The New Hampshire house has just passed a medical marijuana bill. Now it’s on to the Senate where passage looks promising. I’ve wanted to move to New Hampshire for a few years now, as part of the Free State Project. The passage of this bill could give me the push I needed to make the final decision. It will be hard for my wife and I to leave Memphis, but our prospects of raising a family in a voluntary society look a lot more promising in the Granite State.
CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE — The New Hampshire House passed a bill today, 234-138, that would allow seriously ill patients to use medical marijuana if their doctor recommends it – a first for either chamber of the state’s legislature.
I’ve been so busy with my work and personal life I just have not had time to do much blogging. I’m still very active on my Twitter account, but I can always find time to write a 140 character tweet. You can also view my news stream on twitter, just follow @ganjanews.
I’m currently working on a huge story, my first investigative piece. I’m so excited about it I just have to tease a little. It’s big, so stay tuned.
I hope your holiday season is filled with peace, cheer, and smoke. Celebrate with friends and family. Share your greenery and Christmas cheer. Remember that they can cage our bodies but they can never cage our minds. Peace.
A Colbert Christmas: Willie Nelson Sings
Willie Nelson tells the story of a plant that smokes more sweetly than either frankincense or myrrh
Sheriff Joe Arpaio can’t keep drugs out of his own jail. Arpaio is the self proclaimed “Toughest Sheriff in America.” He makes his inmates sleep in tents and wear pink underwear while letting his guards deal drugs to them.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office says a guard at the 4th Avenue Jail has been arrested for allegedly supplying cocaine to an inmate.
The guard is identified by the Sheriff’s Office as 27-year-old Ryan White, a detention officer with the Sheriff’s Office for four years.
White was arrested and booked on two felonies Monday afternoon. Charges include promoting jail contraband and assisting in a criminal syndicate.
So Joe, how’s your drug war working out for you when you can’t even keep the convicted and caged from getting drugs? How the hell are you going to keep drugs off the street if you can’t keep them out of your own damn jail?
The sheriff really thinks highly of himself. I think his fetish is homoerotic bondage. You can hear a full interview with him in the documentary, American Drug War: the Last White Hope (sound warning).
Two men will spend a combined 41 years in prison for providing medicine to the sick and dying. You would have to be a very disturbed individual to find this outcome “justice.” Two lives ruined and countless others are left without the legal medicine they need to survive.
… Luke Scarmazzo, 28, was sentenced to 262 months in prison — 21 years, 10 months — in U.S. District Court in Fresno. His co-defendant, Ricardo Ruiz Montes, 28, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Both were convicted in May of manufacturing marijuana and distributing the drug, as well as operating a continuing criminal enterprise. The two men operated a medical marijuana dispensary known as the California Healthcare Collective that was raided by law enforcement officials in September 2006.
My questions to the government: Where is the victim? What harm was done? If there is no victim, there is no crime. The incarceration of these men is simply unjustified kidnapping. The drug warriors are using the violent aggression of force to enforce an arbitrary moral code. A moral code that believes violence is justified to prevent someone from slightly altering their consciousness and feeling mildly euphoric by using the medicine that naturally occurs in a plant. Some day we will look back on these crimes against humanity as another American holocaust. God help America.
My wife wanted to ad: Why doesn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger do something to stop the US Government from interfering with California law? The governor has a duty to uphold the rule of law in California and if that means throwing the DEA out, then that’s exactly what he should do.
Obama’s selection of Drug Warrior Joe Biden left me queasy about the future administration’s drug policy. Apparently I’m not the only one with concerns. Jacob Sullum writes:
The main danger with Obama is that his history of drug use, instead of making him more open to reform, will make him anxious to show he’s tough on drugs. Something like that seems to have happened with Bill Clinton, who bragged about ever-escalating drug war budgets and threatened doctors who recommended marijuana to their patients with jail, trampling the First Amendment in his rush to prove his anti-drug bona fides.
American’s have spoken and they don’t think humans should be caged for marijuana. In fact the victories that cannabis law reform saw had higher margins of victory than Barack Obama.
Fayetteville, AR, home to the University of Arkansas votes to make marijuana prohibition the lowest law enforcement priority 66% to 34%.
