Naturally, they want to blame drug war violence on the wrong thing.
New pot law blamed as violence escalates
Since recreational marijuana use was decriminalized in Massachusetts last year, pot-related trafficking and violence have escalated across the state, frustrated law enforcement officials tell the Herald.
Smoking weed is not a victimless crime, they say.
“We knew it was going to be a nightmare for public safety and law enforcement. An ounce of marijuana can make a thousand joints,†Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr. said.
Of course, all the violence they noted had to do with turf wars — caused by marijuana still being illegal, not by decriminalization.
And… An ounce of marijuana can make a thousand joints.
Who are these morons?
There are a little over 28 grams in an ounce. That would mean you’d have to make over 35 joints per gram.
That wouldn’t satisfy a hobbit.
Oh dear. Mr. Gerard T. Leone Jr. seems to have come across a TARDIS ounce. No wonder it’s a nightmare for public safety! Those dimensional transcendentalisms tend to wreak havoc with space time.
You’re right DA Leone Jr.. it is a nightmare… thanks for making yet another case for full blown legalisation and regulation…
It wouldn’t satisfy a hobit but it would be massive to a lego guy. If we’re not careful the lego kids could get their hands on these super joints. OMG! think of the lego kids!
An ounce weighs 28grams. The average joint weighs 1 gram. So 28 joints is what you’ll yield from an oz. Unless you have some Frodo Hobbit rolling papers good for two hits.
A wonderful example of how law enforcement has no choice but to lie in defense of prohibition. Without the lies, the policy is indefensible.
I can just see it now, Joe and Jane P. Mundane sitting at the dinner table…Joe says to Jane:
“Oh lordy, lordy, me. Those evil dope fiends have found a way to stretch an ounce out to a thousand joints”
Head scratching, a little mental math…
“Hey, I need to talk to one of those dope fiends about my paycheck….”
Jane: *rolls eyes*
Who are these morons?
“Investigator found abandoned in fields in Iowa and Minnesota between 12,000 and 15,000 pounds of harvested hemp — enough to make thirty billion [Marihuana] cigarettes and to drug the whole population of the United States.”
~ THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY – June 29, 1938
“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”
— Thomas Jefferson, 1823
“Authorities Warn Against Spread of Marijuana Habit
– Insanity, Degeneracy and Violence Follow Use of Weedâ€
– (Actual front page headline)
– BELOIT DAILY NEWS (Beloit, Wisconsin) Feb. 10, 1938 pg1.
“…the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.”
“Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing”
“Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.”
“Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.”
“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”
~ Harry J. Anslinger – America’s 1st Drug Czar (FDR – JFK)
“In a republic like ours, people often think that the proper response to an unjust law is to try to use the political process to change the law, but to obey and respect the law until it is changed. But if the law is itself clearly unjust, and the lawmaking process is not designed to quickly obliterate such unjust laws, then the law deserves no respect — break the law.”
– Henry David Thoreau
good thing that massachusetts residents are, for the most part, educated pretty well about marijuana and back law reform.
its very rare that i meet someone who is fully against marijuana law reform… its very common to meet smokers or people who know smokers and realize the complete hypocrisy of prohibition.
but thats just my experience from living in this state. im sure others differ in different areas
They been doing that for years here in Canada. A grow-op bust always embellished with the number of joints it would yeild. Disgusting.
Were beyond hope it seems.
Its running 55% for, 45 against
in regards to the groping of children at checkpoints. How stupid and demonic can it get? Wait n see.
I for one am embarrassed to be alive in this country.
I think folks are being a little harsh here, because surely this individual has been misquoted. I’m sure the correction will read something like this.
…”an ounce of marijuana can make a thousand right-wing republicans go insane.”
Every schoolboy and girl knows that when someone has a financial stake in an issue they tend to think and vote for those interests. That’s why everything that comes out of the mouths of pro-prohibitionist law enforcement and congress needs to be taken with a grain of salt and a ton of cynicism.
Burn a Doobie not a Witch!
Mass has come a long way baby.
Once you got rid of those pesky Puritans…
The Salem Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials of 1692
The Salem witch trials reveal striking similarities to our present-day war on drugs. Both were/are fueled by fear, not logic. The war on drugs is waged against substances deemed to “possess” individuals, either causing them to become evil or deliver death. The war on witches was against spirits declared to produce the same results. Both were/are moralistic in their declaration of saving humanity from sin by destroying a menace.
Witch hunts and the war on weed
The persecution of “witches” was really a war on sacred plants that continues today.
Barney Franks Personal Use Act.jpg
Here’s a great “tell-tale” line from the story:
“The law, however, provides no enforcement mechanism for police to collect the money.”
