Cannabis News Students for Sensible Drug Policy
  Demonising Druggies Wins Votes
Posted by FoM on June 15, 2001 at 10:15:43 PT
Special Drug Report - The Guardian 
Source: Guardian Unlimited 

justice It is a strange but revealing fact that hundreds of thousands of people in this country are currently afflicted by a dangerous and highly infectious disease and that, even though the government has been warned repeatedly that many thousands of these people will die, the current position of the Department of Health is that it is reviewing the report of an advisory group to decide whether it might then set up a special working group which might then develop a strategy to deal with it. The disease is hepatitis C, which attacks the liver.

Even though there are probably at least 300,000 sufferers in the UK; even though specialist doctors say that 100,000 of them will suffer cirrhosis or cancer of the liver in the next five or 10 years; even though the infection is still spreading: the position remains that the Department of Health has set up no system to monitor the epidemic, has failed to fund any kind of public information campaign, refuses to offer systematic screening or testing for potential carriers, has established no prevention strategy at all and refuses even to treat many sufferers.

The explanation for this extraordinary lack of action appears to be that almost all of the victims of hepatitis C belong to one of the least popular political minorities in Britain - drug users, who contracted the illness by using dirty injection equipment.

Dr Tom Waller, who chairs the medical pressure group Action on Hepatitis C, says it is "a distinct possibility" that this is the cause of the problem. "This is life threatening to a large number of people. You'd think the Department of Health would want to stand on its head if necessary to prevent it."

As it is, many health authorities simply refuse to fund the best available treatment, which involves a combination of interferon and ribavirin.

There is no arm of British healthcare which has been so perverted by politics as the treatment of drug users. In the early days of American prohibition, this was the politics of racism - spics and niggers smoked marijuana, chinks smoked opium, and they would all get what was coming to them.

In the 60s, it was the politics of reaction - hippies smoked everything and attacked the establishment, so the establishment attacked them back. Now, it is simply the pure politics of power: you win votes by waging war on druggies.

You can see the politics perverting the healthcare with particular clarity in New Labour's adoption of Drug Treatment and Testing Orders. The problem here is not just the moral one of whether it is acceptable to compel drug users to undergo treatment under threat of punishment. Nor is it simply the practical problem of allowing those who have broken the law to jump the queue for treatment in front of those who have not. The real problem with DTTOs is that they are a political project built on a foundation of falsehood.

It was the Home Office minister Paul Boateng who last September announced that courts all over England and Wales would now be allowed to impose DTTOs to compel offenders to undergo treatment for their drug problems. Mr Boateng explained that his decision followed three pilot schemes, in Croydon, Liverpool and Gloucester, which had proved to be successful.

Among those who took part in the pilots, he said, there had been a "dramatic" fall in the number of offences they committed and in the amount of money which they spent on drugs. The reality, however, was rather different.

One of the key questions for these pilots was whether drug users would cooperate with treatment which was being forced upon them. The researchers who were hired to study the three pilot schemes found that, even though the 210 offenders had been handpicked, nearly half of them (46%) vanished or were thrown out of the scheme long before it finished its trial run; numerous others were warned for breaching its conditions; and the researchers found that "failure to meet conditions of the order was common in all three sites".

Mr Boateng simply did not mention any of this. One of the "dramatic" results to which Mr Boateng referred was that within a month of being put on the order, offenders had cut their weekly spending on drugs from £400 to only £25. This was, indeed, a dramatic fall, which sat oddly with the conclusion of the researchers that "quite clearly, many offenders in all three pilot sites were continuing to use illegal drugs".

It turns out that this supposedly dramatic result was based entirely on untested claims made by those offenders who had not already been thrown off the scheme and who knew that if they were caught taking drugs, they were liable to be sent back to court for a harsher punishment. Furthermore, these offenders who were claiming to have cut their spending on drugs by 94% had been failing urine tests throughout the scheme: they had failed 42% of their heroin tests, 45% of cocaine tests and 58% of methadone tests.

