breaking News – Hillary Clinton had a successful bowel movement today after being pinned down by fierce sniper fire on the tarmac in Bosnia.
    The sniper fire only let up after comedian Sinbad made the snipers laugh.
    Hats off to Brian Williams who was there.

    In other news Monica Lewinsky won’t be voting for Hillary because the last Clinton presidency left a bad taste in her mouth.

  29. Hope says:

    The six experts that have studied all this?

    Did they study this?

    http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/

    • jean valjean says:

      The true cost of prohibition has to be ignored for its whores like Lieman to go on drawing a fat paycheck on the back of it. He doesn’t give a shit who gets harmed so long as the bucks keep rolling his way.

    • DdC says:

      How can any of the halfwit dozen be experts if no “expert” has ever taught them?
      Except expert liars paid to prohibit.

      ☛ Only 13% of the medical schools surveyed mention the endocannabinoid science to our future doctors
      Not one of the medical schools surveyed had a department of endocannabinoid science or an ECS director. None of them taught the endocannabinoid science as an organized course.

      When doctors give up their oath, training and experience treating patients to nark cops, Patients die. Or lose their kids or get caged.
      DO they kNOw what HARM is?

      ☛ The DEA scheduling system has no scientific basis at all

      No science behind lumping Hemp and Ganja with crack and pcp.

      No doctors taught, so even the pseudo experts quoted by the prohibitionists, aren’t really experts. The real experts are banned due to arrest records learning how to be true experts.

      Big ole ugly catch 22 sewed up tight with one rodent gnawing at the threads. The Internet.

      Who will question them on anything they do if Feinstein or hatch are ever granted Net censorship as they’ve been trying to get since Al Gore invented it.

      I don’t think there is a clearer example of just how low and immoral the ONDCP Empire of DEA and NIDA Prohibitionists are. Knowing what Cannabis can do, then banning anyone else from knowing. Inconprehensable.

      ☛ Cannabis Shrinks Tumors: Government Knew in 74

      ☛ Collaterally Damaged Kids
      New York Nine Year Old Girl With Dravet Syndrome Dies Without Medical Marijuana

    • Servetus says:

      Kleiman… “…a professor of public policy and the director of the Crime Reduction and Justice Initiative at New York University’s Marron Institute….”

      If Kleiman’s thing is “Crime Reduction”, then drug policies place him outside his level of expertise.

      Prohibitive drug policies create opportunities for people to commit drug crimes. With each drug crime enforced, more money goes to the state for law enforcement and incarceration. More law enforcement and incarceration leads to more drug policies, with the collateral creation of more human rights crimes against ordinary citizens. Crime production, not reduction, is what Kleiman represents, and it is achieved through his inhumane policies. People who manufacture crimes are not normally considered public policy professors, they’re considered criminals. In this case, we can be glad there are only six of them.

      • jean valjean says:

        “Crime production, not reduction, is what Kleiman represents, and it is achieved through his inhumane policies.”
        Great point. Lieman is part of a crime wave. Somewhere in his conscience he can see it too, but the money always trumps the ethics. We know he reads this blog; I wonder if he’ll dare answer your charge.

  30. DdC says:

    Lieman and conscience seems oxymoronic.

  31. Servetus says:

    Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, arch Northern prohibitch, has totally exited all official political offices, while leaving the following legacy:

    August 16, 2016 — During his tenure as Prime Minister, which spanned from 2006-2015, Harper was known internationally for pushing through an aggressive conservative agenda which included: wholesale investment in fossil fuels, including Canadian tar sands; blocking international efforts to combat climate change; dismantling civil liberties through mass surveillance; unflinching support of Israel and attempts to outlaw pro-Palestinian boycott movements; supporting numerous wars overseas; and willfully ignoring the treaty rights of Canadian First Nations, among many other things.

    http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/08/26/good-riddance-canadas-stephen-harper-bids-adieu-politics-hello-consulting

    There always seems to be a one-to-one correspondence between bad leadership and imposition of tough drug laws. Nixon, Harper, Duterte, the list continues.

  32. DdC says:

    The Most Important Anti-Obstruction Race in America: Kai Degner vs. Bob Goodlatte.
    Bob Goodlatte’s role as Chair of the Judiciary Committee lets him kill bills and thus block campaign finance reform, immigration reform, criminal justice reform, sensible marijuana policy, consumer protections, civil rights, voting rights, labor rights …

  33. thelbert says:

    here’s a link found on Pete’s first link: http://tinyurl.com/huxgd5q

  34. Servetus says:

    Terry Gotham of Burning Man notes the gentrification effects of marijuana legalization in progressive cities, but he does so in a nice way:

    We’re legalizing in uneven steps across the country, which has brought us into unknown economic, cultural & law enforcement territory and produced some worrying side effects.