I thought police issued tickets and the courts collected the money. Foolish me. Next time you’re in Mass., be sure to tell the cop you’ll dispense with the ticket and just pay him direct. And, PLEASE, have your phone-cam running.
so… is there like a factor of lying? You know… like if someone says “you get 1,000 joints from an ounce of cannabis” but you really only get 25 or so would that be a “Factor 40” lie? And if Calvina Fay says 25 sq ft of space will provide 240,000 joints is that a “Factor Infinity” lie?
Or perhaps we can measure drug war lies (and the liars who tell them) like the Richter Scale… except we call it the Calvina Scale…
I don’t think Calvina Scale describes where the drug warriors and prohibs come up with their facts and statistics but Rectum Scale would.
And remind me not to attend any of those guy’s parties
unless I get to do the rolling.
aaah… just reminded me… the day we rolled the Big Bambu paper from the Cheech and Chong album of the same name (which they sold in the base PX)… that joint took almost 2 ounces! This was in Thailand… about ten of us got together in town and fired that puppy up… the smoke B I L L O W E D up the alley and the Thais started coming out to see what the hell was up. Then they saw it was just us and had a good laugh – crazy farangs!
You know that in Thailand… those red eyes we get? They call ’em “da wan” – sweet eyes.
After reading the complete article:
“Leone said he fears decriminalization has created a booming “cottage industry†for dope dealers to target youths no longer fearing the stigma of arrest or how getting high could affect their already dicey driving. Leone’s combined distribution and trafficking caseload rose from 445 in 2008 to 464 in 2009. This year’s caseload stood at 422 as of last week, on track to match or exceed last year.”
An increase of .5% is a crime wave? Didn’t pot use increase more than the crime rate?
…incompetence…
…So where did these idiots go to school…and havent they worked with cannabis long enough to know how many joints are in an OZ…?
….If they havent learned the way things are traded by now they need to step down from the drug warrior podium…they are making them selves look like fools…
…Ya they say thousands just too scare an unwitting, propagandized public…
… Ya ..they knew decrim wouldnt get rid of prohibition related violence, they knew they could then say
” Look! Drug violence” and further support the lies they follow…
…..Im so sick of liars in charge….
DEAth Merchants and Drug Worriers words have no meaning and numbers never add up. Their entire charade crusade is based on fiction. They’re paid servants following an agenda. Ends always justify the means. Their paychecks depend on it and their bosses fortunes depend on maintaining this dysfunction. Talk about bogus numbers very few in the press even report…
98 Percent Of All Domestically Eradicated Marijuana Is “Ditchweed,” DEA Admits
CN Source: NORML’s Weekly News Bulletin — September 7, 2006
Washington, DC: More than 98 percent of all of the marijuana plants seized by law enforcement in the United States is feral hemp not cultivated cannabis, according to newly released data by the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program and the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics.
They’re saving the kids from burlap!
hmmm… and this little quote:
Remove the word victimless from that sentence and they’re telling the truth:
Now that’s word.
I mean really, it’s so simple… you plant a seed. Crime? nope… you grow the plant… Crime? nope… you harvest, hang and cure the plant… Crime? nope… you use that plant for… whatever it is that people use cannabis for. Nowhere along that chain of events was any crime committed, no assaults, no theft…
So WHERE is the crime? Hm? The crime is the law, the Prohibition. Simple. Basic. word…
Old Grampa Semu used to say that when native folk figured out that the white folk were pretty much always lying they would just turn the words around 180º to find the truth.
The mathematically inept prohibitionists have a method to their madness.
For instance, I’ve noticed that police monetary valuations of drug hauls are usually ten times the actual value of the drugs. I think this is because it’s easy to multiply by 10. Multiplication by 7 is far more difficult for prohibitionists.
Other prohibitionist misstatements or bad arithmetic aren’t necessarily that. That’s because their ‘mistakes’ are always made in ways that favor the prohibitionists.
If the bad arithmetic were really the product of honest, random mistakes, or even ignorance, then there should be as many under-evaluations of drug monetary values as there are over-evaluations. That doesn’t happen.
Prohibitionists never undervalue their drug haul—ever. All drug prohibitionist valuations of illicit drugs are an exercise in drug propaganda.
They managed to shrink $40 billion dollars(a conservative estimate) given by the ONDCP and the FBI as the amount of profits from marijuana for the cartels last spring in a congressional hearing too less than $2 billion while not driving the prices up or having any shortage of weed from doing it…..
That took real math.
It’s funny how, in a sense, both parties are sort of right regarding the question of whether marijuana is a victimless crime.
