cannabisnews.com: Local Rep Backs Bill To Legalize Medical Marijuana





Local Rep Backs Bill To Legalize Medical Marijuana
Posted by CN Staff on April 19, 2008 at 06:00:06 PT
By Michael Alexander 
Source: Daily Pilot
Washington, D.C. -- U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher has signed on to a bill by Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank that would legalize medical marijuana on a federal level.Every year Rohrabacher co-sponsors the Hinchey-Rohrabacher Amendment, which has not passed but would bar the Department of Justice from spending money to enforce marijuana cases in states that have legalized it for medical purposes.
This bill, which was also sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), goes a step further and would begin to reclassify marijuana as a prescription drug, but Rohrabacher said it was consistent with his beliefs and didn’t force states to accept medical marijuana.“If people of a state want to keep it illegal, they themselves could prohibit that,” he said. “It goes a little bit further, but it still maintains the local and state government’s right to make the decision as to whether or not this is a proper function of government.”This bill is not the same as another one Frank introduced this week that would remove federal penalties for the personal use of small amounts of marijuana.“I’m certainly not a co-sponsor of that bill,” Rohrabacher said. “If it ever comes to the floor, I’d have to make that decision.”Source: Daily Pilot (Costa Mesa, CA)Author: Michael Alexander Published: Saturday, April 19, 2008Copyright: 2008 Daily PilotContact: dailypilot latimes.comWebsite: http://www.dailypilot.com/Related Articles: Rep. Frank Wants To Legalize Pothttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread23845.shtmlFrank Wants To Drop Federal Penalties for Pothttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread23838.shtmlBarney Frank: My Pot Bill Liveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread23801.shtml 
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Comment #6 posted by Hope on April 20, 2008 at 10:54:11 PT
Stormcrow....
I think of that book often these days.Birdsong, once so common as to hardly be noticed around here, now surprises me and fills me with joy and sorrow at the same time. Joy that it happens and sorrow and fear that it doesn't happen as much as it should.
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Comment #5 posted by Storm Crow on April 20, 2008 at 09:13:44 PT
Time to re-read......
"Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson. 
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Comment #4 posted by Hope on April 19, 2008 at 10:05:26 PT
Bees and Birds
Since I was a small child, I've been fascinated and always looking out for that first Robin to show up in the spring. They were always large, plump, roundish birds that delighted me and I always saw them as a delightful harbinger of spring. There should be a lot of them by now. A couple of weeks ago I finally saw a Robin. I was dismayed. I've never in all my many years seen one like it. It was so small and miserable looking. It was obviously not well. It was so small, all fluffed up, as birds do when they are unwell, raggedy, and frail looking. It certainly wasn't singing. It looked like it could just drop off the branch, dying, any minute. It was just the one and it was in bad shape.Also, I just learned last week, and I've done a lot of reading about them in the past, that the vicious "Killer" bees that came up from South America are not, and were never, some sort of naturally occurring bees. They were created in a lab and escaped. They were trying to make a bee that made more honey. Greed and slavery at work even on the hardworking bee. What have our greedy corporations wrought? Killer bees for one. We've spread poisons and chemicals upon the earth and in the air for a long time now. It seems more than obvious that there's been a lot of "Collateral damage". We've harmed things that we didn't, or certainly, shouldn't have, wanted to harm. Kind of like the War on Some Drugs.I haven't seen a single bee this spring, but I have seen a lot of red wasps and a few yellow jackets. A red wasp stung me right here at the computer about a week ago.