In some cases, they were failing more urine tests at the end of the 18-month pilot than they had been at the halfway point. Indeed, their con-sumption of drugs remained so high that, by the end of the trial, all three schemes had stopped even requiring them to be drug free, asking only that they "make progress in addressing" their drug problems. Mr Boateng did not mention any of this either.

The other "dramatic" result on which Mr Boateng relied for his success story was that, within a month, offenders were committing far less crime - only 34 offences a month compared to 137. But this, too, was based on nothing more than asking the offenders who stayed in the scheme whether they had been out thieving. Mr Boateng failed to mention that some of these law-abiding guinea pigs were actually arrested for committing new offences during the pilots.

At the end of the 18-month scheme, the researchers could find only 27 of the 210 offenders who "seemed to emerge drug free" - and they were able to come to that conclusion only by a) overlooking the fact that only 13 offenders passed the final urine tests and b) ignoring their use of cannabis. The best that the researchers could say was that the scheme was "promising but not proven".

However, none of this troubled Mr Boateng. Even though these pilots had been set up explicitly "to enable the Home Office to decide whether or not to extend the order across the country" and even though the results were so equivocal, Mr Boateng went ahead and declared them "successful" and invested £60m of taxpayers' money in rolling them out nationally.

He managed to square this with the results of the pilot studies with one brilliantly effective tactic: in a move which left his researchers "flabbergasted", he simply did not wait to be told the bad news and made his decision months before the results of the research were known. And this really did not matter at all because even if the scheme does fail, its no-nonsense toughness on druggies has been a great success from the political point of view.

The real problem, however, lies deeper - in the profound and alarming ignorance of the power elite. There are vocal politicians and senior officials who make policy on drugs and there are leader writers and pundits who support them, and yet they genuinely do not know the first thing about them.

Specifically, the politicians' love of prohibition identifies the drugs themselves as the source of danger to their users. As the Guardian showed yesterday, the truth is that the real dangers come from the black market which has been created by prohibition.

By refusing to acknowledge this medically verifiable fact, the politicians have created a treatment strategy which consistently pushes highly vulnerable drug users into extreme danger. Take heroin as an example.

Until the early 70s, Britain was a haven of enlightenment: every doctor in the country had the right to prescribe heroin for the welfare of patients. This reflected the idea, powerfully proposed by the Rolleston committee in 1926, that drug use should be seen as a problem which needed help, not as a sin which needed punishment.

There were fewer than 500 addicts in the country, most of them musicians or Chinese. With a clean, legal supply of their drug, they remained healthy and were able to live normal lives. Then three London doctors were caught selling inflated prescriptions; there was a moral panic; and Britain's resistance to prohibition started to crumble under political pressure, some of it from the United States which was already committed to imposing a global policy of prohibition.

The result was that doctors generally were forbidden to prescribe heroin to addicts, who were thus forced to buy their supplies illegally: the black market started to grow, inflicting illness and infection on addicts and embroiling them in theft and prostitution to find funds. A small detachment of common-sense realism slipped under the fence, but was soon pinned down by hostile political fire: the Home Office agreed to license specialist psychiatrists to continue to prescribe for heroin users.

This might have saved addicts from disaster, but, as the babble of the prohibitionists drowned the voice of reason, the Home Office - apparently under more pressure from the United States - undermined the system by insisting that these licensed doctors should prescribe heroin substitutes, such as physeptone and methadone, instead of heroin. Furthermore, the Home Office insisted, these substitutes should be prescribed only in rationed and rapidly diminishing quantities.

This sealed the catastrophe: most heroin users did not like physeptone and methadone and sold their supplies; those who did like them found their supplies were rapidly cut off. In either event, to satisfy their addiction, they were pushed back on to the black market, back to the dangers. The British system of support for addicts, which had been admired around the world, was dead.

Since then, it has emerged that the government's favourite heroin substitute, methadone, is more addictive than heroin and also more likely to cause fatal overdose. In a detailed study, Methadone and Heroin, an exercise in medical scepticism, Dr Ben Goldacre found that: "Methadone is a more dangerous drug than heroin, and causes more deaths than even adulterated street heroin."

