BC Bud Goes Global

I watched a BBC TV report on this subject today which was quite entertaining. Especially humorous was the lovely anchor trying to look serious and purposeful while introducing the clip! Unfortunately, the link was unavailable, but here is part of the story:
Canada's spreading cannabis crop
Page last updated at 12:02 GMT, Tuesday, 22 July 2008 13:02 UKAs we walk into John's basement, the smell is so overwhelming it almost knocks me off my feet.
In front of me stand 120 marijuana plants whose thick bushy leaves cover the strong stems.
John explains quite nonchalantly that this is just a small growing operation, or grow-ops as they are known throughout Canada.
[...] Inspector Brian Cantera of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Vancouver believes that John's small grow-op is one of 20,000 to be found in residential houses around the province.
That figure excludes the larger grow-ops in industrial locations, not to mention the huge dope farms that are scattered around British Columbia's vast interior.
If Inspector Cantera's estimates are accurate, then British Columbia is probably home to the largest concentration of organised criminal syndicates in the world.
The striking aspect of BC's marijuana trade is that it has gone beyond the boundaries of traditional organised crime groups (although some are still heavily involved) and entered into the middle classes [astonishing! you can’t possibly mean it!].
Much of the revenue derived from BC Bud, as the cannabis crop is known, goes on paying college fees, perhaps buying a second car or making that holiday to the Caribbean just a little bit more affordable.
The trade is so large that the police in BC are faced with an impossible task.
[...] Billy Weselowski and his wife Kim have devoted themselves to helping vulnerable women caught up in drug and alcohol addiction to restart their lives.
Billy rails against those Canadians who are demanding the legalisation of marijuana.
"I've dealt with at least 20,000 addicts, and easily 10,000 will tell you they've relapsed on marijuana¿That's the underbelly of what marijuana (is) about - what it's doing to people. And it's like alcohol - it runs an industry."
But the marijuana growers have equally passionate supporters like Michelle Rainey who has the legal right to cultivate a limited amount of marijuana for medicinal purposes.
She says it is the only thing that helps relieve the pain inflicted by the debilitating Crohn's disease from which she suffers.
But she is sought by the US to face charges of conspiracy and money-laundering because of a legal Vancouver-based marijuana seed business with which she was previously involved.
Over the past decade, Canada has been moving slowly towards a more benign regime of toleration towards marijuana (although the current minority federal government of Stephen Harper vehemently opposes this development).
This has placed the trade in the middle of some intense arguments between Canada (and BC in particular) on the one hand and the US and its guardian on drugs orthodoxy, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, on the other.
If BC's marijuana trade ever did force through a change in the legal status of the drug in Canada, the implications for Canadian-US relations would be profound. This will be a crime story well worth watching.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7519178.stm

Waiting to Inhale is highly recommended to further your understanding of the seriousness of medical marijuana. It is available from Ironweed.org. Ironweed's monthly dvd selectioni usualy has more than one film on the same topic, and included on this DVD are two other films on the medical [dis]establishment, Health, Money and Fear and Collateral Damage: Bad Medicine in Tennessee: http://www.ironweedfilms.com/

Tree Huggers: The Time Has Come!

Tree Huggers of America is A Non-profit 501(c)(3) Organization

An Alliance of Sensible Concerned Citizens, Advocates of Reason, Rational And Common Sense

Social Uprising of 2008
A Collective Evolution

The long insufferable election campaign of the 2008 is coming to a close. Except a handful of people, everybody else is excited about the Barack Obama winning the Democratic Party's nomination. Now what is wrong with that? The true makeup of the Democratic and Republican parties must be understood, the fact that Democrats and Republicans are the 2 wings; the left, and the right wing of the very same brutal predatory nation-less corporate bird of prey.
Every 4 years an elaborate democracy show is produced and broadcasted all over the country and the world, in order to create an illusion of democracy to fool us, the American people, and sedate us, into 100% submission for another 4 years of living in apathy, ignorance and conformity, while the nation-less corporations are doing what they do best, warmongering, war profiteering, plunder and degradation of our one and only home, Planet Earth.

