The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) is uploading video from the 2011 Drug Policy Alliance Conference in Los Angeles. Here is a sample.
Check out the HCLU Youtube channel link below for more.
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Posted by Camron Wiltshire on November 5, 2011
HempVia the Bob Tuskin Radio Show:
After 11 years, the Florida Hemp Fest is back with a new twist.
Dennis “Murli” Watkins, who served four months of jail time for orchestrating a “doobie toss” at the event in 1994, is bringing back what used to be an annual celebration of marijuana and a protest for its legalization. —Gainesville Sun
Murli just so happens to be a supporter of the “truth.” When we were contacted by him to set up a table and to give a talk on various topics such as the Federal Reserve, fluoride, and 9/11 we gladly accepted.
Watkins said this year’s edition will touch on other, even more controversial issues than legalizing pot. “Hemp has been cultivated for thousands of years. Here it is almost 2012, and we’re still fighting this same stupid battle,” he said. “9/11 was an inside job and they’re worried about someone smoking a doobie. They’ve got to get their priorities in order.” Watkins said there will be a “9/11 truth booth” set up at the event, which will be held on the city’s Bo Diddley Community Plaza downtown. —Gainesville Sun
Lets be blunt, no pun intended, The hemp/cannabis movement has always gone hand in hand with the type of information we cover on a daily basis.
While you obviously do not have to get high to “wake up,” I think that it is pretty well documented that the powers that shouldn’t be do not like marijuana for many different reasons, namely the fact that it may inspire thinking outside the box.
http://www.disinfo.com/2011/11/hemp-activists-and-truthers-unite/
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By Jacob Sullum
As Mike Riggs noted this morning, the Obama administration last Friday night finally got around to addressing the “We the People” online petitions urging repeal of marijuana prohibition. First it had to deal with the clamor for excising “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance (a cause that attracted 20,328 signatures) and removing the slogan “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency (12,273). By comparison, the eight petitions recommending some form of marijuana legalization totaled more than 150,000 (possibly overlapping) signatures; the most popular one, “Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol,” by itself attracted more than 74,000. If you bother to read drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s embarrassingly weak response, you can see why the White House buried it in the weekend news graveyard. -
Coalition of BC Law Enforcement, Health and Academic Experts Call for Marijuana Legalization and Regulation to Reduce Gang Violence
New Polls Shows 87% of British Columbians Link Gang Violence to Organized Crime’s Control of Marijuana Trade
October 27, 2011 [Vancouver, Canada] – In the wake of high-profile gang violence related to the illegal marijuana industry in BC, a new coalition of academic, legal and health experts has released the first of a series of reports and polling results aimed at pressuring politicians to legally regulate marijuana sales under a public health framework.
The Angus Reid poll says 87% of BC respondents link gang violence to organized crime’s efforts to control the province’s massive illegal cannabis trade while the report, called Breaking the Silence, clearly demonstrates that cannabis prohibition in BC has been ineffective and caused significant social harms and public safety issues.
“From a scientific and public health perspective we know that making marijuana illegal has not achieved its stated objectives of limiting marijuana supply or rates of use,” said Dr. Evan Wood, a coalition member and Director of the Urban Health Research Initiative at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. “Given that marijuana prohibition has created a massive financial windfall for violent organized crime groups in BC, we must discuss alternatives to today’s failed laws with a focus on how to decrease violence, remove the illicit industry’s profit motive and improve public health and safety.”
The new coalition, Stop the Violence BC, released the report in tandem with results from an Angus Reid poll that overwhelmingly demonstrates that lawmakers lag far behind public opinion on revamping marijuana laws in BC.
Breaking the Silence: Cannabis prohibition, organized crime, and gang violence
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An independent reviewer has dismissed concerns over a study that shows a 35-per-cent decrease in overdose deaths after the opening of Insite, North America’s only supervised injection facility.
