Marcy Duda doesn't attempt to glamorize or romanticize the life that she lives. Yes, there are the regular mentions in Massachusetts press for her testimony in front of state congressional members or her high-profile demonstrations outside the Springfield, Massachusetts DEA office. There are the national conferences, networks, and accolades from fellow activists. But much of the time, Duda's life is more mundanely consumed with the demands that go along with being the single mother of four children ages 8-22, as well as a five-year-old granddaughter. [continues 504 words]
Shawn Heller, national director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, is disgusted with the entire War on Drugs. "Drug laws as a whole are not only un-American, they violate the essence of the Constitution. Marijuana certainly shouldn't be Schedule I, but the idea that Schedule I even exists, that the Department of Justice is determining what the legal status is for possessing a plant or chemical either in your body or on your person, this is just a crazy idea." [continues 411 words]
If any of you passed our copy of the article to others, please give them a link to the rather large entire article. Corrected copy in the MAP archives: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n898/a05.html Original at the High Times website: http://www.hightimes.com/News/2002_05/norml.html Thank you. [end]
They ran out of beer early at the jammed, raucous, spit-and-baling-wire emergency party that closed this April's National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws annual conference in San Francisco. Thirsty guests found thirstful ways to compensate for the suds, and if you ignored the computers and filing cabinets, it was easy to forget you were violating fire codes at an ad hoc shindig at a hotshot law office. The wife and I decamped around midnight, not content with the five cases of water trucked in to replenish the sweat the crowd had been shaking on each other jitterbugging to a 40-piece (stationary) marching band. We landed in a little North Beach boite. At one point, my New Yorker was aghast to see a purse all by its lonesome on the floor by the jukebox. Voicing her alarm, she was told don't be silly, woman - this is San Francisco. [continues 8168 words]
Proposition 36, the California law ordaining treatment instead of jail for drug users, went into effect July 1. But will some counties just use it to slam people into jail if they fail a urine test? As ever, the devil is in the details. California's Proposition 36-designed to divert 36,000 small-time drug offenders a year from incarceration to treatment-was inaugurated July 1. But drug users might want to consider their locale along with what they put into their bodies. Control of how to implement the initiative the state's voters passed by a 61%-39% margin last November falls to local authorities, and each one of the state's 58 counties has a different plan-with some still emphasizing punishment over treatment. [continues 3652 words]
When it comes to leading the President's Drug War, "compassionate conservatives" need not apply. Last week, President George W. Bush formally appointed a pair of the Drug War's staunchest fanatics to the federal government's highest ranking drug policy posts. On Wednesday, May 9, Bush nominated Republican moral crusader Asa Hutchinson to head the Drug Enforcement Administration. Hutchinson, an Arkansas Congressman, cosponsored legislation in 1999 that sought to impose 10-year prison terms on individuals who post drug-related information on the Internet. [continues 989 words]
The Gentlest Ride Into Hell Americans Have Ever Experienced Recent history judges a President on two things: the state of the economy and foreign affairs. During his two terms in office President Bill Clinton presided over a booming stock market and managed to avoid any unseemly military quagmires. Thus, despite dozens of personal scandals and serious political-and perhaps criminal-problems, he'll probably be remembered as a great, if flawed, leader. But not to the millions who've fallen prey to the Clinton Drug War machine, the most well-oiled policing apparatus America has ever known. [continues 4210 words]
'I'm going to call them as I see them, and this guy is a skunk. You can quote me on that. He shouldn't be out there. I would think that the DEA would find this guy an embarrassment. Because I've been in law enforcement, and the guy embarrassed me.' --Investigator for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer "Clinton smoked it!" bragged the Measure G commercials that aired all last fall over K-WINE Radio, 94.5 FM in Ukiah, CA: "So did Bush and Gore!" [continues 2562 words]
Mention Dan Forbes to most people and they'd draw a blank. But the Office of National Drug Control Policy certainly knows who Dan Forbes is. In January, Forbes, 44, broke the story on Salon.com about how the ONDCP secretly gave financial incentives to television networks to insert the government's zero-tolerance War on Drugs message into the scripts of prime- time shows. Forbes, a graduate of Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, with experience in social work and acting, wrote and researched most of the story from his Brooklyn apartment. Forbes followed with articles about how the ONDCP used the same cash-for-content method to convince major national magazines to print anti-drug propaganda and how the successes of the November '96 California and Arizona medical-marijuana initiatives helped spark this paid media campaign strategy. [continues 2241 words]
The top site bookmarked on my Web browser at HIGH TIMES is mapinc.org, the DrugSense/Media Awareness Project's collection of over 37,000 drug- related news articles. The MAP Inc Website is the most-surfed drug-policy site in the nation, averaging over 70,000 hits a day last March and getting over 100,000 one day April. According to a Webtrends.net comparison, the DrugSense/MAP Websites are more popular then those of the Drug Czar's Office, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, CASA and DARE combined. Last April, almost 8,000 other sites had links to MAP. Aside from news clips, which are also accessible on lists "asset forfeiture" to "raves," the site offers guides to writing letters to the editor, and contains links to over 75 pot and hemp sites, 83 general drug-policy reform sites and 20 prohibitionist groups. [continues 482 words]
There's $500 available right now from the Drug Policy Forum of Texas for anyone who wants to go there to speak on the philosophy behind drug prohibition. The only catch is that you have to be prepared to justify and defend it, a task that so far has intimidated all the best anti-drug speakers in the nation. The DPFT's well-publicized offer has been standing for over three months now, but absolutely no one has accepted the opportunity. "We began to realize many years ago that we can't get these damn guys to come out and debate," the Austin Chronicle was told by DPFT founder Alan Robison, a retired pharmacology professor at the University of Texas Health Center there. "This is a deliberate strategy. These guys know if they don't come, there's no discussion." [continues 1544 words]
