Devastating warfare, widespread poverty and epidemic disease are major problems facing the world. An inanimate, nontoxic plant responsible for fewer deaths than George W. Bush is not one of them.
Marijuana takes the rap for a lot of things. According to the government, pot smokers are likely to shoot their friends and rape comely young maidens--if they ever get their lazy asses off the couch. Well, I hate to break it to you, friends, but you shouldn't necessarily believe everything the government says.
(Shocking, I know. I'll give you a second to catch your breath.)
The history of marijuana prohibition is a sickening chronology of lies. Racism and xenophobia drove the crusade to ban pot in the 1930s. The American Medical Association opposed prohibition, But Congress was more swayed by narcotics czar Henry Anslinger's lurid tales of stoned black jazz musicians and Latinos slacking on their menial jobs and endangering the virtue of white women.
Propaganda flicks like "Reefer Madness," now stocked in the comedy aisle, played on Joe Average's fear of the unknown. Today, we get our "Reefer Madness" 30 hilarious seconds at a time, courtesy of your tax dollars and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
Authoritarians and pop culture alike stereotype marijuana users as sedentary buffoons content to sit around pondering the dubious glories of Doritos and Phish. Tell that to the late Carl Sagan, brilliant physicist, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pot smoker. Marijuana residue was found on a pipe believed to be owned by William Shakespeare. Even notorious stiff Al Gore reportedly sparked up a few in his younger days.
Retired NFL star Mark Stepnoski, one of the league's top linemen for the Dallas Cowboys in the 1990s, came out of the smoky closet and admitted he used marijuana during his career and advocates its legalization. Stepnoski, now president of the Texas chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said it was non-addictive and a better painkiller than most prescription drugs.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, frontrunner in the race for California asylum keeper, casually confessed to smoking pot during his weightlifting days in a now-infamous decades-old interview. If Mr. Universe can find time to light a spliff between sets, the rest of us can probably manage too.
But you don't need any of these examples. All you have to do is look anywhere on this campus to find responsible, successful people who get high without falling into academic disrepair or moral turpitude.
I generally hate to praise Europe and Canada, now tiny specks in the distance on the road to serfdom, but when it comes to pot, they've got us beat hands down. You can buy grass openly in Amsterdam cafes, and guess what? Their economy hasn't collapsed, crime hasn't skyrocketed and no one thinks Pauly Shore is a genius.
Our neighbors to the north, butt of so many jokes, are now laughing at us as John Ashcroft fumes over their steps towards decriminalization. It's hard to blame him. Sanity in such close proximity to, well, Ashcroftism, is an unflattering comparison.
It is impossible to overdose on marijuana, something that cannot be said for innocuous household medicines like aspirin. Nor does the marjuana high induce destructive, antisocial behavior. But don't take my word for it.
"Neither the marijuana user nor the drug itself can be said to consitute a threat to public safety."
Who said that? Jerry Garcia? Woody Harrelson? No, those kind words come from a 1972 report comissioned by that bleeding-heart hippie, Richard Nixon.
That commission recommended decriminalization. My recommendation goes a step further: tolerance. Though my fingers recoil from typing the word so often used as the battering ram of the diversity-crazed left, tolerance is exactly what pot smokers deserve.
Until someone blows smoke in your face or crashes their car through your front door, you really shouldn't care what they do in the privacy of their own home.
Marijuana users aren't bothering you or me. Let's return the favor.
Don't Step On The Grass by David Mackey
Source/Published: Auburn Plainsman, The (AL Edu) October 03, 2003
Contact: letters@theplainsman.com * Website
Related Articles
Legalize It!
High on Legalization
Legalizing Marijuana To Benefit Society By Stephen Simac
Source: Coastal Post October 03, 2003
Californians and citizens of eight other states in the federal union have made a criminal distinction between people who smoke cannabis as a physician recommended remedy and recreational users who just enjoy the effects of cannabis. The federal government and its drug enforcement agencies claim there is no distinction in federal law. The DEA and the Justice Department are just as willing to arrest and jail the sick and dying for using pot to alleviate their pain and suffering as they are healthy tokers who only use it to relax and have fun. Growers and sellers of the herb no matter what their state of health are lumped in with murderers and rapists. They often are punished more harshly with longer prison terms.