Published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet on April 18, 2011, the study, titled Reduction in overdose mortality after the opening of North America’s first medically supervised safer injecting facility: a retrospective population-based study, was the first to assess the impact of supervised injection sites on overdose mortality.
The study was led by Thomas Kerr, an associate professor at UBC and co-director of the Urban Health Research Initiative at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE) and Julio Montaner, director of the BC-CfE and Chair of AIDS Research at UBC.
In a September 2011 letter to John Hepburn, UBC’s Vice President Research & International, a group called Drug Free Australia raised concerns over the interpretation of data in the study. Pursuant to UBC Policy 85 (Scholarly Integrity), Hepburn subsequently appointed Mark Wainberg, professor of medicine and director of the McGill University AIDS Centre, to review the matter.
Wainberg is a past-president of the International AIDS Society, editor-in-chief of the Journal of the International AIDS Society and editor of various other academic journals. He was a recipient of the Canadian Medical Association’s 2009 Medal of Honour and was named a Public Health Hero by the Pan American Health Organization for his work in antiviral treatment of HIV/AIDS.
After reviewing the submission by Drug Free Australia, the Lancet article and the authors’ response, Wainberg concluded:
“In my view, the allegations that have been made by ‘Drug Free Australia’ are without merit and are not based on scientific fact. In contrast, it is my view that the work that has been carried out by the team of Thomas Kerr et al is scientifically well-founded and has contributed to reducing the extent of mortality and morbidity in association with the existence of the safer injection facility. . . . The University of British of British Columbia should be proud of the contributions of its faculty members to the important goal of diminishing deaths due to intravenous drug abuse.”
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Drug Policy Question of the Week – 10-10-11
As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 10-10-11. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3581
Question of the Week: How many people were arrested for marijuana last year?
Every September, the FBI releases its annual “Crime in the United States” report that counts arrests in the United States according to a number of categories, among them drugs.
This report doesn’t make marijuana arrests obvious. Instead, these numbers must be gleaned by computing them.
To do so, one starts by referencing Table 29 of Uniform Crime Report, which lists the estimated number of arrests by category. Note that drug arrests for 2010 equaled 1,638,846. Those for reported categories like disorderly conduct, fraud and burglary equaled about 615,000, 189,000 and 290,000 each.
Then, to compute arrests for marijuana, the separate parent webpage to Table 29 must be referenced. The “Download Arrest Table Excel” link on this page goes to a spreadsheet version of the “Arrests for Drug Abuse Violations Percent Distribution by Region, 2010” table at the bottom of the page. Here you will find percentages for total arrests by substance positioned against these percentages by region.
Marijuana arrests must be computed by multiplying the percentages for possession and for Sale/manufacturing times that aforementioned total number of drug arrests for 2010.
Doing the math, at 6.3% of total drug arrests, there were about 103,000 Americans arrested for selling or manufacturing marijuana in 2010. At 45.8% of total drug arrests, there about 751,000 Americans arrested for merely possessing marijuana in 2010. Together, arrests for both selling and possessing marijuana added to a total of 854,000 arrests in 2010.
Sound complicated? Probably so for numbers of that magnitude.
These facts and others like them can be found in the tables at the bottom of the Marijuana chapter of Drug War Facts at www.drugwarfacts.org.
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Drug Policy Question of the Week – 10-6-11
As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 10-6-11. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3576
Question of the Week: What federal agencies enforce drug laws?
A new table based on a 2009 report from the RAND Corporation can be found in the Drug War Facts Interdiction chapter. This table lists a number of federal agencies that investigate and enforce drug laws. Among these are the United States Department of Defense, the Department of Justice and White House Office of National Drug Control Policy or ONDCP.
Under the Department of Defense, the Defense Information Systems Agency and its Anti-Drug Network engage in information sharing and data mining. The U.S. Northern Command oversees the continental United States and Alaska. The Joint Task Force North under the Northern Command stops transnational threats like drug smuggling. The U.S. Southern Command operates counterdrug operations in Central and South America. Its Joint Interagency Task Force South prevents illegal trafficking within the Caribbean.
