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Pot activist Dana Beal arrested with 150 pounds of marijuana
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Dana Beal in January of 2009 / Wikimedia Commons
Marijuana activist Dana Beal, founder of Cures Not Wars.org website, and organizer of the annual Global Marijuana March, was busted on Wednesday night, with two other men in a van containing 150 pounds of marijuana.
Police stopped the van on Highway 6 just north of Ashland Nebraska, near Interstate 80, because the vehicle was observed “driving erratically,” and the van had obstructed plates. The officer who made the stop, saw that bags of marijuana were plainly visible inside, and called for back-up. Police found the van filled with marijuana, the largest cannabis seizure in Saunders County history, according to Ashland police. The three men were charged with "possession with intent to deliver." The bail for each of the two other men, Christopher Ryan and James Statzer was set at $100K each. The bail for Irvin Dana Beal was set at $500K.
Beal, a publicly active anti-prohibitionist has been arrested before. His latest arrest was in June of 2008, in Mattoon, Illinois when police responded to a report of two women arguing at a restaurant. Witnesses stated that they’d seen Beal place duffel bags beneath nearby vehicles. Upon further inspection, police found two duffel bags filled with $150K in cash. They reported that the money smelled of marijuana and called in drug sniffing dogs.
Beal was charged with obstruction of justice along with another man for allegedly trying to hide the money for fear the police would search their van. In a plead deal, the obstruction charges were dropped for pleading guilty to a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge, along with paying a $1,300 fine, the cash was not returned.
Put the two incidents together, $150K in cash and 150 pounds of marijuana, and it’s pretty easy to draw the conclusion that Beal was involved in distributing marijuana, and obviously made quite a bit of money doing so.
Whether the reader agrees with the current marijuana laws or not, it is pretty hard to dispute that Dana Beal’s actions were a combination of ignorance and arrogance. To think you can be so publicly anti-prohibitionist, while at the same time trafficking relatively large quantities of illegal marijuana, it is hard to describe Beal's actions in any other terms. As with many marijuana busts, he was not targeted specifically by law enforcement, but was instead caught because of an extenuating circumstance or incident such as a traffic stop.
Dana Beal has long been respected by the "Marijuana Nation" for his outspoken activism and event organization skills towards the ultimate goal of ending marijuana prohibition. Now, sitting in jail as an accused drug trafficker with 150 pounds sitting in evidence of those accusations, Dana Beal may have done more to hurt the cause of ending marijuana prohibition and adopting sensible overall drug legislation, than all of his years of activism to help further the cause put together.
Earlier this week, Canadian cannabis activist Marc Emery turned himself into Canadian authorities in Vancouver, Canada, to await extradition to the United States to face marijuana distribution charges stemming from his mail-order Cannabis seed selling business.
Many would be quick to view Dana Beal and Marc Emery as similar cases, two politically arrogant, public anti-prohibition activists who were arrested for trafficking marijuana. That over-simplified parallel however, is not accurate.
While both men have made anti-prohibition their main political and public focus, Marc Emery was selling his seeds out in the open, as many other internet cannabis seeds sellers from around the world do, and he was paying taxes to the Canadian government on those sales, as any other legitimate business owner would do. Emery’s charges were easy to file for the US DOJ because of all the public record of his cannabis seed sales in the United States, and the complete public transparency of Emery's business.
Dana Beal on the other hand, if the evidence against him stands, was plain and simple just trafficking marijuana for profit, and was obviously making large amounts of untaxed money doing so. He didn’t get caught with $150K in cash and then later with 150 pounds of marijuana in a van because of his political activities against marijuana prohibition. Beal got arrested because of a series of unrelated incidents and stupid mistakes that brought him to the attention of the law. Dana Beal is not the first person to go to jail for greed, stupidity, and carelessness, nor will he be the last.
For the complete article The martyrdom of Canadian Marc Emery: For selling seeds, click here.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons; Author: Wandering Courier; Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
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