On a late Friday night, August 23, I received a phone call from colleague Glen Andersen. He opened with a curt "Do you know about Ian?" I misheard yin for Ian and replied jokingly, "No, but I know about yang." Then he told me he'd heard Ian Hunter (born 1961) had died in a boating accident near Nelson but he had no details. We speculated briefly, in vain, hoping it was a mistake. Would I look on the Web? A search on Google produced three entries with the words tragedy, boating, and pot activist. There was no mistake. From a firsthand account on Marc Emery's PotTV Web site, I learned that on August 14 Ian had taken a small motorboat onto Kootenay Lake. NORML's U.S.-based site had posted a partial reprint of a short report in the August 20 Times-Colonist: "Pot Activist Dies in Boat Accident". For a community-minded public figure whose news clippings could paper a rec room, it was meagre fare. [continues 668 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia -- America's drug war is such a spectacular failure that a visitor from another planet might conclude that it's intentionally that way. Suppose that we asked President Bush if, for $8 billion or so each year (plus another $12 billion in state and local enforcement), he would be willing to finance a system that would ensure a violent black market network extending from virtually every U.S. urban neighborhood all the way to Mexico, Colombia and other parts of the world? Meanwhile, an additional goal would be, at least in the United States, to crowd our courts and prisons with people having health problems and those who prey on them. [continues 766 words]