Barack Obama, or John McCain, makes absolutely no difference, if we, the people are made to be voiceless victims of the nation-less corporate elites. If we truly want change things for good and better, which I know we do, we must stay together, united and force Barack Obama, and John McCain to sign their policy proposals, their platform that are promising to achieve to the American people. We must make them to stand behind their own words and sign it into a contract, a written statement of honesty and honor between our representatives and the people.

The idea of forcing a representative of any kind: President, Senator, Congressperson, City Council, etc., to sign her/his policy proposals, their platform should become a common practice. We, the people must watch them like a hawk, and if these representatives deviate from the path of their own written and signed contract, we should sue them and throw them out of the office immediately.

We have to be involved all the time, [my bold] not just in the election campaign shows. We have to get our voice and eyes back. We must demand to reinstate the Media Fairness Doctrine Act of 1949, as a law of the land, to be mandated by Congress and the establishment of local ownership of TV, Newspaper, FM and AM radio stations by the workers, employees and local citizens. We must demand the abolition of the Electoral College, in order to begin establishing a true democracy in the United States of America.

[...] WAR, NAFTA, CAFTA, Taxes and alike are vital issues that must be decided through a Referendum by the people, not the warmongering corrupt elites and their politicians.

Definition of Usury:
Usury is loan sharking, or predatory lending. Usury is a greedy illegal action and practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest. Usury is a criminal exploitation of the middle class and the working class, trapping and robbing them of their belongings.

POWER CORRUPTS,
ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY

And finally, through a Referendum, or Ballot Initiatives, a true practice of democracy in this coming election season, we, the people must vote and pass the following 10 Ballot Initiatives:

1 - A Single Payer Universal Health-Care System, exactly the same health-care system that all government employees and members of congress have already setup for themselves and been using at the taxpayers expanse.
2 - Establishing Term Limits For United States Congress (Senate & House of Representatives) and Supreme Court Judges.
3 - Abolition of the Electoral College. Eradicating the use of rig able vote counting, reading and registering machines of all kinds. Establishing the use of Paper Ballots, just like all real democracies do, all over the world.
4 - Establishing the Fairness Doctrine as the law of the land. And mandating the ownership of all major TV and Radio Networks and Newspapers shares to be owned by the local people of the region / state, and the employees only.
5 - Publicly Financed Campaign Laws for all government offices. And mandating free and equal time to be used for debates amongst candidates. - Restore and reinstate the federal law against usury. Usury laws enables the US federal government to prohibit and stop the kind of outrageous predatory business practices, which have become the general means of robbing people in the name of doing business, in this country.
6 - Mandating the Cancellation of NAFTA and CAFTA, and ALL Government handouts and subsidies of all kinds, to the nation-less corporations. In addition, mandating the abolition of minimum wage and establishing Living Wage.
7 - Legalize the cultivation of an amazing plant, unmatched on Earth. Plant that grows organically, would never need any deadly chemicals, a plant that could give humanity 100s of vital organic products we need; ranging from plastic, fiber for textile, oil for food and fuel, milk, paper, construction material and much more. A Trillion-Dollar Plant, Hemp, is the plant we must legalize [my bold] to cultivate, as all other nations all over the world do.
8 - Mandating a 75% subsidy program to cover the cost of outfitting homes, apartment buildings and open desert areas with solar panels and energy producing and transmitting equipment.
9 - Mandating a true, honest and honorable investigation into the tragic events of the September 11, 2001 [my bold] by a panel of scientists, aerospace engineers, architects and metallurgist experts.
10 - Mandating that all WAR Declaration Legislations, after passage through congress must be reported by the mass media and put before the people for the FINAL APPROVAL by at least a minimum vote of 65% of the American people in a national referendum at the ballot box.

The approval of the above positive and constructive 10 Ballot Initiatives are absolutely necessary in order to have a chance of establishing a true democracy, a grass-root democracy in the United States, replacing the criminal elitist Imperialistic regime, and begin a new exciting journey in American history. We must facilitate the passing of the above Ballot Initiatives into laws of the land and take the power back from the corrupt elite, or nothing will ever change.

