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Bill Would Allow 'Medical' Marijuana

By Bradley Vasoli, The Bulletin
Thursday, April 30, 2009

Harrisburg — State Rep. Mark Cohen, D-202nd, of Philadelphia, introduced a proposal to legalize the use — and even cultivation — of marijuana by some physically ill Pennsylvanians yesterday.

The representative said those suffering from ailments such as cancer, HIV and wasting diseases stand to benefit from properties in marijuana that he said can mitigate their pain. He further asserted the substance could improve the sight of some patients with eye conditions.

“I am doing this on behalf of the patients standing with me today, and the thousands of others asking for a safe, sensible and legal way to manage their pain,” Mr. Cohen said. “People in pain should not either be forced to move out of state for treatment or be allowed to be dependent on an illegal criminal infrastructure for pain relief.”

His bill would permit doctors to recommend that the state allow their patients to smoke the drug. If the Pennsylvania Department of Health approves, the patients would receive a card granting them access to the substance through one of several stores throughout the state. Someone given permission to take marijuana for illness relief could possess at least one ounce of it at any given time.

Thirteen states currently allow some use of “medical” marijuana, while New York and New Jersey have pending proposals to do the same. Mr. Cohen and Pennsylvanians for Medical Marijuana spokesman Chris Goldstein billed the representative’s legislation as among the most restrictive proposed or enacted across the country.

“There are so many checks and balances,” Mr. Goldstein said.

But the Cohen bill wouldn’t simply let Pennsylvanians with permission cards buy the drug at government-regulated outlets. Some patients would gain the ability to grow up to six marijuana plants in their home at once.

Liberalizing the regulation of this substance, in the view of state Rep. Katie True, R-41st, of Lancaster County, simply burdens the state with more injurious drug use. Before becoming a legislator Mrs. True worked as youth director for the drug-prevention nonprofit Pennsylvanians AWARE and founded the anti-drug educational program Kids Saving Kids.

“Marijuana is not medicine,” she said, calling any smoked product “a very bad delivery system in itself for someone who’s sick.”

Mrs. True cited a statement by Robert DuPont, a former drug policy adviser in the Ford, Carter and Nixon administrations, suggesting marijuana advocates have misled the public on the drug’s supposed medical effects.

Dr. DuPont’s statement underscored the damage that burnt marijuana does to the lungs, the brain, the immune system and the reproductive system. It went on to endorse the use of a synthesized version of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), an active chemical in marijuana, to treat patients with applicable diseases.

Though the medicine, Marinol, has been prescribed legally to American patients since 1985, Mr. Goldstein said he does not view it favorably because of its side effects, which include increased need for sleep.

Hearing of Mr. Goldstein’s objection to Marinol, Mrs. True recalled her own experience as a friend, family member and educator helping those who consumed actual smoked marijuana. In short, they weren’t known for their ability to stay awake, she said.

She said she has noticed hardly any medical professionals come forth to endorse the partial legalization of this plant. For decades, she added, supporters of the substance have on occasion made clear that they view the legalization of the drug for medical purposes as the first step toward thorough decriminalization.

“This is all information, in my opinion, from potheads,” she said.

Mr. Cohen acknowledged his legislation aims to rebrand and improve the public’s impression of marijuana.

“It’s time to create a new, honest image for marijuana — one as a form of treatment that when prescribed by responsible doctors could help thousands of patients across this commonwealth,” he said. “The new image should be that of the senior citizen with cancer, the middle-aged person with HIV, the young person with multiple sclerosis, a grandparent with glaucoma or a father with Crohn’s disease.”

And because marijuana, even when legitimated for health purposes, won’t technically be a medicine, the representatives proposed law would place taxes and fees on its purveyance and purchase. He estimates the state would gain $25 million a year.

Mr. Cohen said he believes the bill can pass the General Assembly this session, although the state Senate’s Republican leadership is pronouncing it dead on arrival. Mrs. True said she finds even the leadership of the Democrat-controlled state House of Representatives uninterested in it.

Bradley Vasoli can be reached at bvasoli@thebulletin.us

OSHO - Strange Consequences

Hitler Wants Marijuana Legalized

Marijuana is good for you

Homer Smokes Marijuana

The Simpsons - Homer Smokes Marijuana

playing for change - 'one love'

Playing For Change | Song Around The World "One Love" from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

stand by me

Playing For Change | Song Around The World "Stand By Me" from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?

Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It's not the Netherlands.)

Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled "coffee shops," Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don't enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal's new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.

"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.

But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.

At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on "speculation and fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country's number one public health problem, he says.

"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization," says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual's "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.

Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato Institute that "it's fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to occur no matter what policies are in place — may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.

The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he says, "that is the central concession that will transform the debate."

Air Force One Photo Op Scares New Yorkers, Some Evacuate Buildings

A jumbo jetliner that serves as Air Force One, escorted by a military jet, flew over Lower Manhattan Monday morning, frightening office workers and causing evacuations in what turned out to be a publicity operation approved by a unit of the U.S. Air Force.

Louis Caldera, Director of the White House Military Office, took responsibility for the incident, saying he approved the “mission” last week. “Last week, I approved a mission over New York. I take responsibility for that decision,” he said, “While federal authorities took the proper steps to notify state and local authorities in New York and New Jersey, it’s clear that the mission created confusion and disruption. I apologize and take responsibility for any distress that flight caused.”

He provided no details on the purpose of the flight. At around 10 a.m. EDT, a Boeing 747 was seen accompanied by an F-16 fighter jet flying low over the southern tip of Manhattan and at one point seen circling the Goldman Sachs Tower in nearby Jersey City, N.J.

The circling planes were part of a “photo op,” a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said.

The larger plane was one of two highly customized Boeing 747-200 series aircraft that serve as Air Force One when the commander in chief is on board. Technically, “Air Force One” is the call sign of any Air Force aircraft carrying the president. But President Barack Obama wasn’t aboard the plane Monday. “I’m annoyed — furious is a better word — that I wasn’t told,” Mr. Bloomberg said, calling the photo opportunity “ill considered” and “badly conceived.” He added that the federal government’s decision to stage such an event near the World Trade Center “defies good judgment.” He added that if he had known about the decision he would have worked to get it reversed.





What a bunch of fucking assholes - exileguy

What the Drug Warriors Have Given Us

By Sheldon Richman


Violence among Mexico’s drug cartels and government has spilled over the U.S. border and beyond. The New York Times reports,


In the past few years, the cartels and other drug trafficking organizations have extended their reach across the United States and into Canada. Law enforcement authorities say they believe traffickers distributing the cartels’ marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs are responsible for a rash of shootings in Vancouver, British Columbia, kidnappings in Phoenix, brutal assaults in Birmingham, Ala., and much more.


United States law enforcement officials have identified 230 cities, including Anchorage, Atlanta, Boston and Billings, Mont., where Mexican cartels and their affiliates “maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors,” as a Justice Department report put it in December.


In response the Obama administration says it will send nearly 500 additional agents to reinforce the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Bureau of Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Millions of dollars and military equipment, including three Black Hawk helicopters, will be given to the Mexican government. “If anything, this is really the first wave of things that will be happening,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. She’s also considering requests by the governors of Texas and Arizona to deploy the National Guard.


