You stopped a sneaky drug war expansion! DPA’s work and phone calls from our supporters got Congress to cancel the vote that was scheduled for a bad drug war bill. Now you can help again by urging the Senate to reexamine our criminal justice system. Call Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and urge him to schedule the National Criminal Justice Commission Act for a floor vote!
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Let the states serve as experimental laboratories.
By Patri Friedman
Since medical marijuana was legalized in California in 1996, use has been widespread. And once the Obama administration reduced the harassment, the number of dispensaries has grown rapidly. Not that pot was ever that hard to get out West, but it is now fair to say that the “medical” qualification is close to irrelevant.
So marijuana is now de facto legal in California, requiring only a couple hundred bucks and a short doctor’s visit to become a qualified purchaser. Perhaps as a result, a ballot initiative to fully legalize marijuana is polling at about even odds in the Golden State, and marijuana initiatives are in the pipeline elsewhere.
Now, any libertarian must raise a cup, pipe, vaporizer (or whatever) to finally seeing a little bit of progress in the demented War On People Who Use Some Kinds Of Drugs. Combined with the resurgence in research on medical uses of psychedelics—which often find positive benefits—it looks like this may be the beginning of a positive shift in America’s drug policy. Slow, partial, and late, but in the right direction.
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The ACLU-WA presented a discussion on the history, current status, and future of marijuana-law reform in Washington and the United States. Local and national panelists included travel writer Rick Steves; Keith Stroup, founder of, and legal counsel to, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws; Washington state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles; Rob Kampia, co-founder and executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project; and Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Moderated by ACLU-WA Drug Policy Director Alison Holcomb.
Seattle Channel Video can be played in Flash Player 9 and up -
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Joe McNamara, a retired chief of police in San Jose, CA, and Kansas City, MO, talks about why it’s time to legalize marijuana. Joe is a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), which any civilian can join for free at http://www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com
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Watch SSDP member Daniel Pacheco confront the Drug Czar and deliver 52,000 Just Say Now petition signatures! Have you signed the petition? http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/justsaynow?source=jsn
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On the heels of
yet another study which found that supervised injection sites encourage patrons to seek treatment, the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, an organization funded by the Drug Free America Foundation, whose mission is, among other things, “To advocate no use of illegal drugs and no abuse of legal drugs” and “To oppose legalization of drugs” is complaining to sympathetic media that they are being bullied by harm reduction advocates.Specifically, the DPNOC’s “Director of Research,” Colin Mangham is upset that his reputation is being damaged by a lawsuit filed against him for “publishing” lies and distortions about InSite, Vancouver’s supervised injection facility, and harm reduction in general, in an online “journal” owned by the DFAF.
I am reminded of Ben Stein’s move “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” in which Stein whined that proponents of “intelligent design” and critics of evolution are being discriminated against in colleges, universities and anywhere else empirical evidence and the scientific method are still respected. At least we know we have them on the back foot for a change.
Supervised injection site epitomizes warped philosophy in Downtown Eastside
By Mark Hasiuk, Vancouver Courier September 15, 2010
[snip]
“The best thing you can say about harm reduction advocates is that they are reductionists–they are reducing a complex human problem to a simple thing,” said David Berner, the newly appointed executive director of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, an abstinence-based organization (soon-to-be headquartered in Vancouver) founded by former Conservative MP Randy White. “We need to get money and human energy back into prevention, education and treatment.”
[snip]
But criticizing Insite can come with a price. In the high stakes world of harm reduction, where government grants provide vital lifeblood, reputations are brutally defended. Critics targeted and bullied.
Just ask Colin Mangham.
Last September, the Portland Hotel Society, co-operators of Insite, slapped a defamation and slander lawsuit on Mangham, a 60-year-old research scientist and addictions expert whose 2007 RCMP-funded report published in the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice questioned the findings of Insite researchers. “Statements made about improving public order, saving lives and getting people into detox are misleading and based on data that just isn’t there,” said Mangham, during a recent phone interview from his home in Langley.
[snip]
Where are the transitional fossils? The evidence for common ancestry and decent with modification just isn’t there.
Ten years in, Vancouver’s great harm reduction experiment keeps rolling along, leaving rows of victims in its wake. Addicts get sicker, critics assailed, while an entire neighbourhood rots from the inside out.
Wonder if this is what Philip Owen had in mind?
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Policymakers should consider allowing the licensed sale of cannabis for recreational use, says one of the UK’s leading researchers of the drug.
Professor Roger Pertwee is to make the call in a speech at the British Science Association festival in Birmingham.
He is expected to say radical solutions have to be considered because he believes the current policy of criminalising cannabis is ineffective.
But the government insists decriminalisation would not work.
The dismissal last year of Professor David Nutt as the previous government’s leading drugs adviser showed it was in no mood to consider relaxing the status of cannabis as an illegal class B drug.
It is a view shared by the current government, but Prof Pertwee, an expert on cannabis-like chemicals, is to tell scientists that he, like Professor Nutt, believes it is a policy that is doing more harm than good
“I’m talking about harm minimisation,” he told BBC News.