Thing is:
– marijuana in a legal market is absolutely a victimless crime
– marijuana burdened with prohibition is MADE INTO a not-so-victimless crime
They should be asked why they insist on MAKING crime like that. Those are criminogenic laws.
Liars need to meet lawyers…in court.
If the prohibs could just be corralled into a situation where their lies would have legal consequences, they’d stop lying and clam up in a heartbeat. They couldn’t say anything without risking perjury.
Just think: A prohib is standing before a judge, and is told to swear on a stack of Bibles that s/he will tell the truth about cannabis…and immediately has to plead the Fifth. Doesn’t look good, especially on TV.
Right you are Nemo, the problem is that Judges are part of the prohibition machinery.
The herald just used this article for a stinky editorial:
US MA: Editorial: Safety Goes Up in Smoke
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n940/a05.html?397
I sent them an LTE…
Grandpa Semu was a wise old man. Indeed, pathological liars are some of the most trustworthy people on the planet. It’s those that mix their lies with truth that are dangerous. I learned that back in 1984 when I first met a truly dedicated pathological liar. I did a lot of business with that guy, and he never once failed to tell a bald faced lie. Annoying yes, but I knew I could count on him to lie, so I compensated, no problems after doing that. Frankly I don’t think I’ve ever met a person as trustworthy as that guy. He absolutely never told the truth. The poor guys wife got wasted by an impaired driver and he said ‘no big deal I never really liked her anyway.’ Then he crawled into a dark hole with a bottle of booze and drank himself into a stupor. I mean he stayed there and that’s where he was the last time I saw him. Rat bastard still owes me $170. I swear I couldn’t make something like that up.
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Servetus, the cops penchant for overvaluing has turned around to bite them in a couple of cases in California where the cops were held liable for destroying plants protected by Prop 215. It wasn’t that hard for the plaintiffs to use the cops own fuzzy math to demand reimbursement in full. There were a couple of Colorado cases. The people who wrote Colorado’s Amendment 20 required the cops to maintain possible medical plants in case they needed to be returned and the cops just aren’t very good at keeping cannabis plants alive. You’d think they’d have the sense to hire a hippie, but no, that idea has never crossed their feeble minds.
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Jesper, there are not any non-consensual participants in any cannabis transaction. Not a single one whether the transaction is legal or illegal. The Know Nothings already twist and bend the truth until it’s totally unrecognizable, we don’t need to help them do it.
But thanks, I always appreciate learning new words and it isn’t often someone gives me a new one anymore. Criminogenic, same construction as photogenic. Fascinating.
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kaptinemo you’ve given me a flashback to the OJ Simpson trial when a licensed private investigator was trying to get Judge Ito to accept whatever claptrap he was trying to perpetrate on the court. Judge Ito said fine, we’ll just swear you in and take your word for it. He made the guy take the oath and said, now what was that you were saying? Without missing a beat or acting as if anything was amiss the private dick promptly changed his story 180 degrees. I don’t recall the substance or if he was lying for or against Mr. Simpson, just that the guy didn’t give a hint that he’d just been caught in a bald faced lie. But it sure was a powerful example of how significant sworn testimony can be.
It doesn’t seem to be on Youtube, darn shame that the OJ trial was before the Internet really started rocking. I was in a really bad automobile collision like 2 days before opening statements and got to watch it from beginning to end. I’m likely one of the few people in the country that believes the jury returned the correct verdict based on the evidence that they were allowed to hear. I knew it was over the moment the gloves didn’t fit. That was a stunningly stupid move on the part of the prosecution. There was no reason whatever to make him try on those gloves except for grandstanding by that idiot Darden. There was no jury nullification in that case, there was just a pair of incompetent prosecutors and a judge suffering from his own vanity. The prosecution’s case could have been presented in less than 5 sessions and it would have been a slam dunk conviction. I really thought it sucked that people blamed those poor jurors who were tortured for weeks on end because the idiot prosecutors turned a simple open and shut case into a friggin’ whodunit.
A number of years later I left a pair of my leather gloves outside all winter and got a chuckle when I found them the following Spring and tried to put them on only to find they no longer fit my hands. I got to personally experience the shock OJ must have felt when his gloves no longer fit. Really, you could see it in his eyes that he was as shocked as anyone, perhaps even moreso since he knew for a fact that they were his gloves. It’s interesting to me how good it feels that he’s in prison today even though it’s for another crime. Seriously, Chris Darden was a buffoon and Marcia wasn’t much better. They handed him his acquittal and then both got 7 figure book deals. Go figure that one out.
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Little late.
Seeing how hobbits are a figment of the imagination, one thousand joints is just a fallacy.
I’d like to see how they do that- distributing less than 3/100 of a gram of vegetable matter across the length of a cigarette paper.