These events are also fueling sentiment for new control of guns, especially so-called “assault weapons” (a bogus category dreamed up by gun controllers) since it has been reported that the cartels are entering the United States to buy guns to take back to Mexico.


Does anyone still think the “war on drugs” is a good idea?


That may strike some people as an odd question under the circumstances, so let’s take it from another direction. Have you seen the news stories about the violence on the border being perpetrated by the Mexican whiskey and cigarette cartels?


No? That’s probably because there was no such violence and are no such cartels.


So why are there violent cartels in the marijuana, cocaine, and heroin trades but not in the whiskey and cigarette trades?


All together now: prohibition.


Of course the politicians blame everything and everyone but themselves for this spreading violence. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “Our”? Including hers? “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.” Her answer, in addition to sending the Mexican government taxpayer money, is to go after consumers of drugs and manufacturers and dealers of guns she doesn’t like.


Excuse me? Drug users and gun dealers are to blame for drug-cartel violence? That makes no sense. If it did, then drinkers and smokers, along with gun dealers, would be creating violence, too. What’s missing?


Once again in unison: prohibition. Who brought us prohibition? Politicians. Every politician, bureaucrat, and agent who facilitates or enforces prohibition is an accomplice in the violence because he or she helps to create the conditions in which thugs have a comparative advantage in dealing drugs.


Variety of Evils


For years advocates of free trade in drugs—that is, basic rights to life, liberty, and property for drug consumers, producers, and merchants—have pointed out that prohibition, in addition to being an immoral invasion of liberty by the State, sets in motion a variety of concrete evils that harm innocent people. (No one has been more consistent and rigorous in this than Thomas Szasz). These evils include the corruption of law enforcement, violent crime, and the expansion of intrusive government. Besides these domestic evils, the U.S. government has alienated farmers in foreign lands by helping to destroy their crops and livelihoods. If that’s not terrorism, nothing is. Crop destruction has been a recruiting tool for guerilla organizations, while black-market profits finance them and others with malign intent.


Few listened to these Cassandras against the anti-drug crusade. Maybe they will listen now.


While violent gangs that make their money selling drugs in the black market are murdering and kidnapping people, invading homes, and committing other atrocities, the politicians have nothing to say but the same bromides they’ve been repeating for years. Thinking we’re either simpletons or amnesiacs, they expect us to be comforted by their words. (Will they be right?) They promise to defeat the cartels, crack down on drug use, and disrupt the gun trade. It won’t work. It’s never worked. It can’t work. Black-market operators are always steps ahead of the plodding bureaucrats. Break up one gang and another emerges. The drugs keep flowing (there’s plenty of bribe money), and consumers will have what they want when they want it. The profits made possible by the black market are powerful incentives to keep the industry going. Government is impotent.


Out of Business


Yet the gangs could be put out of business overnight. How? By removing the criminal penalties for the production, trade, and consumption of all drugs; by bringing the black market into the open, so disagreements can be resolved through civil channels and the talent for violence is no longer an advantage; by dissolving the extraordinary profits that illegal industries always reap.


Yes, it is that easy.


People will recoil. We can’t do that! No? Then accept as normal the unspeakable violence that is starting to spread from city to city, because that is the alternative to the stubborn refusal to end the “war on drugs,” which is really a war on people. Even full police-state tactics will not be able to control it, though that won’t stop demagogic politicians from giving them a try. (They can’t keep drugs out of prisons!)


I don’t expect the multitude of officials who depend on the drug war for their livelihoods and power to endorse an end to prohibition. They have shown themselves more than willing to accept the violence (against others) as the price of their ambition. The new threat to us is an opportunity for them to amass more power, bigger budgets, and higher salaries.


But the rest of us have no reason to support the complex of government and “private” tax-financed agencies that grow fat prosecuting this detestable war. The worn-out rationalizations can’t stand examination. Prohibition keeps no one from getting any drug he wants at an affordable price. On the contrary, it encourages the creation of cheaper, more potent drugs, just as alcohol prohibition replaced wine and beer with hard liquor. (More bang in a more compact form.) Prohibition doesn’t keep our children safe. It makes drugs into enticing forbidden fruits and pushes the trade into less visible channels. Drugs aren’t “dangerous,” though people are capable of doing harmful things with drugs and many other things. (Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes is an eye-opening book that I highly recommend.) Addiction is not a disease; it’s a choice.


Everything the drug warriors have said is wrong—and often a conscious lie.


Drugs are to our society what Eurasia and East Asia were to Oceania in Orwell’s 1984: a convenient conjured-up demon to justify expansion of power and the usurping of liberty—in the name of keeping us safe.


What will it take, if not the current violence from Mexico, to make people see through the scam?


Look around. It’s our self-proclaimed protectors from whom need we protection most.

propaganda

Texas lawmakers consider telling U.S. gov't to 'cease and desist'

AUSTIN -- Note to Washington, D.C.: Texas is a sovereign state.

After Gov. Rick Perry's recent comments about some Texans talking secession from the union made national news, legislators are considering issuing a "cease and desist" order to the federal government.

"This state prefers, to the greatest extent possible, to control our own destiny," said Rep. Vicki Truitt, R-Keller, one of several members co-sponsoring the measure. "We prefer that federal government limit the amount of federal mandates it forces upon the people of Texas."

House Concurrent Resolution 50, which claims sovereignty for Texas under the U.S. Constitution's 10th Amendment, was one of several proposals to go before the House State Affairs Committee late Tuesday.

Rep. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, filed the bill, saying that more than a dozen states have proposed similar efforts amid concern that the federal government may be overstepping its boundaries.

"From restrictions on gun and ammunition sales, to freedom-of-choice issues, to the Real ID Act, the federal government is passing laws that limit a state's ability to govern itself," Creighton has said. "Texas simply wants to send the message that we want to govern ourselves and decide for ourselves how our money is to be spent."

Under this resolution, the 81st Legislature "hereby claim[s] sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States."

"This serve[s] as notice and demand to the federal government ... to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers."

Rep. Mark Shelton, R-Fort Worth, also signed on as a co-sponsor.

"Texans should have the right for their representatives in Austin to decide what is best for Texas," Shelton said.

Perry -- who stirred a firestorm last week with secession talk -- said he supports this bill, especially since the federal government "has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state." "I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our union."

Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, said that he initially considered serving as a co-sponsor as well but that he changed his mind because of Perry.

"The concept has been corrupted by gubernatorial politics," he said.

A Scent to Die For

Church Commercial “Satan is Dead”

Finally we can all rest easy. Satan is dead. Jesus and an army of Christians killed the Devil. Phew.

Supreme Court Cuts Back Officers’ Searches of Vehicles

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: April 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday significantly cut back the ability of the police to search the cars of people they arrest.

Police officers have for a generation understood themselves to be free to search vehicles based on nothing more than the fact that they had just arrested an occupant. That principle, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged in his majority opinion, “has been widely taught in police academies” and “law enforcement officers have relied on the rule in conducting vehicle searches during the past 28 years.”

The majority replaced that bright-line rule with a more nuanced one, and law enforcement officials greeted it with dismay. “It’s just terrible,” William J. Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said of the decision. “It’s certainly going to result in less drug and weapons cases being made.”

In a dissent, four justices said the majority had effectively overruled an important and straightforward Fourth Amendment precedent established by the court in a 1981 decision, New York v. Belton.

