Should these folks be targets of federal raids?
(Photo: Shay Sowden)
Asked about medical marijuana on the campaign trail in New Hampshire just a year and a half ago, then-Senator Barack Obama said, "I would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users. It's not a good use of our resources." Admittedly, he's been on the job just a few days, but now-President Obama's administration has just overseen its first medical marijuana raid. It's time for him to live up to his promise and call off the dogs.
It's not right to blame the new White House team for the raid in South Lake Tahoe, California. Drug Enforcement Administration officials are still hold-overs from the old administration, with the priorities of the Bush White House. So when the DEA stormed into Holistic Solutions and stole money and marijuana, they were following an old game plan -- not necessarily the new one.
So consider this a test. Did Barack Obama mean what he said about pulling the federal government out of the business of kicking in doors and hauling people to jail for using marijuana to treat medical problems? The ball is in your court, Mr. President.
Asking the new president to live up to his promises on medical marijuana is hardly radical. No, radical would be to ask him to respect people's right to consume whatever substances they please, to produce those substances, to buy them from willing sellers, and to sell them to eager customers. Radical would be to demand that he recognize that people should be free to do whatever they want so long as they don't violate the equal rights of others.
In other words, whatever is peaceful.
Asking the president to live up to his own promise on medical marijuana isn't radical at all. It's just a matter of pointing out that we want to see him walk the walk after talking the talk.
President Obama will be off to a great start if he quickly reins in the DEA and offers credible assurances that this raid will be the last such raid on his watch. If he doesn't ... Well, that will say an awful lot about what we can expect from this administration.
As for whether what we get is enough ... Well, some of us think it's long past time to make a few radical demands.
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Comments
I agree wholeheartedly, J.D., with the possible quibble that I'd argue Holy Savior's administration indeed deserves blame for this latest raid. After all, what was the 'Office of the President-Elect' for? Ha.
I admit I was surprised to see he ordered Gitmo closed so quickly. That's clearly a good thing - though it means little unless the CIA-/NSA-types are reigned in concurrently (personally I think it's smoke and mirrors).
It's hard for me to even discuss a president's policies knowing the few that might be favorable are nevertheless outweighed by many others that trample liberty, but putting an end to federal raids on pot - against everybody! - would be a huge victory against the drug warriors.
So let me use this opportunity to suggest Obama end the federal war on drugs entirely. If he really wants to uplift people in this country, he could start by killing the one program that incarcerates so many immorally.
The Government has co-opted the marijuana culture into a huge bureaucratic nightmare that employs millions of people. This is the ONLY reason marijuana is still illegal. Not because it is harmful or addicting but because it supports thousands of social programs for "recovery" and "education". Are we going to continue the marijuana sham? That is the question for Obama.
Recent voting in MA and MI plus polls on change.gov and change.org revealed that ending the marijuana prohibition has massive public support.
Our country needs to start an open discussion on marijuana and find out once and for all what is behind the DEA and ONDCP's unnatural opposition to the plant.
The amount of power given to the DEA violates the "checks and balances" principal that our government is founded on. The DEA is the sole decision maker on the scheduling of marijuana AND the primary agency responsible for enforcing the prohibition. That is a clear conflict of interest!
The DEA needs to be held responsible for its decisions. It needs to be made to prove that its decisions are in the country's best interests and that the harms created by them do NOT outweigh the benefits.
Marijuana should be allowed for medical purposes. In fact, perhaps legal?
Our prisons are filled with non violent people, usually drug related and the whole system needs to be revised.
Read somewhere the unions representing prisons are the largest in the nation, thus, the pushing of such strigent laws and increaase of constructing new prisons.
If they legalized it, taxed it and sold it liquor stores, we could end the deficit in no time and reduce prison populations by a third.
There is no such thing as 'holding government agencies' accountable. The only successful method of ridding ourselves of their crimes is abolition.
Legalization for a weed is the ONLY way to go to keep us from being LAW ABIDING criminals.
If weed were legal, the Big 3 would become 7-11, Highs and Sheetz!
Great story! I love it when it's TRUE! He needs to keep his word. We all thought he would support the MMJ laws, he said he would. I dont see the problem, Does he really think we won't support an idea he has already openly supported? That is why we voted for him, right?
We love it when drug addicts equivocate in the manner evidenced on this page.
Medicinal marijuana; what a shoddily constructed trojan horse.
How about, any type of brain chemistry change, through any means, by anyone?
At least, that would be honest.
And it would not look so ridiculous to those who have followed tis debate closely for many decades.
For the record, we do not support medicinal marijuana.
We support freedom of choice.
Svengali, you're a dumbass
Why, because we disagree with an opinion?
Concentrated cannabis hemp oil (Indian hemp, ganja, dagga, marijuana) can cure cancer and many other serious illnesses. Please watch Rick Simpson's "Run from the Cure" at www.phoenixtearsmovie.com. Please read my book "The Emperor Wears No Clothes" online free at www.jackherer.com. It is all about the history and many uses of cannabis hemp. We can end hunger, cure cancer and reverse the Greenhouse Effect with cannabis hemp!