A study by Dr Russell Newcombe, senior lecturer at John Moores University, Liverpool, found that methadone was four times more likely than heroin to cause a fatal overdose. And yet - for entirely political reasons - this is the drug which the government insists be prescribed to heroin addicts.

The bottom line now is that after 30 years of prohibition, the number of heroin addicts has rocketed from less than 500 to as many as 500,000. Around 20,000 of them are being given the arguable benefit of a limited prescription for methadone. And the number of heroin addicts who are allowed a limited prescription for a safe supply of the drug to which they are addicted is less than 500. The hundreds of thousands of others are are thrown out on to the black market, condemning them to precisely the dangers from which which the politicians claim to be saving them.

New Labour's strategy for the treatment of heroin users compounds all of these errors - consistently increasing the risk to addicts. So, for example, ignoring more than 15 years of medical warning on the relative danger of methadone, the Department of Health's new 1999 prescribing guidelines, known as the Orange Book, continue to advise doctors who care for heroin addicts to prescribe methadone instead of heroin.

And, repeating the policy which for 30 years has pushed addicts into the dangers of the black market, the Orange Book continues to urge that doctors should generally prescribe only in rationed and rapidly diminishing quantities.

The Orange Book makes matters even worse by giving GPs an explicit responsibility not just to prescribe the approved quantity of methadone but then to ensure that "the drug is used appropriately and not diverted on to the illegal market". GPs have no such power. The result is that, spurred on by the government's ferocious rhetoric, police have moved in on doctors whose patients have sold their methadone or overdosed: GPs in Carlisle, Essex, London, Luton, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Suffolk and Surrey have found themselves in serious trouble.

This, in turn, has had a chilling effect on other GPs who might have considered prescribing methadone to local users as a temporary refuge from the black market. Professor Gerry Stimson, of Imperial College London, who has studied illicit drugs for 30 years, told us: "We're seeing court cases against doctors and other drugs workers, or police attention to prescribing doctors, which is actually scaring many doctors away."

Across the field, the government's professed desire to offer more treatment to drug users is being undermined by its hardline politics. Chemists who try to supply prescriptions of methadone or diamorphine report hostile visits from police. The All Party Parliamentary Drugs Misuse Group last year took evidence of a psychiatric ward where drug users seeking treatment had been confronted by police with sniffer dogs.

A north London priest, Father Peter Anderson, found himself denounced by the local coroner for supposedly condoning criminal activity because he had allowed homeless drug users to sleep in the grounds of his church. A Release conference last year heard that, if a drug user overdoses, other users are often scared to call an ambulance for fear of being arrested.

Professor Stimson says the root of the problem is the government's ferocious rhetoric: "It sets the wrong tone. You are dealing with people who are already quite marginalised and stigmatised and, if you are having that sort of rhetoric, then you are pointing the finger, scapegoating people. But also politicians get carried away with that rhetoric and they become tougher, they dream up new legislation, they dream up tougher ways of doing things which can backfire and can have adverse effects."

So, for example, the government wants police to be able to deny bail to anyone they suspect of being involved with drugs (so users will be discouraged from carrying their own clean needles or drugs-advice leaflets); to introduce new licences to limit the number of doctors who can prescribe injectible methadone as opposed to the oral linctus (so users who like to inject will end up using black-market needles in dirty conditions); to remove the passports of anyone who has a drug offence (so no past user will ever be able to enjoy a normal life).

The drugs war is a political war. It was political when, as Edward Jay Epstein recorded, President Nixon gave a shot in the arm to his election campaign by fiddling the figures to create a non-existent heroin epidemic, from which he could then promise to rescue the electorate. It was political when Tony Blair announced his plans to appoint a "drugs tsar" - in a secondary school full of sweet, vulnerable children in the middle of the 1997 election campaign.

The masters of the war have always been American politicians. When the Swiss held a referendum on limited heroin legalisation in 1997/8, the US congressional subcommittee on national security, international affairs and criminal justice openly intervened. "We wholeheartedly oppose this sort of government gambit," the committee declared, as though it had some sort of jurisdiction in Switzerland.