Justice Stevens denied that. The precedent of Belton had often been applied too broadly, he said. Vehicle searches should be allowed only in two situations, he wrote: when the person being arrested is close enough to the car to reach in, possibly to grab a weapon or tamper with evidence; or when the arresting officer reasonably believes that the car contains evidence pertinent to the very crime that prompted the arrest.

In the case decided Tuesday, Rodney J. Gant, an Arizona man, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for driving with a suspended license. He was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car while his car was searched.

The police found cocaine and a gun, and Mr. Gant was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to three years. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the search of Mr. Gant’s car had violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and suppressed the evidence against him. The United States Supreme Court affirmed that decision on Tuesday.

Justice Stevens, joined by the unusual alliance of Justices Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said the court had agreed to hear the case because the conventional view of the Belton decision had been widely criticized. “The chorus that has called for us to revisit Belton,” Justice Stevens wrote, “includes courts, scholars and members of this court who have questioned that decision’s clarity and fidelity to Fourth Amendment principles.”

Police officers and lower courts, Justice Stevens wrote, had failed to take adequate account of the two rationales that animated Belton: protecting the safety of arresting officers and safeguarding evidence of crimes. Those rationales only make sense, he said, “when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance” of the car.

At the same time, the majority announced a new justification for a search in connection with an arrest, one drawing on a 2004 concurrence questioning Belton from Justice Scalia. Searches of vehicles are permissible, Justice Stevens said, “when it is reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle.”

As a practical matter, that means many arrests for traffic offenses will not by themselves allow police officers to search vehicles. Arrests for other kinds of crimes, though, may well supply a basis for a search.

The decision, Arizona v. Gant, No. 07-542, was the last to be issued from among the cases the court heard in its October sitting, and it was marked by an uneasy compromise that probably explains the delay.

Justice Scalia said he would have overruled Belton outright and substituted a rule that allowed searches of vehicles in connection with arrests only where the search seeks evidence of the crime for which the arrest was made or another one for which there is probable cause. He added that he joined the majority opinion to avoid a 4-1-4 decision “that leaves the governing rule uncertain.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined in full by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and for the most part by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said the broad Belton rule was sensible and easy to apply.

On the other hand, the new rule allowing searches for evidence of the crime that prompted the arrest, Justice Alito said, “is virtually certain to confuse law enforcement officers and judges for some time to come.”

And the part of the majority opinion allowing searches only when the person arrested can reach the car “may endanger arresting officers,” Justice Alito wrote.

Mr. Johnson of the police association explained the problem. “The case creates a temptation,” he said, “for police to leave the occupant of a vehicle unsecured in the belief that they are now operating within the Fourth Amendment in terms of being able to search the vehicle.”

Though Justice Stevens did not concede that Tuesday’s decision overruled Belton, he did say that fidelity to precedent was no reason to allow constitutional violations to continue.

“Countless individuals guilty of nothing more serious that a traffic violation,” he wrote, “have had their constitutional right to the security of their private effects violated” by the broad rule struck down on Tuesday.

Shameless Self Promotion - Yet Again

That's right, its time to let this goddam self promotional video scroll through the page again, time for another heartless commercial trying to raise dough for the Radio Free Exile podcast, because even though it doesn't cost anything to listen, nothing is free...

So, if you've seen this before, go ahead and ignore it, if you haven't take a look before, its only 3 minutes, check it out, then you can ignore it...
unless you're particularly moved, then maybe you'll buy something...
who knows?

girl of the teabaggers

just following orders

Justices hear arguments over school strip search

By JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court seemed worried Tuesday about tying the hands of school officials looking for drugs and weapons on campus as they wrestled with the appropriateness of a strip-search of a 13-year-old girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen.

Savana Redding was 13 when Safford, Ariz., Middle School officials, on a tip from another student, ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear looking for pills. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs.

Her lawyer argued to the Supreme Court that such a "intrusive and traumatic" search would be unconstitutional in every circumstance if school administrators were not directly told the contraband was in her underwear.

"A school needs to have location-specific information" to put a child through such an embarrassing search, lawyer Adam B. Wolf said.

Would it be constitutional if officials were looking for weapons, or drugs like crack, meth or heroin? "Does that make a difference?" Justice Anthony Kennedy asked. No, Wolf replied.

That leaves school administrators with the choice of embarrassing a child through a search or possibly having other children die while in their care, Justice David Souter said. "With those stakes in mind, why isn't that reasonable?" Souter said.

Wolf said school officials violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches. "There needs to be suspicion that the object is under the clothes," Wolf said.

A 1985 Supreme Court decision that dealt with searching a student's purse has found that school officials need only reasonable suspicions, not probable cause. But the court also warned against a search that is "excessively intrusive."

A schoolmate had accused Redding, then an eighth-grade student, of giving her pills.

Vice Principal Kerry Wilson took Redding to his office to search her backpack. When nothing was found, Redding was taken to a nurse's office where she says she was ordered to take off her shirt and pants. Redding said they then told her to move her bra to the side and to stretch her underwear waistband, exposing her breasts and pelvic area. No pills were found.

A federal magistrate dismissed the lawsuit Redding and her mother April brought, and a federal appeals panel agreed that the search didn't violate her rights. But last July, a full panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the search was "an invasion of constitutional rights."

The court also said Wilson could be found personally liable.

The school's lawyer argued that the courts should not limit school officials' ability to search out what they think are dangerous items on school grounds. "We've got to be able to make decisions," lawyer Matthew Wright said.

But justices worried that allowing a strip search of school age children might lead to more intrusive searches, like body cavity searches. "There would be no legal basis in saying that was out of bounds," Souter said.

Redding, now a 19-year-old college freshman living in her hometown of Safford in rural eastern Arizona, took her first airplane ride to watch the arguments. "It was pretty overwhelming," she said, standing before a bank of cameras and a few dozen reporters outside the building.

Savana Redding said she is considering becoming a counselor, which might mean she could end up working in a school. Asked how she would handle the situation as a counselor, she said she would call a student's parents first. "I didn't have that option," she said, outside the court. "I'm a little kid. I didn't have any idea how it would be handled. But my mom would."

The case is Safford Unified School District v. April Redding, 08-479.

Free Speech Is Sacred

The Torturers’ Manifesto - editorial from the NY Times

To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect — all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Americans Civil Liberties Union deserves credit for suing for the memos’ release. And President Obama deserves credit for overruling his own C.I.A. director and ordering that the memos be made public. It is hard to think of another case in which documents stamped “Top Secret” were released with hardly any deletions.

But this cannot be the end of the scrutiny for these and other decisions by the Bush administration.

Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses — and who set the rules and who approved them — there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.

The abuses and the dangers do not end with the torture memos. Americans still know far too little about President Bush’s decision to illegally eavesdrop on Americans — a program that has since been given legal cover by the Congress.

Last week, The Times reported that the nation’s intelligence agencies have been collecting private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans on a scale that went beyond the broad limits established in legislation last year. The article quoted the Justice Department as saying there had been problems in the surveillance program that had been resolved. But Justice did not say what those problems were or what the resolution was.

That is the heart of the matter: nobody really knows what any of the rules were. Mr. Bush never offered the slightest explanation of what he found lacking in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when he decided to ignore the law after 9/11 and ordered the warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ overseas calls and e-mail. He said he was president and could do what he wanted.