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Comment #3 posted by Had Enough on April 19, 2008 at 09:22:20 PT
Bees
Thanks for that post…The other morning I stepped outside the back door, on the porch there were about three -dozen dead bees lying there. They were not there when I shut the door the night before, around midnight. So sometime between midnight and around 7 am is when they arrived. Also I’ve been seeing them in other places where you don’t normally see them, and I’ve noticed they don’t seem to act to healthy. I had one land on the door of my truck… while I was leaning on the door. A friend pointed him out to me and said look out you might get stung. I looked at the bee and he was hardly moving, it looked like it was doing everything it could just to hang on to the door. I told my friend the he isn’t going to sting anyone standing here. He backed up about 6 ft, I stayed leaning on the door and about 2 to 3 minutes he finally flew off. If mankind loses the bees, we are in trouble.************More on MerckMerck Caught in Massive Scientific Fraud as In-House Authors were Disguised as Independent Scientists (opinion) (NaturalNews) Drug giant Merck has been caught red-handed in a scheme to deceive the FDA and the public over the integrity of its scientific studies, say top medical authorities. According to reports that were (amazingly!) published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and detailed in the Washington Post, Merck waged a "campaign of deception" to disguise its in-house study authors as independent scientists working for universities. This scheme made the studies appear independent and unbiased, allowing them to carry more apparent credibility to FDA officials, doctors and other scientists.This fraud was conducted to boost the apparent scientific credibility of the studies backing Vioxx, a drug that has caused well over 100,000 heart attacks and likely killed well over 50,000 Americans, according to Senate testimony by the FDA's own senior drug safety researcher Dr. David Graham. Vioxx earned Merck $2.3 billion in 2003 alone, and was one of the most lucrative drugs ever sold by any company. But since 2004, when some of the real dangers of the drug became known, a tremendous amount of evidence leading to fraud has surfaced.It now appears quite clear that Merck deliberately lied about the dangers of the drug, misrepresented the results of scientific studies, deceived the FDA to win drug approval, knowingly covered up evidence of the drug's dangers, and now it seems Merck even conducted a deliberate campaign of deceptive ghostwriting designed to attach independent-sounding names to in-house studies that were essentially pro-Vioxx promotional pieces disguised as scientific reports.more…http://www.naturalnews.com:80/023052.html
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Comment #2 posted by mykeyb420 on April 19, 2008 at 08:50:02 PT
Bee AIDS
OT
 In case you are wondering where all the bees are going,,here is a story on Bee AIDS. 
 (I wonder if they can get medical marijuana)
Bee AIDS
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Comment #1 posted by FoM on April 19, 2008 at 06:45:22 PT
Press Release From MPP
Michigan Senate Wants To Restrict It's Citizens Initiative ProcessBy Richard Owl Mirror April 18, 2008 Michigan Senate may vote on restricting initiative process as soon as Tuesday; act nowOn Wednesday, April 16, the Senate Committee on Campaign and Election Oversight passed a bill that would restrict the initiative signature-gathering process. The full Senate could take up the bill as soon as Tuesday, so there's no time to lose: Please ask your legislators to oppose this unconstitutional bill.The bill, SJR K, proposes a state constitutional amendment to require signature gatherers to collect at least 100 valid signatures from 42 of Michigan's counties. It would also let the legislature make that threshold even higher. SJR K would also require an initiative to include the signature of at least one registered voter from each of Michigan's 83 counties. It would violate equal protection and dramatically increase the cost and energy needed to qualify a statewide ballot. It would also give the voters of any single county - including one with only about 2,000 voters - veto power over the rest of the entire state.A federal appellate court found that a similar requirement in Nevada violated equal protection by giving voters in sparsely populated counties more of a voice than voters in densely populated counties. In addition to being unconstitutional, SJR K could cost Michigan voters tens of thousands of dollars, since Nevada had to pay the attorneys' fees who litigated against that state's unconstitutional signature distribution requirement.Why should you care?You might wonder what this has to do with marijuana policy reform. If it wasn't for the initiative process, Michigan voters wouldn't be able to decide whether to allow the medical use of marijuana this November.In a span of less than six months, more than half a million Michiganders signed a petition to put the medical marijuana initiative on the ballot in November. Dozens of people volunteered, and even quit their jobs, to give voters a chance to protect patients.A signature from someone in a sparsely populated county shouldn't count any more a signature from Wayne County. Under SJR K, even if half the state's voters signed a petition, it would not qualify if petitioners couldn't find a person from a remote 2,200-person county who was willing to sign it. It's wrong to give a tiny portion of the state's population veto power and impose enormous costs on petitioners.So, what are you waiting for?Ask your state senator not to restrict the initiative process: https://ssl.capwiz.com/mpp/issues/alert/?alertid=11284046http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977326975&grpId=3659174697244816&nav=Groupspace
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