When Dr John Marks was forced to close Britain's most successful recent project to provide clean heroin for addicts, on Merseyside, the International Herald Tribune carried a report that American drugs agencies had been infuriated when they saw the project on CBS television: "Dr Marks was warned by friends in the Home Office that the US embassy was exerting tremendous pressure to shut him down and, in the end, it was successful."

New Labour drugs policy has been shaped by political infighting. The Home Office tried to stop Keith Hellawell setting targets for reduction in drug use. Hellawell went off to Downing Street and got the prime minister on side. The Home Office then complained that the targets were too high. Hellawell persisted and then found reporters were being briefed that his targets were nonsense since nobody knew how many people were using drugs now, so there was no baseline to set a future target.

In the meantime, the prime minister announced that anyone who is arrested will be urine-tested for drugs; Hellawell's people had a fit because they hadn't approved the plan and, very soon, reporters were being briefed that the PM's plan would be "kicked into the long grass". And in the background, Hellawell was falling out with the Department of Health which produced its Orange Book guidelines for doctors without consulting him. "I am the line," he announced.

In this politically charged atmosphere, it is a heresy to question the value of prohibition. Transform, the only pressure group campaigning for legalisation, wants to commission an opinion poll which may show politicians that public opinion has moved ahead of them, but, at the moment, nobody with any power dares to break ranks. The interesting thing is that the group who in private are now most keen on legalisation are chief constables.

We spoke to four of them who were passionately opposed to the war against drugs. None of them would speak publicly. What they can see, however, is that there is a way out. The war against drugs is unique in all conflict: we can win it, simply by ceasing to fight it.

The faith of well-meaning liberals in New Labour's plan to offer more treatment for drug users has all the moral force of well-meaning Christian folk in the 19th century who considered the use of child labour in Victorian coal mines, saw that it was wrong, lacked the political or intellectual courage to say that it must stop and suggested instead that their hours of work might be limited. No treatment strategy will succeed for as long as it is based on the medically false but politically popular idea that the nature of these drugs is such that they must be banned.

Future historians will look back on our treatment of drug users in the same way as we now look back on the Victorian treatment of those in Bedlam - beaten for their pain. Every victim of the war against drugs is a lesson in the futility of the war, a message of contradiction to the politicians' errors.

They may have become drug users for all kinds of reasons - the pursuit of pleasure, or obsessive flight from pain - but most of those who have lost their jobs or homes, most of those who have been driven into prostitution or thieving, most of those who have become ill or who have died, have been sacrificed to the ambition of politicians who never did have any reason to attack them; but they continue to do so now only because they are too stupid or too ignorant or too callous or too plain scared to admit the truth, that, with their policy of prohibition, they are themselves the architects of this disaster.

Milestones in the Phoney War:

• Until 1971, any GP free to prescribe heroin. Fewer than 500 addicts countrywide

• 1968 three doctors caught over-prescribing

• 1971 Passage of misuse of drugs act which outlawed heroin

• 1995 Dr John Marks forced to stop supplying clean heroin to addicts, despite high success rates, apparently due to pressure from the US

• 1997 Tony Blair appoints drug tsar Keith Hallawell

• 2001 number of addicts is estimated to be up to 500,000

Additional research by Max Houghton.

Nick Davies's programme, Drugs - The Phoney War, is to be shown on Channel Four at 9pm on Tuesday June 19

Note: Our drugs policy is clearly disastrous. Over the past 30 years, it has resulted in a thousandfold increase in heroin addicts, many ill and destitute. But, concludes Nick Davies, politicians are too scared - or too stupid - to admit it.