The Bush administration also never explained how it interpreted laws that were later passed to expand the government’s powers to eavesdrop. And the Obama administration argued in a recent court filing that everything associated with electronic eavesdropping, including what is allowed and what is not, is a state secret.

We do not think Mr. Obama will violate Americans’ rights as Mr. Bush did. But if Americans do not know the rules, they cannot judge whether this government or any one that follows is abiding by the rules.

In the case of detainee abuse, Mr. Obama assured C.I.A. operatives that they would not be prosecuted for actions that their superiors told them were legal. We have never been comfortable with the “only following orders” excuse, especially because Americans still do not know what was actually done or who was giving the orders.

After all, as far as Mr. Bush’s lawyers were concerned, it was not really torture unless it involved breaking bones, burning flesh or pulling teeth. That, Mr. Bybee kept noting, was what the Libyan secret police did to one prisoner. The standard for American behavior should be a lot higher than that of the Libyan secret police.

At least Mr. Obama is not following Mr. Bush’s example of showy trials for the small fry — like Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib notoriety. But he has an obligation to pursue what is clear evidence of a government policy sanctioning the torture and abuse of prisoners — in violation of international law and the Constitution.

That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard; and Mr. Bybee, who holds the lifetime seat on the federal appeals court that Mr. Bush rewarded him with.

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.

After eight years without transparency or accountability, Mr. Obama promised the American people both. His decision to release these memos was another sign of his commitment to transparency. We are waiting to see an equal commitment to accountability.

What 420 Means: The True Story Behind Stoners' Favorite Number

Warren Haynes, the Allman Brothers Band guitarist, routinely plays with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, now touring as The Dead. He's just finished a Dead show in Washington, D.C. and gets a pop quiz from the Huffington Post.

Where does 420 come from?

He pauses and thinks, hands on his side. "I don't know the real origin. I know myths and rumors," he says. "I'm really confused about the first time I heard it. It was like a police code for smoking in progress or something. What's the real story?"

Depending on who you ask, or their state of inebriation, there are as many varieties of answers as strains of medical bud in California. It's the number of active chemicals in marijuana. It's teatime in Holland. It has something to do with Hitler's birthday. It's those numbers in that Bob Dylan song multiplied.

The origin of the term 420, celebrated around the world by pot smokers every April 20th, has long been obscured by the clouded memories of the folks who made it a phenomenon.

The Huffington Post chased the term back to its roots and was able to find it in a lost patch of cannabis in a Point Reyes, California forest. Just as interesting as its origin, it turns out, is how it spread.

It starts with the Dead.

It was Christmas week in Oakland, 1990. Steven Bloom was wandering through The Lot - that timeless gathering of hippies that springs up in the parking lot before every Grateful Dead concert - when a Deadhead handed him a yellow flyer.

"We are going to meet at 4:20 on 4/20 for 420-ing in Marin County at the Bolinas Ridge sunset spot on Mt. Tamalpais," reads the message, which Bloom dug up and forwarded to the Huffington Post. Bloom, then a reporter for High Times magazine and now the publisher of CelebStoner.com and co-author of Pot Culture, had never heard of "420-ing" before.

The flyer came complete with a 420 back story: "420 started somewhere in San Rafael, California in the late '70s. It started as the police code for Marijuana Smoking in Progress. After local heads heard of the police call, they started using the expression 420 when referring to herb - Let's Go 420, dude!"

Bloom reported his find in the May 1991 issue of High Times, which the magazine found in its archives and provided to the Huffington Post. The story, though, was only partially right.

It had nothing to do with a police code -- though the San Rafael part was dead on. Indeed, a group of five San Rafael High School friends known as the Waldos - by virtue of their chosen hang-out spot, a wall outside the school - coined the term in 1971. The Huffington Post spoke with Waldo Steve, Waldo Dave and Dave's older brother, Patrick, and confirmed their full names and identities, which they asked to keep secret for professional reasons. (Pot is still, after all, illegal.)

The Waldos never envisioned that pot smokers the world over would celebrate each April 20th as a result of their foray into the Point Reyes forest. The day has managed to become something of a national holiday in the face of official condemnation. This year's celebration will be no different. Officials at the University of Colorado at Boulder and University of California, Santa Cruz, which boast two of the biggest smoke outs, are pushing back. "As another April 20 approaches, we are faced with concerns from students, parents, alumni, Regents, and community members about a repeat of last year's 4/20 'event,'" wrote Boulder's chancellor in a letter to students. "On April 20, 2009, we hope that you will choose not to participate in unlawful activity that debases the reputation of your University and degree, and will encourage your fellow Buffs to act with pride and remember who they really are."

But the Cheshire cat is out of the bag. Students and locals will show up at round four, light up at 4:20 and be gone shortly thereafter. No bands, no speakers, no chants. Just a bunch of people getting together and getting stoned.

The code often creeps into popular culture and mainstream settings. All of the clocks in Pulp Fiction, for instance, are set to 4:20. In 2003, when the California legislature codified the medical marijuana law voters had approved, the bill was named SB420.

"We think it was a staffer working for [lead Assembly sponsor Mark] Leno, but no one has ever fessed up," says Steph Sherer, head of Americans for Safe Access, which lobbied on behalf of the bill. California legislative staffers spoken to for this story say that the 420 designation remains a mystery, but that both Leno and the lead Senate sponsor, John Vasconcellos, are hip enough that they must have known what it meant. (If you were involved with SB420 and know the story, email me.)

The code pops up in Craig's List postings when fellow smokers search for "420 friendly" roommates. "It's just a vaguer way of saying it and it kind of makes it kind of cool," says Bloom. "Like, you know you're in the know, but that does show you how it's in the mainstream."

The Waldos do have proof, however, that they used the term in the early '70s in the form of an old 420 flag and numerous letters with 420 references and early '70s post marks. They also have a story.

It goes like this: One day in the Fall of 1971 - harvest time - the Waldos got word of a Coast Guard service member who could no longer tend his plot of marijuana plants near the Point Reyes Peninsula Coast Guard station. A treasure map in hand, the Waldos decided to pluck some of this free bud.

The Waldos were all athletes and agreed to meet at the statue of Loius Pasteur outside the school at 4:20, after practice, to begin the hunt.

"We would remind each other in the hallways we were supposed to meet up at 4:20. It originally started out 4:20-Louis and we eventually dropped the Louis," Waldo Steve tells the Huffington Post.

The first forays out were unsuccessful, but the group kept looking for the hidden crop. "We'd meet at 4:20 and get in my old '66 Chevy Impala and, of course, we'd smoke instantly and smoke all the way out to Pt. Reyes and smoke the entire time we were out there. We did it week after week," says Steve. "We never actually found the patch."

But they did find a useful codeword. "I could say to one of my friends, I'd go, 420, and it was telepathic. He would know if I was saying, 'Hey, do you wanna go smoke some?' Or, 'Do you have any?' Or, 'Are you stoned right now?' It was kind of telepathic just from the way you said it," Steve says. "Our teachers didn't know what we were talking about. Our parents didn't know what we were talking about."

It's one thing to identify the origin of the term. Indeed, Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary already include references to the Waldos. The bigger question: How did 420 spread from a circle of California stoners across the globe?