    While [uneven enforcement of marijuana laws] is one of the effects of uneven progress in the legalization movement from the policy perspective, this isn’t the only segment of American life that is feeling problematic consequences from cannabis legalization. The Tech sector + liberalizing drug laws tend to be associated with spikes in rent/property values. This makes sense of course, when you work for Google, you can afford a bunch of pot and a 3 bedroom downtown in whatever city you’re in. However, one aspect of the discussion that gets left out is how this interfaces with the greater obliterating gentrification that occurs in a lot of liberal leaning cities.[…]

    The market force pressures being applied by the tech sector in a lot of cities around the country seem to be similar to how the financial district & real estate industry essentially dictate terms to the Mayor’s Office here in NYC.[…]

    We need to think hard about who we want to be able to afford to live in our communities, and how Radically Inclusive a lot of these cities are becoming. As Burning Man’s average income seems to steadily increase, we are seeing the places burners live approach prohibitive expense. Some of us can shake these hikes off like it ain’t no thing, and to them much respect is given. NYC is getting so bad that short order cooks can’t afford to live less than a 60min commute from the Michelin starred restaurants they’re working in. Artists are shipping out to Philly, Baltimore, DC, Asheville & plenty of other places that don’t smell of Dubai.[…]

    …issues of uneven enforcement & escalating living costs that surround progressive cultures are staring down the barrel at your city, and if they’re not, they will be in 5-10 years.

    Check out their couch at https://burners.me/2016/05/22/two-ominous-side-effects-of-cannabis-legalization/

    • DdC says:

      I’ve mentioned on some boards that it seemed the cost of living in progressive areas was higher. It certainly is in the Central Coast, especially Santa Cruz. They’re having the same problems with low wagers having to commute from other towns. It does clog the freeway. I thought it was strange that those with environmental protection laws become the most expensive. So progressives fight to clean the place up so GOPers can come in flip them and drive the cost up. Now it seems to be the same with cannabis laws. Well all I know is buying GWPH following duncans advise and then going 180 degrees opposite. Buying when all the brokers were whining about dead cats bouncing. Now all my pot is paid for until 2020. We also made sure from the start that everyone gets served.

      ☛ Santa Cruz nonprofit provides free medical marijuana to California vets

      ☛ Inside the Remote Farm That Supplies WAMM
      Death is an everyday part of life here at the marijuana giveaways.

      ☛ Santa Cruz Co dispensary, Granny Purps took in 11,000 pounds of food and handed out 2,000 joints between November and Christmas Eve, All the food was donated to the Second Harvest Food Bank.

  35. SixHorses says:

    “During the show they tell the children not to take illegal drugs or face being murdered by their own government.

    http://tinyurl.com/RavingBonkers-7450-Us

  36. small deformed penis says:

    They saved Hitler’s cock, They hid it under a rock.
    I discovered it, last night. I couldn’t even, believe my eyes.

    If Hitler’s cock could start to talk, it would say: To kill today.
    If Hitler’s cock could choose its mate, it would ask, for Sharon Tate!

    They saved Hitler’s cock. They stuffed it in Mengele’s sock.
    They saved Hitler’s cock, and now it wants to talk.

    Now it’s starting to get hard, I found it in my backyard.
    Every night it kills a dog, and now it wants, some night and fog.
    Hitler’s cock is on the move, and now I’m scared of what it wants to do!

  37. Mr_Alex says:

    @DDC and other DrugWarRant commenters, some new info on Harry Anslinger:

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1K3lYECD9kpanh3cERkNlFoMkE/view?pref=2&pli=1

    If anyone wants more pieces to the Puzzle, read Shadow of the Swastika

    • Servetus says:

      Nice bit of information gathering by cannabis activists Rev. Dr. Anne Armstrong* and Rev. Dr. Alan Gordon.

      Here is some more info on the authors at http://thehealingchurchri.com/

      The connection between Harry Anslinger and German fascism is a link that can be made between many famous and not-so-famous U.S. citizens; people such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. In Britain, there were other admirers of Hitler, such as T. E. Lawrence and Edward VIII. Any appearance of fascist fraternization changed when Hitler declared war on the United States. At the time, if you were a young kid in North Dakota growing up with German immigrant parents and spoke German at the breakfast table, it suddenly became a not-so-good idea to speak German anymore. Luckily, first generation German immigrants didn’t get sent to internment camps as the Japanese did. For Harry Anslinger and others like him, it must have been a real dilemma. He would have needed a scapegoat to deflect malign attention.

      Anslinger is saved from the authors’ charge of being a Nazi sympathizer and double-agent during WWII by the fact that Anslinger anticipated the war and stockpiled enough morphine in the U.S. to get the country through the entire conflict. Yes, Harry Anslinger did one good thing in his lifetime.

