Alternet writers put up a concise piece highlighting 5 Special Interest Groups That Help Keep Marijuana Illegal, something worth knowing if you didn’t already.
The 5 groups listed are:
Seeing how it’s the time of year when billows of pungent smoke pour out across the world (Happy 4/20 everyone!), let us take a few moments to reflect upon the insanity that is drug prohibition.
Suppose every myth you’ve been led to believe about drugs is true, and that they are really an evil scourge on society; destroying families, fueling crime, and turning our young people into mindless addicts. Even if all that were factually accurate (which it isn’t), there is still something far more destructive to our world than drugs themselves. And that something is drug prohibition. (more…)
Out of nowhere, the Liberal party has jumped back into the running with the Canadian public, just by adding one simple policy to their platform: legalize marijuana.
Party members announced that “a new Liberal government will legalize marijuana and ensure the regulation and taxation of its production, distribution, and use, while enacting strict penalties for illegal trafficking, illegal importation and exportation, and impaired driving.”
Yes!!! Canada’s pro-cannabis movement just gained new levels of traction. Even though it is being pushed by the Liberals – 3rd prize in Canadian politics – this is still a huge milestone.
As other parties see just how much the issue of legal weed resonates with the Canadian people, they too will be tempted to hop on the ‘Oh Cannabis’ bandwagon.
While Harper and his conservatives cram more crime bills down our throats, it is great to see that not all politicians have abandoned reasonable policies.
You may have noticed a rash of posts lately calling for the end of the global war on drugs. Well, they say write what you know, so here’s one more reason why we should end drug prohibition – because it sends mixed messages to our young people.
Consider the following:
Cannabis is an incredible medicine that helps patients physically, mentally and spiritually. Cannabis makes for an excellent recreational drug and is proven safer than alcohol or tobacco. Cannabis seeds make a super-nutritional food, and the stalk of the plant itself is one of the most versatile building blocks on earth, able to create all kinds of useful goods.
Yet this incredible plant, this godsend which could be a tremendous boon to human civilization, is vehemently persecuted and vilified worldwide thanks to laws that are entrenched all the way up to the United Nations.
So just what are educated young people supposed to think when they discover both of the above truths, which they inevitably will. Probably something like “If the grown-ups are hell-bent on sticking to something that is so obviously misguided, what else have they been getting wrong?”
If the goal is to protect children, why not start by making it so the system they grow up in isn’t overrun with draconian drug prohibition laws. Laws which have never – even after many decades and hundreds of billions of dollars invested – offered any shred of evidence that they are making the world a better place.
Today’s imagery highlights Carl Sagan’s timeless words and exposes one of the biggest blights to plague our planet: drug prohibition.
As we’ve discussed before, Cannabis is kept illegal to protect several billion dollar empires from the threat of an extremely productive and versatile plant. On top of this, the war on drugs serves as an extension of the military industrial complex, where entities profit by manufacture enemies and then release armed combatants to fight them.
Fortunately, it seems we are positioning ourselves to move beyond these draconian days of drug prohibition. Portugal’s decriminalized drugs over a decade ago, and the results were a resounding success.
Following Portugal’s lead, Britain’s Liberal Democrats are looking into decriminalizing drug possession. Not to be outdone, Greek officials have taken steps towards ending the illegality of drug use.
Great news! Hopefully the whole world will soon hop on the whole treat-drug-use-as-a-health-issue-not-a-criminal-issue bandwagon, setting us free to focus our energy on the real issues, like corrupt and unaccountable governance.
(More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. – Kofi Annan)
Fantastic news! A new 24-page report by a group of politicians and former world leaders has declared the War on Drugs to be an utter failure.
They argue that anti-drug policy causes “devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world” since all it does it fuel organized crime while costing billions in taxpayer dollars and leading to thousands of deaths.
The authors of the report lambast current prohibition policies, writing “Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.”