Smoke 300 Joints A Month Or Else
There is a small group of individuals however who have been granted access to federally grown medical marijuana. They can legally travel with and publicly smoke US government issued cannabis. The feds would prefer to keep these people hidden away in their sick rooms until they die an unpublicized death. They are members of the Food and Drug Association's Compassionate Investigational New Drug program.
Read More...cannabisnews...17464.shtml
Related Articles & Web Sites
Chronic Cannabis Use in PDF
George McMahon's Home Page
Lecture on Legalizing Medical Marijuana
Pot Smoking Changed Pain-Ridden Author's Life
A Cannabis Odyssey - Lester Grinspoon M.D.
Pro-Pot Ads To Be Posted at 10 Metro Stations By Denise Barnes
Source: Washington Times October 02, 2003
Metro subway stations will soon display a batch of ads promoting the legalization and taxation of marijuana as a means to improve sex, save taxes and protect children. The poster ads, sponsored by the Massachusetts-based nonprofit group Change the Climate Inc., had been displayed on Metro buses, billboards and bus shelters during the past month. They are expected to be posted at 10 subway stations as early as Monday, said Metro spokesman Steven Taubenkibel. Read More...cannabisnews...17456.shtml
Change the Climate * Ad
PM Inflames Marijuana Opponents
PM Jokes He'll Try Pot Once It's Decriminalized By CTV.ca News Staff
Source: CTV October 03, 2003
Prime Minister Jean Chretien is considering trying some new things once he retires -- including a good spliff. At least, that's what he joked about in an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press. In the interview, published in Friday's paper, the PM says decriminalizing marijuana is just putting the laws in synch with the times. "It is still illegal, but do you think Canadians want their kids, 18 years-old or 17, who smoke marijuana once and get caught by the police, to have a criminal record for the rest of their life?" he told the paper when asked how he feels about the bill.
Read More...cannabisnews...17463.shtml
Chretien Jokes About Trying Pot
Being There: Pot Tourism
Committee Asks for S.F. Pot Garden Study
Americans for Safe Access to medical cannabis
Marijuana May Benefit Epileptics, Scientists Say
NORML: Cannabinoids Modulate Epileptic Seizures, Study Says
Marijuana-Like Chemicals May Treat Epilepsy
Sam Adams on October 02, 2003 (history)
"An article accompanying the Planck piece added that the use of cannabis in epilepsy can be traced at least as far back to a 15th century treatise on hashish by an Arab writer named Ibn al-Badri."
And Justice for All?
Communities of Color & The War on Drugs
Restore-Digest
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003
From: "D. Paul Stanford" stanford@crrh.org
New Zealand OPED: NANDOR TANCZOS:
LEGALISE CANNABIS TO HELP DEAL WITH P (meth)
Related links: The P epidemic
How speed was popularized...(excerpted)
The antispeed campaign launched by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 1962 and 1963, has already been cited. It was the publicity accompanying this campaign that alerted a whole generation of young people to the perils (and pleasures) of speed. As in other cases described earlier and to be described in subsequent chapters, the peril became the lure.
Anti Drug Ads Can Lead To Increased Drug Useage
'Friendly fire' pilots: Air Force pushes 'go pills'
Air Force defends 'go pills'
Air Force 'Go-Pill' Deemed Hazardous
004 HI: Editorial: End Federal Hysteria About Growing Hemp * archive * Bookmark (Hemp)
Rep. Cynthia Thielen (R, Kaneohe-Kailua) initiated the 1999 legislation authorizing the Wahiawa project. The DEA, which lists hemp as a Schedule 1 drug, granted a string of brief temporary permits for its operation, beginning in December 1999. "The DEA's action on the temporary permits put the project into a nebulous status and it raised questions," resulting in the evaporation of funding from the private sector, Thielen says. Retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffery, the White House drug czar in the Clinton administration, mistakenly assumed that ingested foods containing hemp would set off workplace drug-testing equipment and that hemp was a "stalking horse" for legalization of marijuana. The Bush administration has been even more fearful of hemp as a cousin of marijuana.