Sincerely,

Bahram Maskanian

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- - Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. - - Frederick Douglas

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"I pledge allegiance to Mother Nature and our one and only home; Planet Earth, one Home, under the wisdom of mighty Mother Nature, indivisible, with life, liberty, equality and justice for all."
http://www.treehuggersofamerica.org/

Very interesting blog, with lots of information on alternatives to the status quo. Check out the hemp page to learn how hemp can replace toxic chemicals, the "Plastic Peril."

NYPD RACIST Cops Ignore 1977 Law, Disenfranchise Citizens, Illegally Collect DNA and Defile Mayor La Guardia's Legacy

If I understand Mr. Hentoff correctly, NYC citizens are being entrapped because of their generous natures! What kind of a world do we live in when cops, who say they are public servants and want to make life better for us all, instead just pretend to be friends in order to advance their status in the corrupt system? I hope you enjoy this Village Voice report from the forever righteous Nat Hentoff, followed by a bit of levity.

The NYPD's Secret Crusade Against Marijuana

Furthers a Racist Agenda

The Village Voice

by Nat Hentoff, May 6th, 2008 12:00 AM
[...] I have never seen such systematic dishonesty and contempt for the law as those documented in the 102-page report, "Marijuana Arrest Crusade: Racial Bias and Police Policy in New York City 1997-2007," by Professor Harry Levine of Queens College and Deborah Peterson Small, executive director of Break the Chains.

In 2007 alone, there were 39,700 misdemeanor arrests for the possession of small amounts of marijuana. But such possession hasn't been a crime in New York State since the Marijuana Reform Act of 1977. Under that law, which is still in effect, an offender can usually expect to get only a ticket, punishable by a fine of not more than $100.
But most of the 353,000 New Yorkers arrested for having these small amounts from 1997 to 2006 got much more than a ticket: They were handcuffed, photographed, and fingerprinted, held overnight, arraigned in criminal court, plagued with permanent criminal records, and charged with the crime of having marijuana "burning or open to public view."
Since most of these people arrested had the pot hidden in a pocket, backpack, or purse, how did these stop-and-frisks turn into an arrest for "burning" marijuana" or having it "open to public view"?
As "Marijuana Arrest Crusade" demonstrates, this is done "by tricking and intimidating" suspects to take out the concealed marijuana, so that police officers can then claim they saw it "open to public view." In fact, a longtime Legal Aid supervisor quoted in the study says that this process happens "all the time." And such routine deception by the police to set someone up for arrest on a criminal-misdemeanor charge is perfectly legal.
[...] There is much more detailed information in the report on the impact of these arrests, which—as described in last week's column— greatly and disproportionately affect black and Latino youths. [my bold, throughout] Part 7, "Head Start for Unemployment and Prison," notes that these arrests "can limit the opportunity for young people to obtain employment and access to some schools, and for student aid."
The report also notes something that I've pointed out in this space before: "Mayor Bloomberg and other prominent politicians [and the FBI] have urged collecting DNA from everyone arrested for anything whatsoever, including, therefore, marijuana possession."
–The findings come—as the tables and graphs demonstrate—from arrest data compiled by New York State and the FBI, along with "interviews with police, public defenders, legal aid attorneys, private attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and people arrested for possessing marijuana."
[...] The report points out that the "39,700 misdemeanor marijuana possession arrests" in 2007 were "the fourth largest number of arrests in New York history." And yet, "because the New York Police Department has released almost no information about these arrests, they have attracted little media attention. To this day, few New Yorkers know that for over a decade their city has been on a historically unprecedented marijuana arrest crusade."
[...] In the March 24 edition of The New York Sun—in the article "Turf War Between NYPD and FBI Centers on Terrorism," by Dafna Linzer—Commissioner Kelly, ironically enough, is quoted as follows: "People have information, and they want to control information. Controlling information is power, and they don't want to let it go—it is as fundamental as that."

