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A whopping 72% of California voters support reducing the penalty for possession of a small amount of illegal drugs for personal use from a felony to a misdemeanor
A brand new poll this week finds that a whopping 72% of California voters support reducing the penalty for possession of a small amount of illegal drugs for personal use from a felony to a misdemeanor, including a solid majority who support this reform strongly. The March 21-24 survey of 800 California general election voters was conducted by Lake Research Partners and commissioned by the Drug Policy Alliance, the ACLU of Northern California and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Poll results and analysis are available online.
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An Ontario Superior Court judge has ruled that the federal medical marijuana program is unconstitutional, giving the government three months to fix the problem before pot is effectively legalized.
In an April 11 ruling, Justice Donald Taliano found that doctors across the country have “massively boycotted” the medical marijuana program and largely refuse to sign off on forms giving sick people access to necessary medication.
As a result, legitimately sick people cannot access medical marijuana through appropriate means and must resort to illegal actions.
Doctors’ “overwhelming refusal to participate in the medicinal marijuana program completely undermines the effectiveness of the program,” the judge wrote in his ruling.
“The effect of this blind delegation is that seriously ill people who need marijuana to treat their symptoms are branded criminals simply because they are unable to overcome the barriers to legal access put in place by the legislative scheme.”
Taliano declared the program to be invalid, as well as the criminal laws prohibiting possession and production of cannabis. He suspended his ruling for three months, giving Ottawa until mid-July to fix the program or face the prospect of effectively legalizing possession and production of cannabis.
Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v11/n241/a08.html
Pubdate: Wed, 13 Apr 2011
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2011 The Toronto Star
Contact: [email protected]
Website: http://www.thestar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/456
Author: Jennifer Yang
Referenced: The Decision http://mapinc.org/url/Q7Itqn7O
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis – Canada) -
As many of you know, Marc Emery has been jailed in the United States for the last year serving out a five year sentence for distributing millions of cannabis seeds in an effort to raise money to support cannabis law reform.
For the last several months he has been in Folkstown, GA, at the D Ray James correctional facility. His jail blogs are at http://www.cannabisculture.com/ and further information is available at http://www.freemarc.ca/.
Marc is now being transferred to another facility, currently unknown. He continues to await a decision from the United States on his request to transfer back to Canada to serve out his sentence at home.
We are seeking support for his request to serve his sentence in Canada. He meets all the relevant treaty criteria and suggests that US taxpayers need not be burdened with the cost of his incarceration, particularly when he never physically entered the US while engaging in the admittedly criminal conduct.
If you are able to assist with building support from US officials, either at the state or federal level, please either contact me ([email protected]) or his wife Jodie ([email protected]). Information on how to contact the DOJ representative with conduct of his file is at the www.freemarc.ca website. Please note
that a decision could come at any time, so we are racing the clock in some sense.Thank you in advance for your consideration.
Kirk Tousaw,
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Drug Courts are Not the Answer finds that drug courts are an ineffective and inappropriate response to drug law violations. Many, all the way up to the Obama administration, consider the continued proliferation of drug courts to be a viable solution to the problem of mass arrests and incarceration of people who use drugs. Yet this report finds that drug courts do not reduce incarceration, do not improve public safety, and do not save money when compared to the wholly punitive model they seek to replace. The report calls for reducing the role of the criminal justice system in responding to drug use by expanding demonstrated health approaches, including harm reduction and drug treatment, and by working toward the removal of criminal penalties for drug use.
Drug Courts Are Not the Answer: Toward a Health-Centered Approach to Drug Use. Drug Policy Alliance; March 2011.
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Project by Connie Littlefield
Conceptafilm is making a feature length documentary called “Better Living Through Chemistry.” This film will tell the story of underground psychedelic chemistry: the people who made the drugs; their adventures evading the law; and society’s mixed emotions about the experiences they produced.
Beginning with the prohibition against LSD in 1966 and lasting until Sand’s final capture in 1996, a large amount of the underground LSD available in North America was made by
Nicholas Sand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Sand and Tim Scully: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Scully , initially in partnership with Owsley Stanley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley .
This film tells the story of ‘Orange Sunshine,’ ‘White Lightening,’ ‘Purple Monterey’ and other incarnations of LSD. Sand & Scully made the finest, purest LSD ever created, & evaded the law for a really long time.
We are currently raising development money for what will be a feature-length documentary. With the funds we raise through Kickstarter, we will shoot & edit a short demo, and write a treatment for the film. A budget and marketing plan will complete the development package. With these tools, we will have no trouble finding completion financing.
All donations will result in eternal gratitude & enhanced karma. Patrons who donate more than $250 will receive a DVD copy of the feature film signed by the filmmaker and a ‘thanks to’ on the website. As well, donors of over $1000 will receive a screen credit in the film. Silent blessings and smiles also appreciated.
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By Ernest Drucker
Bill S-10 currently being considered by the House of Commons calls for the introduction of mandatory sentences as deterrents to organized crime and large scale drug dealing in Canada. There are serious doubts about the value of this strategy , and many of the country’s health, research, and academic leaders have objected , aware of the many hazards of this approach . But there is also a body of evidence from the US that can inform Canada’s decision on S -10 and help avoid the disastrous mistake that mandatory drug sentencing has been for the US – in effect launching a 35 year epidemic of mass incarceration and collateral harms to million of Americans.
During the first 20 years of mandatory drug sentencing I ran a large drug treatment program in the Bronx. Under our Rockefeller drug laws ( the model for mandatory drug sentencing laws in the US ) I watched New York State’s prison system grow from 12,000 to 73,000 – as drug offenders rose from 10% to over 40% of the prison population. Since their passage in 1973 over 150,000 drug users were sentenced to prison under these laws. After release most returned to drugs and related crime – with 1/3 back behind bars in 12 months and 2/3 by 3 years after release. Under such laws the US prison population exploded, reaching 2.5 million by 2009 – the highest incarceration rate in US history and in the world today – six times Canada’s imprisonment rate. Today, as a direct result of mandatory drug sentencing , there are more drug offenders in US prisons (over 600,000) than in all of the prisons of the EU for all offenses. Is this an experiment that Canada really wants to repeat?
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By Sandy Goodman
There’s a powerful new piece of evidence that, the way it is being fought, the war on drugs on the Mexican-American border is a lost cause. It comes in a report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations, a highly-respected foreign policy think tank, that recommends that, as an experiment, the federal government allow states “to legalize the production, sale, taxation and consumption of marijuana.” The report says authorities should redirect scarce law enforcement resources to stopping the importation of more dangerous drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine.
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In an interview with KCTS in Seattle, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske (a former Seattle police chief) disputed facts in an op-ed, by LEAP speaker Norm Stamper (also a former Seattle chief) on how the Obama administration continues to emphasize funding for punishment over funding for treatment despite having lots of flowery rhetoric about how they’re treating drug abuse as a health problem