Ganja/hemp lnfolinx
Limbaugh Linked To Painkillers
Limbaugh In The Shadow Of His Own Words
Rush Limbaugh in Pill Probe
Limbaugh Said Target of Drug Probe
Flush Rush
EU Scientists Legalize Controversial Herbicide Paraquat
Poison Pot (Excerpted)
As the April 17, 1978, issue of Inquiry magazine pointed out, some of this nastiness no doubt came home to roost. It was estimated at the time that more than 50 percent of cannabis in the rolled paper and bongs of America's estimated 15 million marijuana smokers came from Mexico. In an all-new sort of Montezuma's revenge, the principal poison used in Mexico's herbicidal cocktail was paraquat, which, when ingested, causes irreversible lung damage. In 1971, President Nixon quit poisoning Vietnamese peasants. Still, even after admitting the dangers again in 1978, the Carter administration refused to stop the spraying in Mexico a position more than a little ironic and hypocritical from, as Inquiry observed, "a President who has called for the 'decriminalization' of marijuana, on the grounds that it is a relatively harmless substance. " Apparently, Carter's convictions didn't stay too warm under that cardigan. Likewise today, as part of U.S. antidrug efforts in South America, natives along the Colombia-Ecuador border are suffering the ill effects of mass-defoliant spraying. According to one study reported by Kintto Lucas for the July 5 Inter Press Service, 6,000-some residents along the border showed symptoms of poisoning. Lucas reported last year in October that at least seven deaths had been attributed directly to the herbicide fumigant on the Colombian side alone. It's easy to forget Carter's poisoning; it was a while ago. It's easier still to overlook Plan Colombia's poisoning; it's far away...
AGENT ORANGE ALL OVER AGAIN
James Ridgeway, Village Voice (excerpted)
The EPA is sitting on a report charging that U.S. spraying of potent herbicides in Colombia is causing serious environmental and health consequences while doing nothing to curb drug production.
Is the Drug Czar Afraid To Debate?
Marijuana takes the rap for a lot of things. According to the government, pot smokers are likely to shoot their friends and rape comely young maidens--if they ever get their lazy asses off the couch. Well, I hate to break it to you, friends, but you shouldn't necessarily believe everything the government says.
(Shocking, I know. I'll give you a second to catch your breath.)
The history of marijuana prohibition is a sickening chronology of lies. Racism and xenophobia drove the crusade to ban pot in the 1930s. The American Medical Association opposed prohibition, But Congress was more swayed by narcotics czar Henry Anslinger's lurid tales of stoned black jazz musicians and Latinos slacking on their menial jobs and endangering the virtue of white women.
Propaganda flicks like "Reefer Madness," now stocked in the comedy aisle, played on Joe Average's fear of the unknown. Today, we get our "Reefer Madness" 30 hilarious seconds at a time, courtesy of your tax dollars and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
Authoritarians and pop culture alike stereotype marijuana users as sedentary buffoons content to sit around pondering the dubious glories of Doritos and Phish. Tell that to the late Carl Sagan, brilliant physicist, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pot smoker. Marijuana residue was found on a pipe believed to be owned by William Shakespeare. Even notorious stiff Al Gore reportedly sparked up a few in his younger days.
Retired NFL star Mark Stepnoski, one of the league's top linemen for the Dallas Cowboys in the 1990s, came out of the smoky closet and admitted he used marijuana during his career and advocates its legalization. Stepnoski, now president of the Texas chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said it was non-addictive and a better painkiller than most prescription drugs.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, frontrunner in the race for California asylum keeper, casually confessed to smoking pot during his weightlifting days in a now-infamous decades-old interview. If Mr. Universe can find time to light a spliff between sets, the rest of us can probably manage too.
But you don't need any of these examples. All you have to do is look anywhere on this campus to find responsible, successful people who get high without falling into academic disrepair or moral turpitude.
