It’s finals week and the end of an extremely busy semester.
OK, this music video isn’t for everyone, and it certainly is not going to do much to convert those who are opposed to legalization and the cannabis culture, but I think it’s very well done on a number of levels.
We don’t fear no plant.
Getting Relief in Wartime: Opioids, Pain Management, and the War on Drugs by Siobhan Reynolds
Siobhan does a good job of showing the flaws in the government’s latest push to fight prescription drug abuse.
Anti-Drug War Movement Emerges in Mexico
After four years of war that has left nearly 40,000 people dead, countless more disappeared, and soldiers on the streets of every state in the country, many Mexicans are finally “fed up” with President Felipe Calderón’s drug policy. This weekend, Mexicans in at least 25 of the country’s 31 states will protest to “stop the war, for a just and peaceful Mexico.” Protests are also planned in solidarity in at least twelve cities in Europe, Canada, the United States, and Brazil.
Mexico: Netizens Put Death of Osama Bin Laden in Context
I found this by blogger Richard Grabman appropriate:
The government here, at the behest of the United States, targeted – and killed – any number of supposedly indispensable men in generic evil-doing business. While there’s a tendency to give these groups inappropriate names like “cartels,†or ridiculously inflated bureaucratic terms like “Transnational Criminal Organizations,†the Mexican fight has been against a known – and not all that complicated – an enemy: gangsters.
Every time some “drug king-pin†has been blown away we’re told it’s an incredible victory for the government and the “war on drugsâ€â€¦ and the result is more violence, more mayhem. […]
The U.S. has supposedly been waging not a war on Al Qaida, but a “war on terror†– the abstract noun that may have on[c]e referred specifically to Bin Laden’s organization, and by extension similar armed ideological movements, but has proven elastic enough to cover nearly any organized violent resistance to the status quo.[…]
What frankly scares quite a number of people here is not that the criminals might “win,†but that the state will lose legitimacy. Or, that in its infinite expansion of the “war on terror,†the United States will drop the pretense of “cooperation†and simply intervene directly in this country. Which, of course, would lead to resistance, which would be labeled “terrorism,†which would require more intervention….
Drug Policy that promotes security: The paradox of de-securitisation – a new paper by Transform Drug Policy Foundation.
Most interesting non-story: Marijuana crops planted outside Osama Bin Laden’s compound; farmers growing ganja near terror lair
You can see the reporters trying to find a way to make a story out of this, but the simple fact is that marijuana is popular everywhere and grows just about anywhere. That’s probably the only story there.
Yet another story of medical marijuana helping save lives, with an added hint of heroic dad taking matters into his own hands:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1383240/Boy-brain-cancer-cured-secretly-fed-medical-marijuana-father.html
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Cash was discussed in a conversation here when he was living in Montana as he was the youngest Montanan to be on the Montana registry. Apparently his parents moved to Washington, perhaps because they were scared that the Montana
MilitiaLegislature would repeal the Montana medicinal cannabis law. Good decision Mr. and Mrs. Hyde.Transform’s done it again. A shining example of sanity…to be quickly clouded over with the usual, stale old bromides uttered by political Neanderthals. But they’ve laid the blame squarely at the feet of those said Neanderthals, with the ubiquitous Upton Sinclair quote about understanding only what your paycheck allows you to.
As Transform and many other groups and individuals pointed out, as things get worse economically, those providing that paycheck via taxes are going to want more efficiency for their hard-earned (and, in the US, increasingly resented) taxed income.
And that will force the inevitable debate about drug prohibition that has been deliberately avoided for so long, courtesy of the ‘securitization’ policies engaged in by the ‘stakeholders’ of prohibition, those who’ve benefited monetarily and politically from prosecuting it.
The day is coming when the volume of their (taxpayer fueled) ‘noise machine’ will in turn be drowned out by the demands of the public to better use increasingly shrinking tax resources. As always, money is king…
Now they’re getting serious:
Us moves to stifle Mexican drug traffic
That’s a good one malcolm.
1969 in the mormon newspaper Deseret News.
I still think they’re wasting their time down there though; here’s what we really need to ban:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13294022
It worries me that financial institutions are now dropping out from giving patients credit for their medicine.
Weed? In the Hindu Kush?
Who would have thunk it?
So with 40,000 of their fellow citizens being killed by the war on drugs, the people of Mexico are now forced to protest against their own government to stop the madness. When you really think about it, it just makes no sense. Why wouldn’t a government stop its actions when it is causing the death of tens of thousands of its own people? Why does it need citizens to protest against it?
Corruption leading to (and resulting from) the abuse of power.
aaah, the pharmacorporatization of cannabis… GW Pharmaceuticals – Sativex
And just ’cause it’s Friday I havta share my favorite headline of the day… saw it this morning before heading off to work and damn near busted a gut: Osama Found Alive
The Cash Hyde story could become a major Thud. It all depends…
The world’s major religions can thank ganja and mushrooms (and maybe a bit of datura) for their beginnings.
The Incas built Macchu Pichu over 500 years ago, an engineering marvel atop a steep pinnacle, sandwiched between two active fault lines, at the center point of and precisely aligned to the four directions with four of the highest visible mountains and we’re busy making things that last only a few years and poisoning our planet and ourselves in the doing…
ummm… what was the question?