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Hemp Hemp Hoorah!
Oregon is poised to join the growing number of states that have reauthorized industrial hemp farming -- the environmentally-friendly, non-narcotic cousin of marijuana. On Monday, lawmakers there overwhelmingly voted in favor of the legalization measure, which now awaits the signature of Gov. Ted Kulongoski. If signed, Oregon would become the ninth state to remove legal barriers to its production.
Reefer Madness has written extensively about the growing movement to reintroduce hemp farming, once a staple of the American agricultural landscape, so I won't go over and over the virtues of the crop again here.
Still, it is worth revisiting several key points -- including the fact that the only reason -- only, only, only reason -- the crop is illegal to grow in the U.S. is that the Drug Enforcement Administration stands steadfast in maintaining that because hemp is the same plant as marijuana, it must be dope, and dope, as you know, is illegal. Alternately, they argue that allowing farmers to plant hemp would help pot growers hide their crop -- this argument is just bull; because of cross-pollination, any pot grown amid a sea of hemp would become completely useless as a drug.
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Pot Possession Becomes a Death Sentence in Harris County
Although former national drug czar John Walters liked to say – often with a smirk on his face – that no one in America goes to jail for marijuana possession, the truth is that they do – routinely.
And, sometimes, they die there.
That was the case earlier this month in Harris County, when 29-year-old Theresa Anthony who was in jail for two-and-a-half weeks on a minor pot possession charge, died in custody.
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Maryland Mayor Sues Cops Over Botched Drug Raid
To recap: A drug dog in Arizona hit on pot inside a package at a post office there that was addressed to Tomsic. Police brought the package to Maryland and, dressed like mail carriers, P.G. County deputies delivered the package to Calvo and Tomsic's home, where it sat outside all day July 30, 2008. When Calvo got home he picked up the package, brought it inside, and headed upstairs. That's when the P.G. narcos and Sheriff's SWAT team swooped in and broke into the home. Once inside, they shot dead Calvo and Tomsic's dogs.
A week later the narcos admitted that the deadly raid was a mistake. Police said they'd arrested a delivery person in connection with a scheme to smuggle drugs by addressing drug-filled packages to uninvolved and unsuspecting people. The plan was to intercept the packages before they arrived at their addressed destinations -- a not-so-original plot that police could've, and should've, figured out before descending on the Calvo home.
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Easing Pot Penalties
U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., has renewed the call for more sensible federal pot policies, filing two bills: one that would ease penalties related to minor possession, and another that would ban the feds from interfering with medicinal use of the drug.
The Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act (H.R. 2835), filed on June 11, would not only ban the feds from applying restrictions in the Controlled Substances Act to individuals using medi-pot in compliance with state law, but it would also do what pot-law reformers have been wanting for years: Move marijuana from CSA schedule I – the most restrictive – to schedule II, where many other prescription meds dwell.
The bill would also forbid the feds from meddling in pot growing operations sanctioned by law in any of the 13 states where medi-pot use is currently legal, and would prohibit the government from applying any FDA provision to restrict the use of medi-mari in states where it is legal. (The bill would not, however, affect any "Federal, State, or local law regulating or prohibiting smoking in public.")
To date 20 co-sponsors have signed on to the measure, including Texas' own Liberpublican Rep. Ron Paul.
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Supremes Stand for Individual Rights
On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two rulings strengthening individual rights against state power. In the first, the court redefined the right of students to be free from unreasonable searches. In the second, the court reinforced the right of defendants to confront witnesses against them.
In the first case, an 8-1 ruling by the court means that school officials will likely find it more difficult to justify the strip searching of students suspected of carrying contraband.
In the case at hand, school officials at Stafford Middle School strip searched 13-year-old Savana Redding in 2003, after the principal got a tip that she might be carrying prescription strength ibuprofen and anti-inflammatory naproxen. After agreeing to having her backpack searched, the school principal, Kerry Wilson, ordered Redding to the nurse's office, where two other staff members ordered her to undress and then to "shake" out her bra, and to do the same thing with the elastic of her underpants, to prove she had no pills.
No pills were found.
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High-Potency Poppycock
Chicago-area GOP U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk says today’s pot dealers are not just out to get you high – they’re out to get you really, really, really high, and to make a crap-load of cash doing it.
According to Kirk, the potency of pot being dealt on the streets is now so great that it’s time for the federal government to fight back by increasing federal penalties for dealing the drug. High-potency pot – dope with 15% or more tetrahydrocannibinol, aka THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana – makes users “zombie-like,” Kirk has been told by cops, he said in a recent press release. And dealers are turning to the high-pote pot to rack up profits akin to those seen by cocaine dealers. “Drug dealers know they can make as much money selling Kush [a strain of pot] as cocaine but without the heavier sentences that accompany crack and cocaine trafficking,” he said. “If you can make as much money selling pot as cocaine, you should face the same penalties.”