      Unfortunately, the history and evidence offered by Rev. Dr. Anne Armstrong and Rev. Dr. Alan Gordon limits any references to the Catholic Church’s use of drug enforcement vis-à-vis the Spanish Inquisition, such as using it as a means of civilizing (enslaving) indigenous peoples during the reign of the Spanish conquistadors in South and Central America. There is also no mention of Operation Gladio, which ties neatly into fascism, Allen Dulles, Operation Artichoke, and the Vatican Bank being used to house money from drug cartels, etc. Instead, every effort is made to paint Harry Anslinger as the sole villain in an opportunistic crusade against specific drug consumers that’s actually been ongoing, with various interruptions, for 2000 years. Also, the information the duo provide about ergot mold is dangerously mistaken. No one has ever ingested ergot in its raw, unaltered form, and lived.

      *Rev. Dr. Anne Armstrong, Deaconess to a small catholic apostolate called The Healing Church, brought a 2-foot joint-shaped “freedom relay torch” into church to have it blessed, on its way to the UN in a state-by-state passing akin to the Olympic Torch — except this one was for cancer patients’ access rights, and for amnesty for those serving cannabis life sentences. When Armstrong took the Torch into church, she was physically assaulted by Detectives posing as church security guards, using fake ID and false credentials, who, when told they had been caught on video, tried to justify their wrongful battery of Armstrong by claiming she had been disrespectfully smoking cannabis in church (the video shows otherwise).

    • jean valjean says:

      Why am I no more surprised to see that Anslinger was a Nazi than I am to discover that half the Ferguson police dept are Klan members? Law enforcement has always been racist but it’s more troubling that they are organized and not just lone kooks. The legacy of slavery is still omnipresent in US policing.

      • Mr_Alex says:

        The guy who passed on the link to me on FB, is also suspecting that William Hearst could very well be a German Agent as well, all I will say is the guy who showed me the PDF lives in the state of Pennsylvania.

        I have started to wonder if Cannabis Prohibition was Nazi in nature as well

    • thelbert says:

      quite a read, mr. Alex especially the part about the bogus nature of prohition laws.

  38. SixHorses says:

    BANGKOK — The penalties and restrictions on marijuana and methamphetamines will be relaxed by year’s end, according the nation’s top drug enforcement official.

    The plan, which would permit use of such drugs for medical benefit, is part of the military government’s newfound progressive approach to drug abuse in a break from long years of outright bans and harsh punishment.

    Apart from marijuana and meth, known by Thais as yaa baa, officials are also aiming to reclassify kratom and hemp, said Sirinya Sitdhichai, director of the Narcotics Control Board. Kratom, hemp and marijuana will undergo reclassification first, he said, followed by meth.

    http://tinyurl.com/TheEndTheEndTheEnd

  39. Dr. Zig Zag's toking buddy aka NCN says:

    OF POSSIBLE RELEVANCE:

    According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 16 of 17 U.S. drug companies PAID leaders of academic medical centers to sit on their board of directors.

    The AVERAGE PAY for this sinecure was more than $312,000 as of 2014.

    Johnson & Johnson was most generous, paying off the leaders of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, The UCLA Health System, the University of Michigan, Morehouse School of Medicine, Eisenhower Medical Center, Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Cornell University.

    J&J appears to be first among Big Pharma equals. After California voters passed legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996, leading drug warriors held an EMERGENCY meeting in Washington, D.C., at which a representative of J&J’s Robert Wood Foundation promised financial support for whatever CONTAINMENT SCHEMES the group devised.

    GlaxoSmithKline paid off honchos from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, NYU Langone Medical Center and Texas Medical Center. Merck paid two execs from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and one each from New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College. Amgen paid $281,000 to a University of Southern California administrator.

    —————-

    The info above is from the Winter 2015/2016 issue of O’Shaughnessy’s the Journal of Cannabis in Clinical Practice. Their website is beyondthc.com.

    Johnson & Johnson is one of the main players fighting cannabis as medicine and when you give a person $300,000 for doing nothing, you’ve probably got a friend for your propaganda for life. Kudos to J&J for their bold moves in attempting to spoil the waters on cannabis.

    Containment Schemes for you and me. Just say Know! Class assignment is to purge your pad of J&J bullshit products. Defund the war criminals hiding behind Schedule I protection.

    These sinecure-sucking-sluts are one of the reasons why BOTEC and the gag-of-six can do what they do. Institutional medicine hates patients as much as they hate weed.

  40. “Obama Leaves Behind a Marijuana Nightmare”
    http://tinyurl.com/h5jxm57

    … “Federal prohibition needs to end with the total removal of cannabis from the CSA. As only Bernie Sanders has proposed, it would be far better if cannabis were treated like alcohol and tobacco under federal law, even though it is far safer than either of those deadly drugs.”

    “President Obama had the power to do great good, instead he failed to end the caustic, cruel, and counterproductive federal prohibition of cannabis. We got a little change, but we could have, and should have, gotten more.”

  41. HoedeFukdiddle says:

    raised from the deep, fed on solid tornadoes, now I’m altogether alien

    http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/01/arts/art-and-drugs/index.html

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