As fortune would have it, the collapse of San Francisco's hippie utopia in the late '60s set the stage. As speed freaks, thugs and con artists took over The Haight, the Grateful Dead picked up and moved to the Marin County hills - just blocks from San Rafael High School.

"Marin Country was kind of ground zero for the counter culture," says Steve.

The Waldos had more than just a geographic connection to the Dead. Mark Waldo's father took care of real estate for the Dead. And Waldo Dave's older brother, Patrick, managed a Dead sideband and was good friends with bassist Phil Lesh. Patrick tells the Huffington Post that he smoked with Lesh on numerous occasions. He couldn't recall if he used the term 420 around him, but guessed that he must have.

The Dead, recalls Waldo Steve, "had this rehearsal hall on Front Street, San Rafael, California, and they used to practice there. So we used to go hang out and listen to them play music and get high while they're practicing for gigs. But I think it's possible my brother Patrick might have spread it through Phil Lesh. And me, too, because I was hanging out with Lesh and his band when they were doing a summer tour my brother was managing."

The band that Patrick managed was called Too Loose To Truck and featured not only Lesh but rock legend David Crosby and acclaimed guitarist Terry Haggerty.

The Waldos also had open access to Dead parties and rehearsals. "We'd go with [Mark's] dad, who was a hip dad from the '60s," says Steve. "There was a place called Winterland and we'd always be backstage running around or onstage and, of course, we're using those phrases. When somebody passes a joint or something, 'Hey, 420.' So it started spreading through that community."

Lesh, walking off the stage after a recent Dead concert, confirmed that Patrick is a friend and said he "wouldn't be surprised" if the Waldos had coined 420. He wasn't sure, he said, when the first time he heard it was. "I do not remember. I'm very sorry. I wish I could help," he said.

Wavy-Gravy is a hippie icon with his own ice cream flavor and has been hanging out with the Dead for decades. HuffPost spotted him outside the concert. Asked about the origin of 420, he suggested it began "somewhere in the foggy mists of time. What time is it now? I say to you: eternity now."

As the Grateful Dead toured the globe through the '70s and '80s, playing hundreds of shows a year - the term spread though the Dead underground. Once High Times got hip to it, the magazine helped take it global.

"I started incorporating it into everything we were doing," High Times editor Steve Hager told the Huffington Post. "I started doing all these big events - the World Hemp Expo Extravaganza and the Cannabis Cup - and we built everything around 420. The publicity that High Times gave it is what made it an international thing. Until then, it was relatively confined to the Grateful Dead subculture. But we blew it out into an international phenomenon."

Sometime in the early '90s, High Times wisely purchased the web domain 420.com.

Bloom, the reporter who first stumbled on it, gives High Times less credit. "We posted that flyer and then we started to see little references to it. It wasn't really much of High Times doing," he says. "We weren't really pushing it that hard, just kind of referencing the phrase."

The Waldos say that within a few years the term had spread throughout San Rafael and was cropping up elsewhere in the state. By the early '90s, it had penetrated deep enough that Dave and Steve started hearing people use it in unexpected places - Ohio, Florida, Canada - and spotted it painted on signs and etched into park benches.

In 1997, the Waldos decided to set the record straight and got in touch with High Times.

"They said, 'The fact is, there is no 420 [police] code in California. You guys ever look it up?'" Blooms recalls. He had to admit that no, he had never looked it up. Hager flew out to San Rafael, met the Waldos, examined their evidence, spoke with others in town, and concluded they were telling the truth.

Hager still believes them. "No one's ever been able to come up with any use of 420 that predates the 1971 usage, which they had established. So unless somebody can come up with something that predates them, then I don't think anybody's going to get credit for it other than them," he says.

"We never made a dime on the thing," says Dave, half boasting, half lamenting.

He does take pride in his role, though. "I still have a lot of friends who tell their friends that they know one of the guys that started the 420 thing. So it's kind of like a cult celebrity thing. Two years ago I went to the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. High Times magazine flew me out," says Dave.

Dave is now a credit analyst and works for Steve, who owns a specialty lending institution and lost money to the con artist Bernie Madoff. He spends more time today, he says, composing angry letters to the SEC than he does getting high.

The other three Waldos have also been successful, Steve says. One is head of marketing for a Napa Valley winery. Another is in printing and graphics. A third works for a roofing and gutter company. "He's like, head of their gutter division," says Steve, who keeps in close touch with them all.

"I've got to run a business. I've got to stay sharp," says Steve, explaining why he rarely smokes pot anymore. "Seems like everybody I know who smokes daily, or many times in a week, it seems like there's always something going wrong with their life, professionally, or in their relationships, or financially or something. It's a lot of fun, but it seems like if someone does it too much, there's some karmic cost to it."

"I never endorsed the use of marijuana. But hey, it worked for me," says Waldo Dave. "I'm sure on my headstone it'll say: 'One of the 420 guys.'"

Ryan Grim is the author of the soon-to-be-released book This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America

Marijuana Advocacy Group Launches TV Campaign on ‘4/20’

Legalization: Yes We Can - Jason Druss


By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: April 19, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — On Monday, somewhere in New York City, 420 people will gather for High Times magazine’s annual beauty pageant, a secretly located and sold-out event that its sponsor says will “turn the Big Apple into the Baked Apple and help us usher in a new era of marijuana freedom in America.”

David Perleberg sold pro-marijuana T-shirts at the forum, including one that shows the university’s buffalo mascot inhaling.

They will not be the only ones partaking: April 20 has long been an unofficial day of celebration for marijuana fans, an occasion for campus smoke-outs, concerts and cannabis festivals. But some advocates of legal marijuana say this year’s “high holiday” carries extra significance as they sense increasing momentum toward acceptance of the drug, either as medicine or entertainment.

“It is the biggest moment yet,” said Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington, who cited several national polls showing growing support for legalization. “There’s a sense that the notion of legalizing marijuana is starting to cross the fringes into mainstream debate.”

For Mr. Nadelmann and others like him, the signs of change are everywhere, from the nation’s statehouses — where more than a dozen legislatures have taken up measures to allow some medical use of marijuana or some easing of penalties for recreational use — to its swimming pools, where an admission of marijuana use by the Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps was largely forgiven with a shrug.

Long stigmatized as political poison, the marijuana movement has found new allies in prominent politicians, including Representatives Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, who co-wrote a bill last year to decrease federal penalties for possession and to give medical users new protections.

The bill failed, but with the recession prompting bulging budget deficits, some legislators in California and Massachusetts have gone further, suggesting that the drug could be legalized and taxed, a concept that has intrigued even such ideologically opposed pundits as Glenn Beck of Fox News and Jack Cafferty of CNN.

“Look, I’m a libertarian,” Mr. Beck said on his Feb. 26 program. “You want to legalize marijuana, you want to legalize drugs — that’s fine.”

All of which has longtime proponents of the drug feeling oddly optimistic and even overexposed.

“We’ve been on national cable news more in the first three months than we typically are in an entire year,” said Bruce Mirken, the director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, a reform group based in Washington. “And any time you’ve got Glenn Beck and Barney Frank agreeing on something, it’s either a sign that change is impending or that the end times are here.”