In Drug War America, more people live in prisons and jails than in Philadelphia, Detroit or Houston. Shattered Lives: Portraits from America's Drug War (Creative Xpressions, PO Box 1716, El Cerrito, CA 94530), by Mikki Norris, Chris Conrad and Virginia Resner, shows the human faces behind the bars of Incarceration Nation. Many are familiar Drug War POWs, like Will Foster (serving 20 years for growing pot) and Kemba Smith (24 years for minor links to her ex-boyfriend's crack syndicate), but the lesser-knowns have equally outrageous stories: [continues 77 words]
Cliff Thornton hopes word of mouth will spread enough peace to end the war on drugs and freedom. Every time he pitches his common-sense message to a college class, an NAACP meeting or a Rotary Luncheon, he aims to convince one person of prohibition's failures. "If I get one now, it will be two next time, three the next time and then it will grow exponentially because they'll all tell their friends," he says, until public opinion shifts. [continues 639 words]
The CIA's Dope-Smuggling 'Freedom Fighters': Profile: Luis Posada Carriles The belated admission last November by the CIA's Inspector General that in fact the Agency has always worked hand-in-glove with international narcotics kingpins caught the mainstream media with their pants down and butts up in the air. Despite last spring's orgy of coordinated condemnation of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series on CIA-connected drugrunning contras in the 1980s, media prostitutes from the Washington Post to the New York Times to Face The Press were reduced to purveying the truth for once, after the CIA copped to it at last. But of course they didn't tell all the truth, not out loud. A typical NY Times `expose' of one of the Agency's most hallowed Cuban `freedom fighters,' for example, somehow omitted to mention all the dope-running he's been involved with over the generations. HIGH TIMES' faithful chronicler of the CIA's drug wars, JERRY MELDON, fills in the blanks the Times found unfit for print: First Of An Occasional Series. [continues 1644 words]
The Internet’s low-cost, instantaneous communication and its ability to make unlimited information available to an ever-expanding audience is nothing short of a revolution in the people’s ability to effect social change. The vast network of drug-law reformers on-line represents a growing army of peace which will ultimately topple the prohibitionist establishment and put an end to America’s longest war. In the past, most reform efforts have been local. The economics of creating a mass movement relegated like-minded people to relative isolation, making it difficult to join forces even in modest ways, across state or county lines. But not anymore. [continues 638 words]
THE DRUG WAR INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY, April 1998 by John Veit HT: You've defined the War on Drugs as an instrument of population control. How does it accomplish that? CHOMSKY: Population control is actually a term I borrowed from the counterinsurgency literature of the Kennedy years. The main targets at the time were Southeast Asia and Latin America, where there was an awful lot of popular ferment. They recognized that the population was supporting popular forces that were calling for all kinds of social change that the United States simply could not tolerate. And you could control people in a number of ways. One way was just by terror and violence, napalm bombing and so on, but they also worked on developing other kinds of population-control measures to keep people subjugated, ranging from propaganda to concentration camps. Propaganda is much more effective when it is combined with terror. [continues 3001 words]
Two prestigious American and British medical associations recently announced their support for legalizing the use of marijuana-derived chemicals for medical purposes. The Society for Neuroscience in Washington and the British Medical Association in London both came out late last year in support of new evidence demonstrating that cannabinoids - active chemical compounds in marijuana - provide save and effective relief for a number of serious health conditions. Combined, the two associations represent the interests of approximately 140,000 physicians and researchers worldwide. [continues 600 words]
COLVILLE, WA--The 500,000-plus prisoners in America's drug gulag inhabit an isolated, subterranean world, whether literally underground, like the federal ADX maximum-security prison in Florence, CO, or behind the walls in remote rural towns. The deeper they are in--serving mandatory minimums like 11 years and three months, 19 years and seven months, 24 years with a five-year "tag"--the further they are cut off from normal life. [continues 987 words]
STATE COLLEGE, PA - One day last July, Alan Gordon walked into a magistrate's office here carrying a cardboard lettuce box with 150 cannabis seedlings sprouting in it. He explained that he planned to grow and distribute this marijuana because it combats all the acute and chronic effects of ultraviolet-B radiation sickness. Symptoms of UV-B overexposure include salivation, appetite loss, hyperthermia and hyperactivity; whereas pot's effects include cotton-mouth, appetite stimulation, hypothermia and sedation. Hence, Gordon argues, pot-smoking is legal under the criminal code's justification clause, which universally countenances lawbreaking in circumstances where a greater harm is prevented, such as swerving out of a legal traffic lane to avoid hitting a child. In an era of ubiquitous and increasing UV-B exposure, he claims, not smoking pot is more harmful than smoking it. He's repeatedly invited the government to argue the point with him in court - and has been turned down every time so far. [continues 555 words]
Last August, amidst fanfare generated by a National Institutes of Health report endorsing medical-marijuana research, NIH Director Dr. Harold Varmus announced that the agency "is open to receiving research grant applications for studies of the medical efficacy of marijuana," adding, rather disingenuously: "We want to make clear what has always been the case." Dr. Donald Abrams, a noted AIDS researcher and professor at the School of Medicine of the University of California at San Francisco, might beg to differ. In 1992, Dr. Abrams designed a pilot study that would have compared the effectiveness of inhaled marijuana with that of synthetic THC as a treatment for the weight loss associated with AIDS "wasting syndrome." He quickly secured private funding for it, and also gained approval from the Scientific Advisory Board of the San Francisco Community Consortium, the California Research Advisory Panel and the federal Food and Drug Administration to move ahead. [continues 619 words]