I generally hate to praise Europe and Canada, now tiny specks in the distance on the road to serfdom, but when it comes to pot, they've got us beat hands down. You can buy grass openly in Amsterdam cafes, and guess what? Their economy hasn't collapsed, crime hasn't skyrocketed and no one thinks Pauly Shore is a genius.
Our neighbors to the north, butt of so many jokes, are now laughing at us as John Ashcroft fumes over their steps towards decriminalization. It's hard to blame him. Sanity in such close proximity to, well, Ashcroftism, is an unflattering comparison.
It is impossible to overdose on marijuana, something that cannot be said for innocuous household medicines like aspirin. Nor does the marjuana high induce destructive, antisocial behavior. But don't take my word for it.
"Neither the marijuana user nor the drug itself can be said to consitute a threat to public safety."
Who said that? Jerry Garcia? Woody Harrelson? No, those kind words come from a 1972 report comissioned by that bleeding-heart hippie, Richard Nixon.
That commission recommended decriminalization. My recommendation goes a step further: tolerance. Though my fingers recoil from typing the word so often used as the battering ram of the diversity-crazed left, tolerance is exactly what pot smokers deserve.
Until someone blows smoke in your face or crashes their car through your front door, you really shouldn't care what they do in the privacy of their own home.
Marijuana users aren't bothering you or me. Let's return the favor.
Don't Step On The Grass by David Mackey
Source/Published: Auburn Plainsman, The (AL Edu) October 03, 2003
Contact: letters@theplainsman.com * Website
Related Articles
Legalize It!
High on Legalization
Legalizing Marijuana To Benefit Society By Stephen Simac
Source: Coastal Post October 03, 2003
Californians and citizens of eight other states in the federal union have made a criminal distinction between people who smoke cannabis as a physician recommended remedy and recreational users who just enjoy the effects of cannabis. The federal government and its drug enforcement agencies claim there is no distinction in federal law. The DEA and the Justice Department are just as willing to arrest and jail the sick and dying for using pot to alleviate their pain and suffering as they are healthy tokers who only use it to relax and have fun. Growers and sellers of the herb no matter what their state of health are lumped in with murderers and rapists. They often are punished more harshly with longer prison terms.
Smoke 300 Joints A Month Or Else
There is a small group of individuals however who have been granted access to federally grown medical marijuana. They can legally travel with and publicly smoke US government issued cannabis. The feds would prefer to keep these people hidden away in their sick rooms until they die an unpublicized death. They are members of the Food and Drug Association's Compassionate Investigational New Drug program.
Read More...cannabisnews...17464.shtml
Related Articles & Web Sites
Chronic Cannabis Use in PDF
George McMahon's Home Page
Lecture on Legalizing Medical Marijuana
Pot Smoking Changed Pain-Ridden Author's Life
A Cannabis Odyssey - Lester Grinspoon M.D.
Pro-Pot Ads To Be Posted at 10 Metro Stations By Denise Barnes
Source: Washington Times October 02, 2003
Metro subway stations will soon display a batch of ads promoting the legalization and taxation of marijuana as a means to improve sex, save taxes and protect children. The poster ads, sponsored by the Massachusetts-based nonprofit group Change the Climate Inc., had been displayed on Metro buses, billboards and bus shelters during the past month. They are expected to be posted at 10 subway stations as early as Monday, said Metro spokesman Steven Taubenkibel. Read More...cannabisnews...17456.shtml
Change the Climate * Ad
PM Inflames Marijuana Opponents
PM Jokes He'll Try Pot Once It's Decriminalized By CTV.ca News Staff
Source: CTV October 03, 2003
Prime Minister Jean Chretien is considering trying some new things once he retires -- including a good spliff. At least, that's what he joked about in an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press. In the interview, published in Friday's paper, the PM says decriminalizing marijuana is just putting the laws in synch with the times. "It is still illegal, but do you think Canadians want their kids, 18 years-old or 17, who smoke marijuana once and get caught by the police, to have a criminal record for the rest of their life?" he told the paper when asked how he feels about the bill.