Beneficiaries of the moment include Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which advocates legalization, and other groups like it. Norml says that its Web traffic and donations (sometimes in $4.20 increments) have surged, and that it will begin a television advertising campaign on Monday, which concludes with a plea, and an homage, to President Obama.

“Legalization,” the advertisement says, “yes we can!”

That seems unlikely anytime soon. In a visit last week to Mexico, where drug violence has claimed thousands of lives and threatened to spill across the border, Mr. Obama said the United States must work to curb demand for drugs.

Still, pro-marijuana groups have applauded recent remarks by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who suggested that federal law enforcement resources would not be used to pursue legitimate medical marijuana users and outlets in California and a dozen other states that allow medical use of the drug. Court battles are also percolating. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard arguments last Tuesday in San Francisco in a 2007 lawsuit challenging the government’s official skepticism about medical uses of the drug.

But Allen F. St. Pierre, the executive director of Norml, said he had cautioned supporters that any legal changes that might occur would probably be incremental.

“The balancing act this year is trying to get our most active, most vocal supporters to be more realistic in their expectations in what the Obama administration is going to do,” Mr. St. Pierre said.

For fans of the drug, perhaps the biggest indicator of changing attitudes is how widespread the observance of April 20 has become, including its use in marketing campaigns for stoner-movie openings (like last year’s “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay”) and as a peg for marijuana-related television programming (like the G4 network’s prime-time double bill Monday of “Super High Me” and “Half Baked”).

Events tied to April 20 have “reached the tipping point in the last few years after being a completely underground phenomenon for a long time,” said Steven Hager, the creative director and former editor of High Times. “And I think that’s symptomatic of the fact that people’s perception of marijuana is reaching a tipping point.”

Mr. Hager said the significance of April 20 dates to a ritual begun in the early 1970s in which a group of Northern California teenagers smoked marijuana every day at 4:20 p.m. Word of the ritual spread and expanded to a yearly event in various places. Soon, marijuana aficionados were using “420” as a code for smoking and using it as a sign-off on fliers for concerts where the drug would be plentiful.

In recent years, the April 20 events have become so widespread that several colleges have urged students to just say no. At the University of Colorado, Boulder, where thousands of students regularly use the day to light up in the quad, administrators sent an e-mail message this month pleading with students not to “participate in unlawful activity that debases the reputation of your university and degree.”

A similar warning was sent to students at the University of California, Santa Cruz — home of the Grateful Dead archives — which banned overnight guests at residence halls leading up to April 20.

None of which, of course, is expected to discourage the dozens of parties — large and small — planned for Monday, including the top-secret crowning of Ms. High Times.

In San Francisco, meanwhile, where a city supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi, suggested last week that the city should consider getting into the medical marijuana business as a provider, big crowds are expected to turn out at places like Hippie Hill, a drum-happy glade in Golden Gate Park.

A cloud of pungent smoke is also expected to be thick at concerts like one planned at the Fillmore rock club, where the outspoken pro-marijuana hip-hop group Cypress Hill is expected to take the stage at 4:20 p.m.

“You can see twice the amount of smoke as you do at a regular show,” said B-Real, a rapper in the group. “And it’s a great fragrance.”

I'm Always Thinking In One Liners - The Video

Happy 420

Fan Mail?

Hi ExileGuy,
I also liked your broadcast(s) and appreciate your sense of humor. But I hope you won't get offended if I tell you that your avatar is absolutely revolting, almost as ugly as the fat Irish guy in Austin Power's "The Spy That Shagged Me." Perhaps it's a good way to keep the chicks and gays away? But why would you want to do that? Other then that,keep up on trucking.
Adam

Adam,
Ugly? Absolutely revolting? I'm shattered, shattered I say. Is there no justice or empathy in this world for an exiled two dimensional computer generated sarcastic and irreverent graphic? And what of my dear and aged mother, whom I resemble most closely, do you dare call her ugly and revolting as well? Should I tell her? Ah, the humiliation. I'll be up all night, crying in my pillow, unable to sleep, thinking of you.
Have a nice day.
xo
exileguy

Ed Rosenthal the Guru of Ganja

Ed Rosenthal is one of the few stoners who's become a celebrity because of being a stoner. This Dude is amongst the most righteous marijuana activists of all time and if there were a Stoners Hall of Fame he would have to be the first inductee. Ed is total proof positive that people who smoke weed can be productive, this man has been very busy, especially on behalf of the movement to reform MJ laws and working with the state's weed growers, dispensaries, and local governments to standardize and implement the delivery of pharmaceutical grade cannabis to patients.

Ed's conviction is legendary and court cases too many to list, it's like he's been the scape goat for the MJ movement but in the entire time his sentence has been more about navigating through court procedures, politics, bureaucracy and legal bull-shit than dealing with incarceration. However, the legal-defense expenses were huge and required an Internet campaign called Green-Aid to assist in funding. Legal battles wage on....

Meanwhile, Ed took up promoting the cause of "Overgrow America" which is so cool, plus he's the founder and owner of Quick Trading Company in Piedmont, California. Quick Trading publishes the yearly Big Book of Buds Calender, the Big Book of Buds series, Marijuana Buds for Less, Cultivating Exceptional Cannabis, Closet Cultivator, Dank: The Quest for the Very Best Marijuana, Joint Rolling Handbook, Marijuana Garden Saver, and Marijuana Herbal cookbook among others. Make sure you visit Ed Rosenthal's blog and drop by his Myspace page.

Former Miss NJ applies heat to legalize medical marijuana

By BEN LEACH Staff Writer 609-272-7261
Published: Friday, April 17, 2009

A former Miss New Jersey has put down her tiara and is rolling up her sleeves to fight for the legalization of medical marijuana.

The New Jersey state senate approved a bill that would legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes in February. While the bill awaits approval by the state’s assembly and then Gov. Jon S. Corzine, Georgine DiMaria is using her former title and her personal experience battling medical issues to raise state and national awareness about legalizing marijuana for the people who need it the most.

Georgine DiMaria, 24, won the Miss New Jersey pageant and went on to compete in the Miss America pageant in 2006. Since then, she’s served as a national spokeswoman for the American Lung Association.

DiMaria uses medical marijuana to treat her severe case of asthma after rescue inhalers and other forms of treatment failed to get her condition under control. Her asthma was so bad that it left her bedridden, forcing her to be homeschooled.

“When you can’t breathe, nothing else matters,” DiMaria said.

Evolution Carl Sagan Style

Dance Monkeys, Dance!

Dance Monkeys Dance!

Carl Sagan - Origins

What No One Wants to Know About Marijuana

From The Natural Mind by Dr. Andrew Weil

Because marijuana is such an unimpressive pharmacological agent, it is not a very interesting drug to study in a laboratory. Pharmacologists cannot get a handle on it with their methods, and because they cannot see the reality of the non-material state of consciousness that users experience, they are forced to design experimental situations very far removed from the real world in order to get measurable effects. There are three conditions under which marijuana can be shown to impair general psychological performance in laboratory subjects. They are:

1. by giving it to people who have never had it before;

2. by giving people very high doses that they are not used to
   (or giving it orally to people used to smoking it); and

3. by giving people very hard things to do, especially things that they have never had a chance to practice while under the influence of the drug.

