DdC

Part of the reason that the government has been so ineffective in stopping people from using marijuana just might stem from the ludicrous, biased and often racist arguments it used to make the plant illegal in the first place.

Marijuana has been prohibited under federal law since 1937, when Congress, acting on fears brought up by the DEA's predecessor, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, passed the Marihuana Tax Act.

Although bureau Commissioner Harry Anslinger told Congress that marijuana was an addictive drug used primarily by Mexicans, "Negroes" and jazz musicians "which produces in its users insanity, criminality and death," William C. Woodward, chief counselor for the American Medical Association, lobbied against the act, saying, "The American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marijuana is a dangerous drug."

Woodward, who was later misrepresented on the floor of the Senate as having solidly supported the bill, was told after his testimony that the committee was "sick of hearing him" and was advised to "go home."

The only testimony that supported Anslinger's claims came from a Temple University pharmacologist who claimed to have injected a cannabis extract into the brains of 300 dogs, one of whom later died. After the law passed, the pharmacologist, James C. Munch, went on the narcotics bureau payroll as its "official expert" on marijuana.

Although he was later reprimanded by the bureau for testifying in court that he had once used the drug himself--he evidently told a jury in New York that, "After two puffs from a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat"--Munch still served as the bureau's pot expert until 1962.

Note: The federal government's credibility on marijuana is suspect.

Pot Turns Man Into Bat
<a href="http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread15947.shtml" target="_blank">http ://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread15947.shtml</A>
Source: Chico News & Review, The (CA)
Author: Josh Indar
Published: April 10, 2003
Website: <a href="http://www.newsreview.com" target="_blank">http ://www.newsreview.com</A>
Contact: chicoletters@newsrev iew.com

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Green Green Grass of Home
April 13, 2003 at 18:28:21 PT
By Yitzhak Laor
Source: Ha`aretz Daily

What is so frightening about those green, green leaves to the point where parents who smoke them on Friday, sign the petition against hashish that their children bring home from the school principal on Sunday?

The founding father of Christianity, Shaul Hatarsi - that is, Paul - understood the connection between prohibition and sin when he wrote in the Epistle to the Romans (7:7):

"I had not known sin but by the law," and therefore he based ethics not on prohibitions - that is, not on desires that are forbidden, but on love of a different kind, love without an object, the love of Jesus. In other words, Paul understood the dialectic between prohibition and desire: There is no desire without prohibition and there is no prohibition without desire. Thus far, with respect to the universal.

Henceforth, our subject is hashish. Some of the pleasure in smoking it, or eating it baked in brownies, or drinking it as an infusion (and I stress that this is just part of the pleasure, so as not to arouse the ire of the amiable Green Leaf people) has to do with the strange prohibition that society imposes on the use of products from this plant in which this book, wonderfully edited by Dan Daor, takes such delight. And indeed, before we praise this book, a word about the prohibition on cannabis. The proponents of legalization, in the spirit of Paul, say: Why create criminals through a prohibition that is not observed? Continued...
<a href="http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread15952.shtml" target="_blank">http ://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread15952.shtml</A>

The War at Home
April 11, 2003 at 09:45:38 PT
By Sanho Tree
Source: Sojourners Magazine

Our jails overflow with nonviolent drug offenders. Have we reached the point where the drug war causes more harm than the drugs themselves?

In 1965, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy tried to promote an enlightened drug policy before our country declared war on its own citizens. He told Congress, "Now, more than at any other time in our history, the addict is a product of a society which has moved faster and further than it has allowed him to go, a society which in its complexity and its increasing material comfort has left him behind.

In taking up the use of drugs the addict is merely exhibiting the outermost aspects of a deep-seated alienation from this society, of a combination of personal problems having both psychological and sociological aspects."

Kennedy continued, "The fact that addiction is bound up with the hard core of the worst problems confronting us socially makes it discouraging at the outset to talk about ‘solving' it. ‘Solving' it really means solving poverty and broken homes, racial discrimination and inadequate education, slums and unemployment...." Thirty-eight years later, the preconditions contributing to drug addiction have changed little, but our response to the problem has become overwhelmingly punitive. Continued...
<a href="http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread15940.shtml" target="_blank">http ://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread15940.shtml</A>

DrugSense: Drug War Clock
<a href="http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm" target="_blank">http ://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm</A>
Kennedy: Too Many People Are Behind Bars
<a href="http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15920.shtml" target="_blank">http ://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15920.shtml</A>
U.S. Prison Population Tops 2 Million
<a href="http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15897.shtml" target="_blank">http ://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15897.shtml</A>
An American Gulag in The Making
<a href="http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread14279.shtml" target="_blank">http ://cannabisnews.com/news/thread14279.shtml</A>
The Perils of Prop. 215
<a href="http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15946.shtml" target="_blank">http ://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15946.shtml</A>
CannabisNews -- Cannabis Archives
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The Polish State has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which I desired, and has appealed to arms. Germans in Poland are persecuted with bloody terror and driven from their houses. A series of violations of the frontier, intolerable to a great power, prove that Poland is no longer willing to respect the frontier of the Reich. In order to put an end to this lunacy, than to meet force with force from now on. The German army will fight the battle for the honor and the vital rights of reborn Germany with hard determination. I expect that every soldier, mindful of the great traditions of eternal German soldiery, will ever remain conscious that he is a representative of the National-Socialist Greater Germany. Long live our people and our Reich!
- Proclamation of Adolf Hitler September 1, 1939

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."
- Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, U.S. Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, August 12, 1945

My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision… the regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America… The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security. That duty falls to me as commander in chief by the oath I have sworn, buy the oath I will keep… (T)he only way to reduce the harm and the duration of the war is to apply the full force and might of our military, and we are prepared to do so.
- Speech by George Bush March 17, 2003

<a href="http://www.indymedia.org" target="_blank">http ://www.indymedia.org</A>

<a href="http://www.sumeria.net/politics/shadv3.html" target="_blank">The Invisible Prohibition</a>
"Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there."
- William E. Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, 1937.

U.S. law enforcement spends $7.5 to $10 billion annually enforcing marijuana laws. According to the FBI, 720,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges in 2001.
Keith Stroup, <a href="http://www.norml.org" target="_blank">(NOR ML)</a>

<a href="http://images.indymedia.org/imc/mayday/email_paul_r_222qwvi qe.gif" target="_blank">The Bushits are Coming! Paul Revere</a>

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kiWikkid

another great post packed with info and links.
i always look forward to your efforts.

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THE BLUNCH BLACK OF BLOTRE BLAME