I want extend personal congratulations to the people at the Marijuana Policy Project. No one organization has done so much for cannabis law reform in such a short amount of time. Sensible Fayetteville deserve honors for their work in Fayetteville, Arkansas. If we reformers can score 2 to 1 margins in the deep south I see hope for ending marijuana prohibition completely. We’re winning!
I was disenfranchised by broken Diebold machines today. The ballot was incomplete and left off the local referendums including the one that would bring Instant Runoff Voting to Shelby Co, TN (Memphis). After I was turned away from the polls, I got back in my car, listening to the volunteer radio station WEVL. They were playing the bluegrass gospel song, Daniel Prayed. The second verse started like this:
The cast him in the lions den because he would not honor men.
Now I don’t know if God sill talks to humans or not, but I think that message was too profound for me to ignore. I think the institution called government is broken by its very nature. No man has moral authority over any other man. I think natural laws rule the physical world as well as our interactions with each other and the choices we make. We see natural consequences of our actions all the time. Economist call these “market forces.” If people would allow their neighbors to be ruled by the natural consequences of their own actions the world would be a peaceful and prosperous place.
Some people say that anarchy is chaos, but that statement ignores the existence of natural law. It is the violent force of government that has always disrupted human tranquility. For this reason I am compelled to no longer participate in the system. If it is true that government rules by the consent of the governed then I hearby withdraw my consent. I do this under my nom de plume as to avoid hostility from the violent people that work to secure the institution of government. From now on anytime I do consent to government authority I do so under duress, for fear of loss of life or liberty, or to protect the life or liberty of another voluntary participant.
I don’t know if divine providence kept me from voting today or not. I do know that my decision is not reactionary. It is based on principle and humanity. I do not believe in the use of force, violence, or coercion to achieve political or social goals. Government by its nature is force monopolized.
The US must rethink its Latin American foreign policy, beginning with the drug war. Sponsoring a proxy war with drug cartels will only foster anti-American sentiment among the citizenry and the large profits of drug trafficking will continue drive public officials to corruption.
MEXICO CITY — In what could be one of Mexico’s worst cases of drug-related corruption in a decade, Mexican officials alleged that a drug cartel infiltrated the highest levels of Mexico’s attorney general’s office, paying people there as much as $450,000 a month to get sensitive information about antidrug activities.
Is there hope for change? Drug Czar John Walters shows some signs of sanity.
Mr. Walters, a vehement opponent of drug legalization, backed a proposal by [Mexican President] Mr. Calderón not to prosecute people caught carrying relatively small amounts of illegal narcotics, including cocaine and heroin. Under Mr. Calderón’s plan, addicts would be treated differently from traffickers and would avoid jail if they agreed to undergo treatment, not unlike similar programs in some parts of the United States. “I don’t think that’s legalization,” Mr. Walters said.
It’s a start. While the decriminalization of drugs is a baby step toward policy reform, it does nothing to address the profit motive that violent thugs have to traffic in illegal narcotics. A re-legalization of the bread-and-butter of narcotics traffickers, marijuana, would rip the financial rug out from under the gangsters that terrorize Mexico and the rest of Latin America. When American alcohol prohibition gave rise to gangsters like Al Capone and blood spilled on in our major cities we repealed the laws that caused the bloodbath. We should do the same for Mexico.
Unintended Consequences: Perhaps racist windbags like Lou Dobbs wouldn’t have some much “illegal” immigration to complain about if American foreign policy didn’t do so much damage to the Mexican economy. Mexicans have a right to keep their families safe from harm, just as Americans do.
Those who favor the continued prohibition of cannabis base their arguments on the false premise that the continued enforcement of said laws “protects our children.” This statement is nonsense. In fact, just the opposite is true.
The war on weed endangers the health and safety of our children. It enables young people to have unregulated access to marijuana — easier access than they currently have to legal, age-restricted intoxicants like alcohol and tobacco. It enables young people to interact and befriend pushers of other illegal, more dangerous drugs. It compels young people dismiss the educational messages they receive pertaining to the potential health risks posed by the use of ‘hard drugs’ and prescription pharmaceuticals because kids say: “If they lied to me about pot, why wouldn’t they be lying to me about everything else too.”
Most importantly, the criminal laws are far more likely to result in having our children arrested and placed behind bars than they are likely to in any way discourage them to try pot.
These are the facts, and it’s about time we start shouting them from the rooftops.