Under any of these three conditions, pharmacologists can demonstrate that marijuana impairs performance. And if we look at the work being done by NIMH-funded researchers, all of it fulfills one or more of these conditions. In addition, the tests being used by these scientists are designed to look for impairments of functions that have nothing to do with why marijuana users put themselves in an altered state of consciousness. People who get high on marijuana do not spontaneously try to do arithmetic problems or test their fine coordination.

If a marijuana user is allowed to smoke his usual doses and then to do things he has had a chance to practice while high, he does not apper to perform any differently from someone who is not high.

What pharmacologists cannot make sense of is that people who are high on marijuana cannot be shown, in objective terms, to be different from people who are not high. That is, if a marijuana user is allowed to smoke his usual doses and then to do things he has had a chance to practice while high, he does not appear to perform any differently from someone who is not high. Now, this pattern of users performing better than nonusers is a general phenomenon associated with all psychoactive drugs. For example, an alcoholic will vastly outperform a nondrinker on any test if the two are equally intoxicated; he has learned to compensate for the effects of the drug on his nervous system. But compensation can proceed only so far until it runs up against a ceiling imposed by the pharmacological action of the drug on lower brain centers. Again, since marijuana has no clinically significant action on lower brain centers, compensation can reach 100 percent with practice.

These considerations mean that there are no answers to questions like, What does marijuana do to driving ability? The only possible answer is, It depends. It depends on the person - whether he is a marijuana user, whether he has practiced driving while under the influence of marijuana. In speaking to legislative and medical groups, I have stated a personal reaction to this question in the form of the decision I would make if I were given the choice of riding with one of the following four drivers:

1. a person who had never smoked marijuana before and just had;

2. a marijuana smoker who had never driven while high and was just about to;

3. a high marijuana smoker who had practiced driving while high; and

4. a person with any amount of alcohol in him.

I would unhesitatingly take driver number three as the best possible risk. One may wonder how many drivers of types one and two are on our highways. Probably many. But there is some consolation in the fact that persons learning to do things under the influence of marijuana almost always are anxious about their performance and therefore tend to err on the side of overcaution.

The tendency for novice users of marijuana to imagine that their psychological functioning is disrupted to a much greater degree than it actually is, is most noticeable in conection with subtle changes in speech. People who are high on marijuana seem to have to do slightly more work that usual to remember moment to moment the logical thread of what they are saying. This change manifests itself in two ways: as a tendency to forget what one started out to say, especially following an interruption, and a tendency to go off on irrelevant tangents. Zinberg, Nelson and I were able to pick up these changes in tape recordings of our Boston subjects, but I must emphasize the adjective subtle in describing them. Someone not specially trained to listen for these changes would not hear them. Interestingly enough, however, marijuana users themselves often imagine they are not making sense abd become anxious about other people guessing that they are high. Some users experience this subjective anxiety about speech most intensely when they are talking on the telephone. Here is a quote from such a user (a twenty-four-year-old male medical student), which Zinberg and I included in a paper published in Nature in 1969:

I've learned to do a lot of things when I'm stoned and seem to function well in all spheres of activity. I can also "turn off" a high when that seems necessary. The one problem I have, however, is talking to straight people when I don't want them to know I'm stoned. It's really scary because you constantly imagine you're talking nonsense and that the other person is going to realize you're high. That's never happened, though, so I conclude that I don't sound as crazy to others as I do to myself. It's worst on the telephone. Someone will call up and be talking to me, and when he stops I'll have no idea what he just said. Then I don't know what I'm supposed to answer and I have to stall until I get a clue as to what's expected of me. Again, even though this is very disconcerting, the other party never seems to notice that anything's wrong unless he's a heavy grass smoker, too, and then it doesn't matter.¹

Probably, the subtle difficulties in speech that high users pay great attention to are themselves manifestations of a change in a more general psychological function called immediate memory. It seems valid to distinguish three kinds of memory in man. The first has been termed immediate and seems to cover events of the past few seconds only. It is as if all information coming into the brain is held in some location for a very short time before a decision is made about where to store it. If it is to be filed in an accessible place, it passes to a second storage location called recent memory, where it may remain for days or, perhaps, weeks; otherwise it is salted away out of reach of ordinary consciousness. Eventually, if it is to be kept in an accessible place for a longer time, it moves to a third long-term storage location, which is the permanent memory file. Each of these locations has active connections to ordinary consciousness so that memories may be quickly retrieved from all of them in our normal waking state.

In senile dementia, the classic psychological change is loss of recent memory with sparing of immediate and long-term memory. A senile patient can remember a string of numbers read to him long enough to recite them back and can go into autobiographical detail about his childhood. He cannot remember the date or the events of the previous day. By contrast, in certain forms of post-traumatic amnesia, immediate and recent memory are spared, but information filed prior to the trauma cannot be retrieved from the long-term memory storage. A person high on marijuana seems to have difficulty remembering what happened in the past few seconds, and the subtle speech changes reflect this difficulty. Furthermore, it looks as if a significant disturbance of immediate memory retrieval has few noticable consequences in terms of behavior, although it may cause great anxiety in the mind of the person experiencing it.

The rationale behind living in the present is stated in ancient Hindu writing and forms a prominent theme of Buddhist and Christian philosophy as well: to the extent that consciousness is diverted into the past and future -- both of which are unreal -- to that extent is it unavailable for use in the real here and now.

This last observation raises an interesting question. Is the problem disturbance of immediate memory or anxiety about this change? Most people who have read the hypothesis Zinberg and I first presented in Nature have drawn the conclusion that marijuana interferes with immediate memory. In fact, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, in testimony before Congress in 1970, used our results to support the statement that "more recent studies . . . in which researchers have learned some troublesome facts . . . make it impossible to give marijuana a clean bill of health."² I would once have gone along with this kind of reasoning, but the more I have thought about the matter, the more it has become clear to me that it is not useful to think of marijuana as interfering with one's awareness of the immediate past.

For one thing, disturbance of immediate memory seems to be a common feature of all altered states of consciousness in which attention is focused on the present. It can be noticed in hypnotic and other trances, meditation, mystic ecstasies, and highs associated with all drugs. Therefore, to call marijuana the cause of the phenomenon is probably unwise. In addition, the phrase disturbance of immediate memory bristles with negativity. Is it a negative description of a condition that might just as well be looked at positively? I believe so. In fact, the ability to live entirely in the present, without paying attention to the immediate past or future, is precisely the goal of meditation and the exact aim of many religious disciplines. The rationale behind living in the present is stated in ancient Hindu writing and forms a prominent theme of Buddhist and Christian philosophy as well: to the extent that consciousness is diverted into the past and future -- both of which are unreal -- to that extent is it unavailable for use in the real here and now. Consequently, monastic systems of all faiths have used devices like gongs and bells to focus the consciousness of the novice on the immediate reality of the present, and contemporary instructional materials on mental and spiritual development stress the same theme. Here are a few examples:

1. From A Practical Guide to Yoga by James Hewitt

   When the mind is stilled by Raja Yoga, time--that is to say, psychological time--ceases to exist. For time is relative. It only exists when one thing is taken in relation to another. If I go on a train journey my leaving the train at my destination, taken in relation to my getting in, shows a passage of time. Similarly, if I think of "fruit," and in a split second follow with another thought "apples," time has passed, and I am aware of its passing. But if the mind takes one thought and holds it, one-pointed and still, time is erased; it ceases--psychologically--to exist.