Complete Title: Demonising Druggies Wins Votes, That's All That Counts

Source: Guardian Unlimited, The (UK)
Published: Friday June 15, 2001
Copyright: 2001 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Contact: letters@guardian.co.uk
Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Related Articles & Web Site:

Special Report: Drugs in Britain
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs

Hepatitis C Information Board
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fdrugpolicytalkfrm9

The Heroin Challenge
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread10061.shtml

Make Heroin Legal - Part I
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread10053.shtml


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Comment #10 posted by Lehder on June 16, 2001 at 06:54:19 PT
cowards
thanks for a most interesting link, DdC, which i'll repeat:
http://www.marijuananews.com/smokin_professor_still_can.htm

So professor emeritus of chemistry julian heicklen can smoke marijuana in public, dare the police to arrest him and walk away. Well, one must ask why. Can this behavior be tolerated ? Doesn't it send the wrong message to children - 'come to college, blow weed with impunity'?

Here is the message that the government's failure to prosecute sends to me: The government is afraid to prosecute successful and influential people who would defy it. Robert Downey, no hero of mine, is the exception because he gladly cowers before the judge and admits to having a problem. Perhaps he does have a real problem with drugs - and that is why he's being prosecuted.

Now Julian Heicklen has a problem not with marijuana but with the government, and that is partly why he has not been arrested. He would be happy to explain his problem to a judge, and the more publicized and prolonged the criminal proceedings, the better. That's why Carl Sagan - his friendship with Lester Grinspoon never a secret - was never arrested. He too would have fought back with the truth to avoid prison and the American public would have listened.

The governemnt knows that its criminal drug war industry simply could not bear serious public scrutiny. It's one thing to intimidate a financially weak and unknown person with prison, obtain his admission of guilt and send him to drug court. But an O.J. Simpson type of trial of a powerful and influential person who would fight back could be a great embarrassment to the government. And a whole series of such high-profile drug trials could end the so-called war on drugs.

Speaking of O.J. Simpson, there was in fact a bit of the drug war in that trial. You may remember that the defense had originally called Kary Mullis, Nobel prize winner in chemistry and inventor of polymerase chain reaction, to testify on the validity of dna testing at the O.J. trial. He was shown on television news upon his arrival in LA to testify at the trial and advertised then, along with his other distinctions, as an advocate of taking LSD! A guy like this, like Heicklen, scares the government. And that is why, without explanation, Mullis simply disappeared from the trial, never testified, and no reason for his absence was ever given. I strongly suspect that federal authorities got johnny cochran straightened out: no testimony from Mullis.

Famous, influential and respected people who fight back can cause the government problems which it has not been able to solve with propaganda, lies or prisons. Thanks to Julian Heicklen for rubbing their noses in their hypocrisy.



[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #9 posted by DdC on June 15, 2001 at 20:03:09 PT
"DEATH TO THE DRUGGIES"
"DEATH TO THE DRUGGIES"
http://www.marijuananews.com/death_to_the_druggies.htm

A Look at Prohibitionist Rhetoric and Its Consequences by Julian Heicklen
February10, 1998

Julian Heicklen is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Penn State University.This and other articles are available on his web site http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/p/jph13/

See The Smokin' Professor Still Can't Get Arrested So He Is Making His Points --Escalating His Challenge
http://www.marijuananews.com/smokin_professor_still_can.htm

and The Penn State Professor Who Can't Get Arrested Gets An Articulate Ally: A Local Editor!
http://www.marijuananews.com/penn_state_professor_who_can.htm

and The Professor Still Can't Get Arrested Smoking Marijuana at Penn State Gates -- Says: "I am an advocate of freedom."
http://www.marijuananews.com/professor_still_can.htm

and Police Refuse to Arrest 65-year-old Penn State Chemistry Professor Taking Part In Smokeout
http://www.marijuananews.com/police_refuse_to_arrest_65year.htm

Senator Orin Hatch, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and 28 Senate co-sponsors have introduced Bill S. 3 that mandates that a person convicted of bringing into the United States "100 usual dosage amounts" of several illicit substances including two ounces of marijuana be sentenced to life without parole for a first offense and death for a second offense.

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and 37 House co-sponsors have introduced Bill H. R. 41 with the identical provision. On May 8, 1997, Speaker Gingrich said: "If you sell it, we're going to kill you."