Also fundamental is Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's requirement for combating official lawlessness in a free society: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Will the sunlight of public exposure finally begin to disinfect the NYPD, which under this rancid policy—promulgated by several New York mayors and police commissioners—has been contemptuously violating the letter and the intent of the Marijuana Reform Act for 10 straight years? [...]

HARRY J. ANSLINGER
"The Father of the Drug War"
Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics 1930-1962

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0819,blunt-justice,433852,4.html
It's Friday night. Here's a little fun, courtesy of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who offers common sense and a defense for rational lawmaking and the Mickey Mouse of law enforcement, Harry Anslinger, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Anslinger via voice over by [I think?] Woody Harrelson, and Cannamation Films.

Racial Bias in Drug War Verified

Reports Find Racial Gap in Drug Arrests
By ERIK ECKHOLM, Published: May 6, 2008
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates
Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.
But they note that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the war on drugs, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks.
In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to 1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980.
More than four in five of the arrests were for possession of banned substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. [my bold] Four in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to the latest F.B.I. data.
Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: they are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, [my bold] according to the Human Rights Watch report.
[...] Some crime experts say that the disparities exist for sound reasons. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, said it made sense for police to focus more on fighting visible drug dealing in low-income urban areas, largely involving members of minorities, than on hidden use in suburban homes, more often by whites, because the urban street trade is more associated with violence and other crimes and impairs the quality of life.
“The disparities reflect policing decisions to use drug laws to try and reduce violence and to respond to the demand by law-abiding residents in poor neighborhoods to clean up the drug trade,” Ms. Mac Donald said. [What about the violence created in homes where mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters are incarcerated for possession, not making a profit over someone else's misery!? Ms. Mac Donald doesn’t care about the quiet violence of families being torn apart! She is a racist and a class criminal!]
[...] Police in a few cities including Denver, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have said they are spending fewer resources on arrests for lower-lever offenses like marijuana possession.
In December, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the federal sentencing guidelines for convictions involving crack cocaine, which is more often used by blacks, somewhat reducing the length of sentences compared with those for convictions involving powder cocaine. But mandatory and longer sentences for crack violations remain embedded in federal and state laws.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/06disparities.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Justice for Non-Violent "Drug" Offenders

Do you need me to point out that our airwaves are full of "legal" drugs which provide very little real help except to make money for Big Pharma? Of course not! You also know that if you have money, or are white and "upwardly mobile," (the delusion that the rich will pee money on you) you probably will get off with a tiny slap on the wrist. And the lesson is?

24 Hour Push: Email the Governor!

Dear Friend of Drop the Rock,
Tomorrow, at 1:00 PM, Governor Spitzer will deliver his State of the State address. The Drop the Rock Coalition aims to send as many emails as possible to the Governor in the next 24 hours to press him to call for Rockefeller repeal during his speech.
To Email the Governor, Click here:
http://www.droptherock.org/actionalert.htm
Enacted in 1973, when Nelson Rockefeller was governor, the Rockefeller Drug Laws require harsh prison terms for the possession or sale of relatively small amounts of drugs.
There are now almost 15,500 drug offenders in NY's prisons; most of them minor offenders with no history of violent behavior.
It costs NY nearly $500 million a year to imprison drug offenders.
Over 92% of the people locked up in NY for drug offenses are African American or Latino, despite research showing that the majority of people who use and sell drugs are white.
Research shows that drug treatment is cheaper than imprisonment and more successful in reducing drug related crime.
Moreover, repealing the Drug Laws would save the fiscally strapped state up to $200 million per year.
After over 32 years, it is long past time to remove the stain of these wasteful, unjust, ineffective & racist laws from NY’s penal code.
http://www.droptherock.org/

Please also review my post from December 20, 2007, Prove it or Shut Up! discussing the wasted money for the “War on Drugs” as well as a hilarious challenge of $10,000 to either Giuliani, Romney, McCain to prove their statements on medical marijuana.

http://www.mpp.org/