THE "WAR ON DRUGS" was actually a political tool to crush leftist protesters and black people, a former Nixon White House adviser admitted in a decades-old interview published Tuesday. John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon's domestic policy chief, laid bare the sinister use of his boss' controversial policy in a 1994 interview with journalist Dan Baum that the writer revisited in a new article for Harper's magazine. "You want to know what this was really all about," Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said in the interview after Baum asked him about Nixon's harsh antidrug policies. [continues 563 words]
The annual Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival was held Saturday and Sunday, attracting thousands of people to downtown Madison to inform the public about why marijuana should be legalized. This year's festival, the 31st annual, was clearly a success from the standpoint of the event's organizers. Speakers, such as Elvy Musikka, Steve Silverman and Valerie Gremillion spoke to large, receptive audiences, inspiring debate and widespread intelligent discussion. Lining a gate running through Library Mall were posters of incarcerated families who had been part of marijuana conspiracies and sheets of statistical research claiming to prove marijuana is a harmless drug. [continues 186 words]
These aren't your typical potheads. They're not lying around listening to Phish and eating Teddy Grahams. These potheads are up and about, advocating the substance they cherish -- marijuana. The 31st Annual Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival will be held in downtown Madison this weekend to inform the public of the possible benefits of legalizing marijuana, in addition to what the event's sponsors assert are the harms that marijuana's prohibition has already caused. Ald. Mike Verveer, District 4, claims that the festival is "up there among the famous Madison events." [continues 433 words]