The report concludes that governments should end criminalization of drug use, experiment with legal models that would undermine organized crime syndicates and offer health and treatment services for drug-users.
Finally, some sensible drug discussions at the highest level. Drug prohibition has been a tremendous blight on our species for decades now, highlighting the inherent injustice in the world’s political system. It is high time that we came to our senses about drug policy reform.
Man, I’m stoked! Today marks another important step towards ending these draconian days of drug prohibition, bringing us one step closer to ending war on earth.
Time is running out in the international anti-prohibition petition to the UN. If you one of the 500,000+ who’ve already voiced their support, what are you waiting for? Visit Avaaz right now!
Enforcing drug prohibition has proven itself to be far more costly to society than illicit drugs have ever been. It is time for the people of the world to stand together and bring the senseless war on drugs to an end.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter spoke to congress regarding the ridiculously flawed war on drugs, saying:
“Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use.”
Heeding Carter’s words, Delaware Governor Jack Markell has just finalized a small step towards regaining sanity, signing a bill into law that allows the production, distribution and use of marijuana for medical purposes.
Awesome news for Delawareans, for the pro-Cannabis movement, and for rational people everywhere.
As incredible as we humans are, and amazing as our accomplishments have been, we’ve still some major injustices left to eradicate.
While not as pressing as say, Israel’s oppression of Palestine, an issue that is not given its due credence for its crimes against humanity is… drug prohibition. Yes, the war on drugs is a tragedy of the utmost proportions for many reasons, of which here are two:
First, we’re spending billions a year on soldiers, cops and jails to fight drugs, while the only tangible results are the creation of a gigantic black market to prop up powerful organized crime syndicates.
Second, we’ve actually been stifling our world’s GDP by not harnessing the full potential of a few highly beneficial plants, like Cannabis and Coca, which could each be multi-billion dollar businesses on their own.
So why does the war on drugs persist? Surely not because it has been successful. Today, even though narcotics are cheaper and stronger than ever before, prohibition does far more damage to society than the drugs they vilify.
No, what it boils down to is that these beneficial plants are being made illegal because of their very usefulness. Cheap and plentiful, they offer tremendous competition for other billion dollar industries – a notion vibrantly described by the writers at Absolute Despotism:
Marijuana’s probably bad for you, but so is shoving pine cones up your ass. The reason marijuana’s illegal and pine cones aren’t, is because you can’t use pine cones to make paper… But in the 1930’s a new machine called a “decorticator” made it profitable to produce paper from hemp. So profitable that Popular Mechanics called hemp the “New Billion-Dollar Crop” and reported “10,000 acres devoted to hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average [forest] pulp land.”
Well a lot of people, including newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, owned a shit load of timberland, and because people don’t like it when new technology comes along and fucks up their business, Hearst started calling hemp marijuana, and launched a newspaper campaign to ban his competition. It worked, and even though the American Medical Association was against banning marijuana (seriously), in 1937 it was outlawed. So thanks to people like Hearst, marijuana was outlawed to prevent competition from hemp.
Hearst was just one powerful guy in the paper industry. Now picture similar rich tycoons within Cannabis’ other competing fields, like oil, cotton, pharmaceuticals, alcohol and tobacco, and we begin to see the real reasons drug prohibition is still around – big money in a few pockets.
But here’s the good news: the sham known as drug prohibition is being exposed to a growing audience. Soon, in the same fashion that alcohol prohibition was demolished, enough of us will stand together against further injustice and bring the world’s war on drugs to a well-deserved end.
(Oh, Cannabis!)
An Ontario Superior Court judge ruled Monday that Canada’s medical marijuana program is unconstitutional, essentially quashing laws against possessing and producing cannabis.
The judge has given the government three months to appeal, and if the ruling isn’t challenged, owning or growing pot will become legal across Canada.
Oh man, how glorious this would be! We can finally stop policing and prohibiting one of the world’s most productive plants.