The Drug Enforcement Administration or DEA has several divisions. Its National Security Intelligence Section interfaces with the intelligence community. The DEA’s Operation Pipeline targets private motor vehicles involved in drug trafficking, with its counterpart, Operation Convoy, handling commercial vehicles. The El Paso Intelligence Center is a major hub for disseminating drug related intelligence data. DEA Mobile Intelligence Units assist state and local drug-enforcement challenges.
The ONDCP operates 31 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas or HIDTAs that collect counterdrug intelligence. Each HIDTAs has a Regional Intelligence Center associated with it.
The Department of Justice’s Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force focuses major drug-smuggling and money-laundering operations, while the multi-agency National Joint Terrorism Task Force brings together more than three-dozen other government agencies that collect and process terrorist intelligence.
A graphical map of these and other federal agencies created by the RAND Corporation can be found at the bottom of the aforementioned table.
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Drug Policy Question of the Week – 10-1-11
As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 10-1-11. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3570
Question of the Week: Is opiate use increasing?
Each year around this time, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration releases its National Survey on Drug Use and Health that reports the prevalence of illicit drug use in the US population age 12 or older.
Trendable from 2002 onward, the data measure “lifetime” and “monthly” use of various illicit drugs, alcohol and tobacco. “Lifetime” use means having tried a drug just once. “Monthly” use equates to consuming an illicit drug at least once per month. NSDUH calls “monthly” use “current use.”
What is striking about these data, but under reported in their analysis, is the growth in the use of opiates, specifically heroin and pain relievers, often opiates as well. In the nine years since 2002, among the drugs showing the largest “lifetime” growth in users were pain relievers at +17.4% over 2002 and heroin at +12.5% over 2002.
“Monthly” usage of heroin at +44% and pain relievers +16.5% grew the most quickly over their 2002 respective user populations. There were an estimated 5.1 million users of illicit pain relievers in 2010, over 700,000 more than in 2002.
The increasing use of these illicit drugs is tragically reflected in the headline of a recent Los Angeles Times article entitled, “Drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in the U.S.” Citing 2009 data in a 2011 National Vital Statistics Report and naming these drugs as the culprit, the article read,
“Claiming a life every 14 minutes … This is the first time that drugs have accounted for more fatalities than traffic accidents since the government started tracking drug-induced deaths in 1979.”
These facts and others like them can be found in three data tables within the Drug Use chapter of Drug War Facts at www.drugwarfacts.org.
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Re: Pot Dangers ( III ), letter, Oct. 4; Marijuana Has No Place In Society, letter, Sept. 30; A Misguided Sense Of Justice, letter, Sept. 28.
Some of the U.S. hysteria about marijuana seems to be rubbing off on Canadians. I don’t doubt Dr. Henry T. Chuang’s sincerity in opposing its use, but I think the problems he refers to would pale in comparison to those caused by alcohol in his city.
I am a middle-aged male business owner who experimented with pot then left it behind with my youth. I never thought about it again. But almost a decade ago, I had an acute back injury that left me, temporarily, unable to sleep, with no appetite and in a lot of pain. I did not want to use the Oxycodone I had been prescribed. A friend of a friend brought in some marijuana and suggested I try it. I was amazed. The pain subsided and I ate a huge meal. Then I went to bed and had the first good sleep I’d had in weeks.
I haven’t smoked it since, but that episode proved to me that there is both a need and place for marijuana in our society and it’s beyond time that it should be legalized and regulated. Demonizing and further criminalizing it is unjust and counterproductive.
Robert Chapman
Oakville, Ont.
Pubdate: Thu, 06 Oct 2011
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2011 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Robert Chapman
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v11/n603/a03.html
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v11/n603/a04.html
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v11/n610/a06.html
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v11/n614/a10.html
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v11/n614/a12.html