Asking the new president to live up to his promises on medical marijuana is hardly radical. No, radical would be to ask him to respect people's right to consume whatever substances they please, to produce those substances, to buy them from willing sellers, and to sell them to eager customers. Radical would be to demand that he recognize that people should be free to do whatever they want so long as they don't violate the equal rights of others.
In other words, whatever is peaceful.
+++++++++++++++++
Hmmm, I wonder.
Does this ALSO APPLY TO PEACEFUL MEMBERS OF THE GUN CULTURE??? People who only want to be left alone to enjoy THEIR passion? Especially as they are actually NOT harming anyone.
Even hunters are controlling the wildlife population. Without them out there with the PERMISSION of the state they are hunting in, only culling the PERMITTED amount of game for food, these herds get out of hand, and promote disease, starvation and large scale death. And they pay the state for this privledge to do THE STATE WILDLIFE OFFICES job.
I kinda doubt it.
The desire to allow medicinal marijuana, when pushed forward by dready kids that are all, "dude, it's like, medicine, dude", is very funny to the average marijuana user.
We just believe all drugs should be legal. If doctors want to prescribe it, fine.
The economic arguments put forth by dready kids who know nothing about economics except, "dood, it will save the planet, dude", are even funnier, for the same reason.
People want to legalize marijuana, the prohibition of which was a mistake and a disgrace to justice, mostly because they like to get baked.
We roll our eyes in your general direction, and reach for the bong.
U.S. government is infected with Religion.
The shame & blame ideology is BUSH DOCTRINE and Roman Catholic authoritarian
dogma. The Church has an unbroken history of resisting science, facts, love, life.
The beatings will continue until everyone submits to New Master's Hand.
Stop this stupid and wasteful practice that is not supported by a majority of Americans. I do not understand how these cops can be proud of themselves when they assualt and rob sick, unarmed defenseless Californians. Plus, aren't the local and state police supposed to enforce California laws and protect the citizens of California? Did not the Supreme Court stat that they have no business enforcing federal laws? All the local police involved in this farce should be fired immediately! The DEA should stop acting like thugs and go after real criminals!
Cannabis is very safe and effective for the treatment of a variety of medical conditions. It is non-toxic, not lethal, and not physically addictive. There is no logical reason for the DEA to classify it in schedule 1. There is also no reason to attack and persecute sick people who use it for treatment. It is a waste of our tax dollars and precious resources. It sends a bad message to our children who see cowardly DEA agents dressed and acting like the Nazi Gestapo assaulting, intimidating and attacking sick people and their providers with automatic weapons for using such a benign substance.
I am living proof medical marijuana works, I was diagnosed with MS in 2004 at age 38,42 now. only problem is I live in Iowa.
"The pharmaceutical industry markets, sells and profits greatly from prescription drugs that, at best, mainly work in 30% to 50% of people and, at worst, actually contribute to hospitalization, permanent disability, disease, illness and death. Prescription drugs have killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam War and on a yearly basis.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), prescription drugs are now the fourth leading medical cause of death in the U.S. and Canada, behind only cancer, heart disease, and stroke.
One out of five (1 out of 5) new drugs in the U.S. is taken off the market for harming or killing patients or will have the highest level of warning placed on the label.
...
An alarming 51% of drugs approved by the FDA have serious adverse effects that are not detected prior to approval. It is estimated that each year prescription drugs injure 1.5 million people to the degree that they require hospitalization.
According to a study in the Journal of American Medical Association, each year prescription drugs cause serious reactions and permanent disability for over 2.2 million people. Many researchers state that these figures are grossly understated and it is much higher, but fear of lawsuits prevent accurate reporting. Award winning medical journalist, Lynne McTaggart states that “the vast majority of drug-related deaths are never reported at all.”
A comprehensive study performed in the U.S. by three University of Toronto professors in 1998, revealed 106,000 deaths in U.S. hospitals were caused by prescription drugs administered as prescribed-not in error! Many observers believe there could be another 100,000 deaths caused by prescription drugs outside hospitals.
...
While the drugs may be causing death, the profits are soaring. It is no secret that the pharmaceutical industry is a billion dollar giant profiting hand over fist at the public’s peril.
From 1960 to 1980, prescription drug sales were fairly steady as a percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, but from 1980 to 2000, they tripled. Sales now stand between $200 billion to $300 billion a year.
The top ten drug companies (which included European companies) had profits of nearly 25 percent of sales in 1990.
In 2001, the ten American drug companies in the Fortune 500 list ranked far above all other American industries in average net return, whether as a percentage of sales (18.5 percent), of assets (16.3 percent), or of shareholders’ equity (33.2 percent). These are astonishing margins. For comparison, the median net return for all other industries in the Fortune 500 was only 3.3 percent of sales. The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together (33.7 billion).
Let me emphasize this again. The combined profits of the ten largest US drug companies reaches 35.9 billion - a sum higher than the combined profits for all other 490 corporations on the Fortune 500 List!