Read More...cannabisnews...17463.shtml
Chretien Jokes About Trying Pot
Being There: Pot Tourism
Committee Asks for S.F. Pot Garden Study
Americans for Safe Access to medical cannabis
Marijuana May Benefit Epileptics, Scientists Say
NORML: Cannabinoids Modulate Epileptic Seizures, Study Says
Marijuana-Like Chemicals May Treat Epilepsy
Sam Adams on October 02, 2003 (history)
"An article accompanying the Planck piece added that the use of cannabis in epilepsy can be traced at least as far back to a 15th century treatise on hashish by an Arab writer named Ibn al-Badri."
And Justice for All?
Communities of Color & The War on Drugs
Restore-Digest
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003
From: "D. Paul Stanford" stanford@crrh.org
New Zealand OPED: NANDOR TANCZOS:
LEGALISE CANNABIS TO HELP DEAL WITH P (meth)
Related links: The P epidemic
How speed was popularized...(excerpted)
The antispeed campaign launched by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 1962 and 1963, has already been cited. It was the publicity accompanying this campaign that alerted a whole generation of young people to the perils (and pleasures) of speed. As in other cases described earlier and to be described in subsequent chapters, the peril became the lure.
Anti Drug Ads Can Lead To Increased Drug Useage
'Friendly fire' pilots: Air Force pushes 'go pills'
Air Force defends 'go pills'
Air Force 'Go-Pill' Deemed Hazardous
004 HI: Editorial: End Federal Hysteria About Growing Hemp * archive * Bookmark (Hemp)
Rep. Cynthia Thielen (R, Kaneohe-Kailua) initiated the 1999 legislation authorizing the Wahiawa project. The DEA, which lists hemp as a Schedule 1 drug, granted a string of brief temporary permits for its operation, beginning in December 1999. "The DEA's action on the temporary permits put the project into a nebulous status and it raised questions," resulting in the evaporation of funding from the private sector, Thielen says. Retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffery, the White House drug czar in the Clinton administration, mistakenly assumed that ingested foods containing hemp would set off workplace drug-testing equipment and that hemp was a "stalking horse" for legalization of marijuana. The Bush administration has been even more fearful of hemp as a cousin of marijuana.
Ganja/hemp lnfolinx
Limbaugh Linked To Painkillers
Limbaugh In The Shadow Of His Own Words
Rush Limbaugh in Pill Probe
Limbaugh Said Target of Drug Probe
Flush Rush
EU Scientists Legalize Controversial Herbicide Paraquat Poison Pot (Excerpted)
As the April 17, 1978, issue of Inquiry magazine pointed out, some of this nastiness no doubt came home to roost. It was estimated at the time that more than 50 percent of cannabis in the rolled paper and bongs of America's estimated 15 million marijuana smokers came from Mexico. In an all-new sort of Montezuma's revenge, the principal poison used in Mexico's herbicidal cocktail was paraquat, which, when ingested, causes irreversible lung damage. In 1971, President Nixon quit poisoning Vietnamese peasants. Still, even after admitting the dangers again in 1978, the Carter administration refused to stop the spraying in Mexico a position more than a little ironic and hypocritical from, as Inquiry observed, "a President who has called for the 'decriminalization' of marijuana, on the grounds that it is a relatively harmless substance. " Apparently, Carter's convictions didn't stay too warm under that cardigan. Likewise today, as part of U.S. antidrug efforts in South America, natives along the Colombia-Ecuador border are suffering the ill effects of mass-defoliant spraying. According to one study reported by Kintto Lucas for the July 5 Inter Press Service, 6,000-some residents along the border showed symptoms of poisoning. Lucas reported last year in October that at least seven deaths had been attributed directly to the herbicide fumigant on the Colombian side alone. It's easy to forget Carter's poisoning; it was a while ago. It's easier still to overlook Plan Colombia's poisoning; it's far away...
AGENT ORANGE ALL OVER AGAIN
James Ridgeway, Village Voice (excerpted)
The EPA is sitting on a report charging that U.S. spraying of potent herbicides in Colombia is causing serious environmental and health consequences while doing nothing to curb drug production.
Is the Drug Czar Afraid To Debate?