William Bennett, the first U. S. "Drug Czar" has said:
"The non-addicted or casual irregular user is likely to have a still-intact family, social and work life. These are the users who should have their names published in local papers. They should be subject to drivers' license suspension, employer notification, overnight or weekend detention, eviction from public housing, or forfeiture of the cars they drive while purchasing drugs."

On "Larry King Live," June 15, 1989, a caller to the national cable television show suggested to Drug "Czar" William Bennett: "Behead the damn drug dealers." Mr. Bennett's response was: "I mean what the caller suggests is morally plausible. Legally, it's difficult But somebody selling drugs to a kid? Morally, I don't have any problem with that at all." Mr. Bennett reiterated his position the next day in a written statement that told drug dealers: "You deserve to die."

Thomas J. Gleaton, Director of PRIDE has said: "We, as parents of all nations, must say to our local law enforcement officer, 'If my child, my loved one, or my friend breaks the law by using illicit drugs, please arrest him or her.'"

Folks, this is your America. Because of the hysteria of our national leaders, not only has reason left the land, but so has the law. Recently in Centre County, Alan Gordon was on trial for possession of marijuana. His experience with the criminal justice system is an example of how the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pennsylvania Constitution are trashed.

continued
http://www.marijuananews.com/death_to_the_druggies.htm

Free the POW's
http://www.cannabinoid.com/boards/politics/media/36/36684.gif
I LOST MY FREEDOM Linx
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fendingcannabisprohibitionlinx.showMessage?topicID=22.topic

Don't Hold Your Breath in All This Smoke
http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread9974.shtml

why support prohibition
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fendingcannabisprohibitionstuff.showMessage?topicID=122.topic

Food Stamps Become a Weapon in the War on Drugs
http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread9965.shtml
http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/politics/media/36/36958.gif

Assassins of Youth
http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/politics/media/36/36796.gif
Stossel: Drug Program Doesn't Work
http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread9870.shtml

Lots of Jobs and Alternatives to the Fossils and Fossil Fuels.
Hemp Applications
http://www.cannabinoid.com/wwwboard/politics/binaries/29/29800.gif
Products
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[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #8 posted by FoM on June 15, 2001 at 16:10:14 PT
test
test

[ Post Comment ]
 
Comment #7 posted by greenfox on June 15, 2001 at 13:59:19 PT
Troutmask...
do you work for norml or something? ;) I've been a member for yesrs. ..now.

-gf/.


[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #6 posted by TroutMask on June 15, 2001 at 13:45:15 PT
Speaking of Pictures...
Speaking of pictures, did anyone see the handsome picture of Dr. Russo in the latest NORML newsletter?

IF YOU DIDN'T, DON'T MISS THE NEXT OPPORTUNITY!!!!

Join NORML TODAY AND GET A FREE T-SHIRT!!!!

www.norml.org

[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #5 posted by FoM on June 15, 2001 at 13:41:59 PT
Greenfox
That sounds good. Send me the pictures. I think it would be best to send just one picture at a time but I could be wrong. I don't have a good isp connection so let's try it and see if it works.

[ Post Comment ]
 
Comment #4 posted by greenfox on June 15, 2001 at 13:12:47 PT
One last note on my trip...(duplicate post)
Actually, I've smoked many a j before, Pontifix. :) This, was at best, my stoned banter if I led you to believe otherwise.

FOM:

I will do my best to upload them. I may just email them to you because in the cyber cafes over there they charge by the hour, so it'll be easier that way. Besides, I have a "anonymous" email account, (so big brother can suck my.. um... big, fat, juicy, rock-hard, ....ripe cola) ;)

anyway...

Indeed, I am looking forward to all this "nonsense" (as the Dutch have it quite straight, or in this case, crooked) A friend who was supposed to come with me was in a terrible car accident- it took a piece of his leg. After several hours of intense hospital frustration (and a titanium rod!) they were able to put his leg back together. However, being that it was TWO DAYS before my last trip to the Netherlands (he was supposed to be there WITH ME last time in January,) he was unable to attend.

However, I talked him into it. After several months of recovery, he'll be comming along this time. It's actually pretty screwed up because for me it will be like yesterday. But my friend has never seen the wonders.....

