You may be familiar with the horror stories of British Columbians tied up in a legal twilight zone after the seizure of assets for crimes they did not commit. Property and cash can be grabbed even in the absence of criminal charges or convictions connected to the alleged crimes, often involving marijuana. B.C. bud is not the main problem here. The real threat is an invasive species known as the draconian "Civil Forfeiture Act" - the judicial equivalent of fire ants, zebra mussels and giant hogweed. [continues 658 words]
Experts Weigh in on the Health Benefits of Mind-Altering Plants Plants don't do much compared to animals. They're sedentary sorts, even with time-lapse photography. We're talking about vegetative, botanical bores. Right? Wrong, according to Dennis McKenna, who argues against the standard take on plants. The droll ethnopharmacologist is struggling with an uncooperative Powerbook as he launches into a presentation at UBC on the co-evolution of humans and plants. The genetic destinies of these two kingdoms have been tied together for tens of thousands of years, he argues. He notes that plants are "virtuoso chemists that use messenger molecules as territorial signals, speaking to fungi, insects, and herbivores. They eat light and spin out all this chemistry: the secondary compounds... that we humans value as medicines as flavourings, as dyes as perfumes, as cosmetics and all the kind of things that make our life richer and sensorily more interesting." [continues 2296 words]
Creative City Report Decidedly Uncreative The Creative City Task Force released its Culture Plan for Vancouver 2008-2018 last month, entitled Creative City. If the document is adopted by council, the plan will dictate the breadth and depth of cultural investment by the civic government over the next 10 years, and as a result, the quality of cultural life in the city for a long time. For a report that uses the word "creative" 120 times in just 26 pages, there isn't much creativity in it. It is, to be fair, a literary product of government bureaucracy, and so the report's introduction by the Culture Department predictably brims with literary gems like: "Staff will then use the consolidated Implementation Plan to identify operational actions for the City to be incorporated into annual workplans over the coming years." [continues 582 words]
SFU Prof Equates 18th Century Scots With Modern Day Aboriginals When it comes to the problem of drug addiction, Bruce Alexander, professor emeritus of psychology at SFU, focuses on the bigger picture. In a 2001 paper for the B.C. Centre for Policy Alternatives, he rejected the binary option of addiction as either a "criminal" problem or a "medical" problem. He insisted it's neither. "In a free market society, the spread of addiction is primarily a political, social, and economic problem." [continues 709 words]
SFU Professor Identifies Society'S Ills When U.S. reporter Dan Rather blew into town last week to investigate Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, he could have done worse than interview SFU professor of psychology Bruce Alexander. But the professor's position is probably too nuanced for another prime time yawner devoted to the War on Some Drugs. While Alexander endorses Vancouver's Four Pillars program, he feels such efforts don't dig deep enough to address the roots of addiction in society. [continues 673 words]
From the Downtown Eastside to Online Gambling Bruce Alexander's research on addiction isn't usually the stuff of newspaper headlines. That changed last month when he won the 2007 Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in support of controversy. The National Post went with the headline, "Addicted to controversy." "I don't think I'm addicted to controversy," said the soft-spoken SFU emeritus professor of psychology while accepting his award at the Wosk Centre for Dialogue. "I don't even like controversy." [continues 721 words]
Following news last week of the U.S.-orchestrated dope bust of Marc Emery's seed-shipping business on Hastings Street, I thought back to an earlier, stranger news item involving cross-border drug interdiction. In the spring of 2004, David Laing was on a highway near Hope when he was pulled over by two police officers. One of the officers, in a southern American accent, asked him for his vehicle license and registration. Laing, familiar with Canadian law, refused to allow his vehicle to be searched. According to the CBC news, the officer with the twang turned out to be a Texas state trooper working with a member of the Hope detachment of the RCMP. The cops issued Laing a ticket for having two different addresses for his insurance and his registration, and released him. [continues 655 words]
"The history of the 'war on drugs,' and more specifically the well-documented history of marijuana legislation, makes it clear that the goals of the repeatedly declared 'wars' have little to do with availability and use of harmful substances, and a lot to do with what is called 'population control' in the literature of counterinsurgency. The targets are both at home and abroad-overwhelmingly the poor and defenseless... The 'war on drugs' has the dual function of eliminating the disposable people (being civilized, we lock them up rather than murdering them) and frightening the rest, and has been cynically used for these purposes. The case of Renee Boje illustrates this cynical abuse of power..." [continues 700 words]
When a violent loner killed four RCMP agents last March, after a call to repossess a truck on his property, the story immediately went sideways. The discovery of pot plants at James Roszko's residence gave the tragedy a ready-made, reefer madness angle. Suddenly a news item about rural property crime and an unhinged cop-killer was spun as grow-op bust gone bad. After weeks of ballyhoo about deadly bud, any media shill with a talent for the bleeding obvious could have offered a different take: had marijuana growing been decriminalized in Canada, the four police officers could well have avoided a lethal confrontation with the disturbed Rozko. [continues 664 words]
Shortly before the hydrogen-bomb-to-swat-a-fly police action descended on Da Kine Smoke and Beverage Shop last week, I met with several of my degenerate dope-smoking friends outside the Commercial Drive business. A sign inside requested all media and law enforcement to present themselves immediately to staff. I just stood there with my hands in my pockets, watching my friends join a crowd three deep-Vancouverites of all ages and ethnicity, who were signing forms at the front desk and eyeing menus offering melt-your-face-off varieties of B.C. weed. [continues 728 words]
Most of us have heard the mainstream media's drill on Osama bin Laden, chief suspect as ringleader in the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York. The scion of a wealthy Saudi family, finding purpose in fundamentalist Islam, becomes a "freedom fighter" in the Afghan-Soviet war, and ends up exporting terrorism a decade later. This tale of faith, double-dealing, and vengeance is as old as Jericho, but with a modern twist: boy meets religion, boy gets religion, boy goes nuts and blows up assets belonging to the Great Satan. [continues 616 words]
Jfk, Cia, Kgb, Fbi, Nsa, Ufo, Nasa. There may be no necessary relationship between some or any of them, but all have figured in various conspiracy theories over the years. In terms of looniness, some of these constructs have even matched the one-man play written for Lee Harvey Oswald by the Warren Commission. (The multiple gunmen theory of the JFK assassination recently received support from acoustic analysis of law enforcement audio tapes from Dealy Plaza. This goes to show that the nuttiest of conspiracy theories doesn't automatically disqualify all of them. ) [continues 629 words]