[unfortunately, the Examiner will not allow me to provide a link to the full article titled "Prescription Drugs 4th Leading Cause of Death in Hollywood Today Sep 2008]
from "SSRI Pushers Under Fire", Scoop News, 2 Jan 2009:
"The Senate Finance Committee, with the ranking Republican, Senator Charles Grassley, leading the charge, is investigating GlaxoSmithKline regarding new revelations in a report filed in litigation showing that the company manipulated the numbers on adverse events related to suicidality in clinical trials back in 1989, to make it appear that Paxil did not increase the risk of patients experiencing suicidal behavior when, in fact, trial subjects on Paxil were eight times more likely to attempt or commit suicide than patients taking placebos.
Quite a few of the top pushers are also under investigation by the Committee due to revelations that millions of dollars has changed hands between the SSRI makers and the academics who signed off on some of the most fraudulently reported research in the history of modern medicine. A full list of names is easy to compile by scanning the literature on SSRI studies conducted on children. The same names appear repeatedly.
In alphabetical order, the Fortune 500 team of pushers, at a minimum, includes Drs Joseph Biederman, David Brent, Jeffrey Bridge, Daniel Casey, David Dunner, Graham Emslie, Daniel Geller, Robert Gibbons, Frederick Goodwin, Martin Keller, Andrew Leon, John Mann, John March, Charles Nemeroff, John Rush, Neal Ryan, David Shaffer, and Karen Wagner."
...
The UK's medicines “watchdog,” the British Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, he reports, "has never taken any action against the academics who make fraudulent claims in ghostwritten articles, nor doctors working for the companies who repeat such claims, even when they have been shown to be untrue."
"And no one in Britain," he points out, "has any means of finding out why their husband or child might have died."
Seven years before Dr Healy wrote this commentary, in a Prozac case for which he served as an expert witness, the plaintiff's legal team learned that Eli Lilly had withheld evidence in a jury trial when the May 7, 2007 Boston Globe reported that Lilly had agreed to pay $20 million for the rights to a patent on a new version of Prozac that would reduce "akathisia," the very side effect long believed to increase the risk of suicidal behavior, three months before the trial began.
While testifying under oath, Lilly researcher, Gary Tollefson, had told the jury, "there is absolutely no medically sound evidence of an association between any antidepressant medicine, including Prozac, and the induction of suicidal ideation or violence."
When in fact, the wording in the patent for the new formula stated "fluoxetine (Prozac) produces a state of inner restlessness (akathisia), which is one of its more significant side effects," and the "adverse effects which are decreased by administering the R(-) isomer of fluoxetine include but are not limited to headaches, nervousness, anxiety, insomnia, inner restlessness (akathisia), suicidal thoughts and self mutilation."
The Obama administration's inclusion of increased funding for the Byrne Grant program as part of his "stimulus package" is an ominous indication of where we might be headed with respect to drug policy in this country. Stop the drug war altogether. It has not done a bit of good and at minimum, leave the sick and dying alone. Live up to your word, Mr. Obama.
With the ground swell of support shown on both the polls on change.org and change.gov,who can we find to lead us in a national day of protest.
I am a member of several marijuana websites and the response from people on this subject is great.I daily ask members to write their representatives and sign every petition and poll,and everyday i get at least 20 to 30 people saying they did.We need a person and a place to come together so we all can be counted and join in on one petition to Mr.Obama.How can we get the word out nationaly to all of the supporters of marijuana reform.We need someone willing to speak for all of us.
My wife of 23 years is going blind from
glaucoma,the drugs she takes do not work and the side effects are making here miserable.I am afraid she will go blind before this issue is adressed by our government.
We are sorry to hear of your mates affliction, and wish her a speedy recovery.
We have one question, though.
Were you, or your mate, recreational marijuana users before her diagnoses?
Also, are you a recreational marijuana user, right now?
Because if you are, give me a break.
Legalize now; no decriminalization, no medicine Trojan horse.
Legalize.
Nuff said.
I don't feel like we should use the word "marijuana" anymore. This was an invention by those who fought and lied so hard to instill fear in those who would likely misperceive the reality of the situation by giving cannabis a mexican sounding name that correlated with their racist stories.
If the big corps and scandalous government of the old times can make up new names for things to spin their true meaning, then maybe we should too. As long as we refer to Cannabis as "marijuana", we will continue to spread the fear, paranoia, and hatred of an equally beloved species.
So, whose with me. Let's reinvent the steel, so to speak.
Steve
frizbe1605@gmail.com
Enough is enough I say legalize and put a sin tax on. This will be better for all concerned. Just be reasonable. I am 60 I see no real reason not to allow us to have our freedom of chioce.
I think with the economy crumbling we have higher priorities than attacking medical dispenseries! This drug war is a real war on citizens. it has accomplished absoulutely nothing and the only ones that benefits are courts and cops. legalize it and let people enjoy the many benefits of serenity,peace of mind,and cancer relief. nixon started the drug war that should tell you something. nothing but a crook.
Just reagalize `peace`!!
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