Because an eye for an eye always makes things better.
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Medi-Pot Roundup
So far, it's been an action packed year for medical marijuana advocates – indeed, so much has been happening that its been hard to keep up. In an effort to get current, Reefer Madness has compiled this cheat sheet of recent highlights:
In April, a group of doctors and medical researchers launched the American Academy of Cannabinoid Medicine, with the goal of setting the "gold standard for the practice of Cannabinoid Medicine" – in part by providing board certification for qualified practitioners.
Researchers in New Zealand have found more evidence that cannabinoids can actually help treat cancer.
New medi-pot laws are getting closer to passage in Delaware, Illinois, and New Jersey. In Jersey, the current version of the proposed medi-mari law is more strict than the original version. Still, Gov. Jon Corzine has said he will sign the measure into law if it gets to his desk. With passage of a medi-pot bill in the Illinois Senate, it now appears there is a three-way race to see which state will become the 14th to enact laws protecting ill patients using pot.
In Rhode Island, lawmakers have passed a measure that would expand the state's medi-pot law to allow state-licensed dispensaries, reports the Marijuana Policy Project. The measure will now move to Gov. Donald Carcieri.
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Austin Coke Traffickers in Federal Pokey
Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said Wednesday that an uptick in violent street crime and gang activity in neighborhoods across the city was the impetus for a more than two-year joint local-state-federal task force investigation that ended with 28 defendants sentenced to between three and 27 years in federal prison. "It is a good day for anyone who abhors violence," Acevedo said at a Wednesday afternoon press conference.
Investigators with the APD, FBI, Travis Co. Sheriff's Office, Pflugerville PD and several other Central Texas agencies joined with the Texas DPS and Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice's Office of Inspector General to crack down on a cocaine trafficking organization run through the Cinco-Tres gang (or, 5-3, which, broken down, is the 512 area code), a subset of the Bloods gang, said Acevedo. At the helm was Duane Hosea, "the head of the snake, as far as I'm concerned," Acevedo said, who is now spending 27 years in federal prison for his trafficking activities. Hosea was directly tied in with cartels south of the border in Mexico and Honduras, FBI agent Steve Hause said. The goal of the joint investigation was to break down the "entire conspiracy from the streets to Mexico," he said.
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Deuell Needles His Fellow Republicans
Sen. Bob Deuell, a medical doctor and R-Greenville, saw his bill for a needle exchange program for drug addicts – a great and overdue idea – endangered by the Democrats' chubbing in the House, and tried to amend the bill onto another one in order to save it. But Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horsehoe Bay, objected. I still haven't figured out the details, but this objection somehow endangered the main bill, so Deuell reluctantly pulled his amendment down. He then launched into an angry attack on his colleagues' lack of good sense on drug and health policy:
"I think its time, especially for you Republicans, that if we're to remain a viable party, we need to start looking at medical facts and dealing with reality and not dealing with black helicopters and other myths that are out there by the right-wing extremists."
Fraser was unmoved, joking to the press table that “black helicopters are circling.” He then told a reporter from Quorum Report, “Just because my constituents don’t believe [in] handing out needles to drug addicts doesn’t mean they are part of some black helicopter conspiracy. They just don’t support that sort of program, and neither do I.”
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Obama Afraid of Needles?
President Barack Obama has not included in his proposed budget a pledge to lift a federal ban on funding for needle exchange. During the primary campaign Obama came out in support of needle exchange as a way to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS. "The President will support common sense approaches" to promoting AIDS prevention, the White House website previously boasted. "The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users."
Now, however, that pledge has been removed from the website. A White House spokesman told the Huffington Post that the administration isn't quite ready to lift the ban, but that Obama still supports needle exchange. "We have not removed the ban in our budget proposal because we want to work with Congress and the American public to build support for the change," spokesman Ben LaBolt said. "We are committed to doing this as part of a National HIV/AIDS strategy and are confident that we can build support for these scientifically-based programs" -- they're just not that interested, apparently.
Meanwhile, also included in the proposed budget is the so-called Barr Amendment, which blocks Washington, D.C., from implementing a medi-pot law that voters there passed in 1998. At the time, then-Republican Georgia Congressman Bob Barr was so irritated by the 70% voter approval for the measure that he authored the amendment which would strip the District of all funding if officials tried to implement the voter-approved measure. Ironically, in March 2007, Barr changed his tune, joining the Marijuana Policy Project as a lobbyist in order to press for the repeal of his own amendment. So far, it would seem, he hasn't gotten very far.
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