   In the hurly-burly of civilized living we rarely find time, or even give a thought to living in the NOW. We spend our NOW thinking of the past or dreaming of the future. Raja Yoga enables us to be still and experience eternity, as defined by Boethius: "to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present to come."³

2. The following excerpt is from C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters--a witty and practical statement of orthodox Christian theology cast in the form of letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior devil, Wormwood, who is trying to capture the soul of an earthly "patient":

   MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

   I had noticed, of course, that the humans were having a lull in their European war [World War II]--what they naively call "The War!"--and am not surprised that there is a corresponding lull in the patient's anxieties. Do we want to encourage this or to keep him worried? Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind. Our choice between them raised important questions.

   The humans live in time, but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure. Our business is to get them away from the eternal and from the Present.⁴

3. From Concentration and Meditation by Christmas Humphreys:

   As the sequence of day and night, so is the alternation of work and rest, and it is in the minutes of comparative repose that the difference appears between the trained and the untrained student of mind-development. The beginner allows his energy to drain away in idle conversation or mental rambling, in vague revision of past experiences or anxiety of events as yet unborn, or in a thousand other wasteful ways for which, were he spending gold instead of mental energy, he would be hailed as a reckless spend-thrift to be avoided by all prudent men.⁵

4. The following summary of J. Krishnamurti's philosophy of time is from Metaphysical Approach to Reality by Ganga Sahai, Mr. Krishnamurti's recent books are widely available in the West.

   There is a state of being which Krishnamurti calls the timeless. It comes with the realization that the only real moment is the moment of the Now, the eternal present; the past and future taken as "no-more" and "not-yet" are illusions.

   The center, the observer, is memory. The center is always in the past. Therefore, the center is not a living thing. It is a memory of what has been. When there is complete attention, there us no observer....

   Life is broken up and this breaking of life, caused by the center "me," is time. If we look at the whole of existence without the center "me" there is no time.

   The new dimension is the silent mind. It is always in the present, always in the Now. It is the timeless mind that really exists.⁶

Thus the pharmacological way of thinking leads to the formulation of a hypothesis built upon an incorrect causal attribution and a negatively biased description of a phenomenon assigned great value in other ways of thinking. The pharmacologist says marijuana interferes with immediate memory, and by using tests in which one is penalized for not paying full attention to the past, the pharmacologist can produce evidence to document his hypothesis. The National Institute of Mental Health is supporting this kind of research with money appropriated by Congress. It is not funding research designed to look for the positive advantages of having one's full awareness focused on the present.

In a similar way, all other psychological effects of marijuana turn out to be common features of altered states of consciousness unassociated with drugs, and whenever pharmacologist describes them in negative ways, it is possible to look at them positively from the point of conscious experience. The perceptual changes reported by marijuana users are another example. Here again is an apparent paradox since all testing to date has failed to show any objective changes in sensory function during acute marijuana intoxication. If pharmacologists paid closer attention to what users say, they would find their way out of this paradox. There is no indication from persons high on marijuana that their sense organs are working differently from usual. Rather, the change seems to be in what they do with incoming sensory information. For instance, many users claim that listening to music is more interesting and pleasurable when they are high. They do not claim that they hear tones of lower volume or that they can better discriminate between pitches of tones. Yet all of the testing of auditory function under marijuana has been aimed at the ear--at auditory thresholds, pitch discrimination, and the like.

In 1969, when I still thought as a pharmacologist in my professional life, I wrote the following paragraph in an article, "Cannabis," published in England in Science Journal:

It would make more sense to look for effects not on the ear but rather on that part of the brain that processes auditory information. Cannabis seems to affect the secondary perception of sensory information, not the primary reception of it. Unfortunately, it is considerably harder to study secondary perception because the neural organization underlying it is less accessible to direct experimentation and much less well understood. A working hypothesis is that incoming sensory information (such as auditory signals representing music) normally follows conditioned pathways through the secondary perception network in order to get to consciousness. Under Cannabis, which might interfere with this normal processing, information may take novel routes to consciousness and thus be perceived in novel ways. Such a model would explain why users often say that under Cannabis they see things for the first time "as they really are," or why they dwell on aspects of complex visual or auditory stimuli they would ordinarily ignore.⁷

I now realize that altered secondary perception of sensory information is intrinsic to all altered states of consciousness, whether triggered by drugs or not. Therefore, it no longer seems profitable to me to try to understand how marijuana "causes" the effect. In addition, I no longer subscribe to the negative hypothesis that marijuana interferes with normal processing of perceptual data. Rather, I observe that in altered states of consciousness, one frequently gains the ability to interpret his perceptions in new ways and that this ability seems to be the key to freedom from bondage to the senses. For example, hypnotic anesthesia is nothing more than another way of perceiving pain. The patient, fully aware but in a state of focused consciousness, learns the "trick" of separating the pain itself from his reaction to it. He is thus free to perceive the pain in a novel way - something going on "out there" but not hurting. (One hypnotist I know produces this state with the suggestion that "the hurt is going out of the pain.")

Furthermore, the ability to produce anesthesia at will (a power frequently demonstrated by adepts at yoga) may be no more than a trifling use of this freedom to experience sensations in other ways. Once one learns the process, he may become aware of many more useful things to do with it than ignore pain. For example, the conscious experience of unity behind the diversity of phenomena - said by sages and mystics of all centuries to be the most blissful and uplifting of human experiences - may require nothing more than a moment's freedom to stand back from the inrush of sensory information and look at it in a different way from usual. If all the so-called psychological effects of marijuana are really not attributable to marijuana, and if the physical effects that are attributable to it are so unimpressive, what, then, is marijuana? To my mind, the best term for marijuana is active placebo - that is, a substance whose apparent effects on the mind are actually placebo effects in response to minimal physiological action. Pharmacologists sometimes use active placebos (in contrast to inactive placebos like sugar pills) in drug testing; for example, nicotinic acid, which causes warmth and flushing, has been compared with hallucinogens in some laboratory experiments. But pharmacologists do not understand that all psychoactive drugs are really active placebos since the psychic effects arise from consciousness, elicited by set and setting, in response to physiological cues.

Thus, for most marijuana users, the occasion of smoking a joint becomes an opportunity or excuse for experiencing a mode of consciousness that is available to everyone all the time, even though many people do not know how to get high without using a drug. Not surprisingly, regular marijuana users often find themselves becoming high spontaneously. (The pharmacologist invokes "residual concentrations of Cannabis constituents in the body" to explain this observation.) The user who correctly interprets the significance of his spontaneous highs takes the first step away from dependence on the drug to achieve the desired state of consciousness and the first step toward freer use of his own nervous system. All drugs that seem to give highs behave this way; all are active placebos. But the less physiological noise, the easier it is for a user to understand the true nature of drugs and their highly indirect relationship to states of consciousness. Alcohol users are less likely to find themselves spontaneously high because they have come to think that "high" includes all the pharmacological noise of alcohol. At the same time, marijuana, while providing a better opportunity to make the jump to drugless highs, is more insidious as a creator of illusion, for it enables the user to pretend that he is not really dependent on it at the same time that it reinforces the notion that highs come in joints, an irony that recalls another unsettling comment of C. S. Lewis' Screwtape: "Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar."

Dr. Andrew Weil, The Natural Mind