Well, I will set up a "virtual tour" of Amsterdam. We'll call it "greenfox's spaced out trip" ;) and there will be a plethora of pictures to be... HAD.

a few "for sures" (you WILL see pictures of these places):

· The Grey Area, home of the "Grey Mist" kif- pure THC!

· Dutch Flowers, strategically located across the street from a bakery

· De Kaul's, home of the all-too-powerful NL5 x Haze joints- prerolled for your pleasure!

· BlueBird, lots of hash... GOOD hash!

· Sensi Seedbank, must 'stock up' on stock! gf <> >:)

· Sagamartha, beautiful little plants in the window...

......... and that's just a few.... I think you guys will like the pictures and if NOTHING ELSE I PROMISE to post on this channel while I am there. After all, I need to keep up on how Uncle Sam is doing raping my beautiful country. ;)

((I am going to post this in a newer message so that you are sure to see it, FoM. Please don't mind the duplicate!)) :)


Brothers, Sisters, ... I love you all, I am very happy. Hopefully, a day will come when I can invite you ALL out to enjoy my "bounties" :) Until then, I will be free, (for a while anyway..) I will be in touch.

Peace & love all.

(and, of course, my crafty tagline...)

sly in green, foxy in kind
-greenf0x


[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #3 posted by observer on June 15, 2001 at 12:41:05 PT
tar baby
The interesting thing is that the group who in private are now most keen on legalisation are chief constables. We spoke to four of them who were passionately opposed to the war against drugs. None of them would speak publicly. What they can see, however, is that there is a way out. The war against drugs is unique in all conflict: we can win it, simply by ceasing to fight it.

see:

THE WONDERFUL TAR BABY STORY
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG97/remus/tar-baby.html



[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #2 posted by Pontifex on June 15, 2001 at 12:04:49 PT:

Don't expect a reprieve from Bush, either
Well put, Jack. I think you addressed the root cause of
the war on drugs -- the many constitutencies that get
their bread and butter from this interminable conflict.

To your list, also add: prison guard unions,
petrochemical companies, Democratic/Republican
politicians and more. All of them draw sustenance
from the War on Drugs, and that -- not any sort of logical
debate -- is the reason the war grinds on, endlessly.

Bush has already proven that his free market rhetoric is
totally empty. You'll notice he caved into lobbyists from
the steel industry and is now demanding new
restrictions on imported steel. These restrictions will
directly harm all industries and consumers that
purchase steel or steel-made products, but gain Bush
the backing of the well organized steel industry.

So if Bush will sell out his supposed conservative
principles for a bit of backing from the steel industry,
you know he will never, ever, EVER
countenance industrial hemp, to say nothing of medical
marijuana.

The Republicans and Democrats are part of the
problem. Only third party politicians or maverick
independents dare oppose the War on Drugs in any
form.


[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #1 posted by Jack H on June 15, 2001 at 10:48:07 PT
Excellent article
As an American I must say that it will only take the protests of other countries to push the US into ending prohibition. If the DEA wants to find the evil in the war they should monitor the politicians who push for criminal penalties. Unless these politicians are grossly misinformed (doubtful), there has got to be some sort of lobbying by the black marketeers, textile industries, law enforcement agencies, and pharmeceutical companies. They are the only ones who seem to benefit. Not the majority of citizens. But of course the DEA falls into law enforcement, so who will spy on family?

If any country has any balls out there-- fight our global policies on prohibition - The information is out there. Countries seem to be leaning on legalizing marijuana (Portugal, Jamaica, Canada) And excpect more drug-war propaganda to surface in the coming months. Stand firm and never be swayed by anyone telling you there is such a thing as limited freedom.

We know the vast uses for Marijuana- So of course the government must know as well. That is the economic/social catastrophy Bush is talking about. Industries that produce nylon and cotton will lose market share. Pharmecies will lose business once the word has gotten out that weed can reduce pain in ANY ailment. It makes me sick when I think of why there is prohibition today. But at least I know of a great substance to cure my migraines.

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