Marches are underway across the land, as hundreds of thousands of people are showing their support for the movement to finally end marijuana prohibition.
In honor of this great day, here’s a lovely infographic showing the negative costs of the ineffectual policies drug prohibition, and what could be gained by finally freeing the weed. (The stats pertain to America, but are equally applicable to any nation choosing to fight the war on drugs.) (more…)
A poll came out this week showing more than half of Canadians believe Muslims to be untrustworthy, scoring far worse than any other group.
What is up with that, Canada? (more…)
Oh glorious days! The war against the war on weed is advancing across many fronts. As long as this keeps up, the Western world might actually climb out of the dark ages and finally purge the plague of drug prohibition.
Up in the Great White North, the Liberal party added legalization of marijuana to their platform. Not less enforcement. Not decriminalization. Actual full fledged regulation that allows the unfettered distribution and taxation of legal weed. Take that, Harper!
Spurred forward by the frigid temperatures, Michiganders just kicked of a campaign to amend state law and legalize marijuana for use with adults over the age of 21. Go Wolverines! Or should I say Weedverines? No… Wolverines is just fine.
Members of the Centennial State – Colorado – will soon get a chance, come November, to decide whether or not they’d like to legalize possession of small amounts of the sticky icky. Finally, a law-abiding rocky mountain high!
And last but not least, prepare your bullshit protection for when the US government will be forced to justify the Schedule I status of Marijuana in court. Watch as the contortionists from the pro-prohibition side attempt to show how one of the safest and most beneficial plants on earth is actually just as bad as black tar heroin.
Opposition to drug prohibition has never been stronger than it is right now. The end is in sight. Within a few years, if all goes smoothly, we’ll be able to look back on ourselves today with the same disdain with which we view the quaint alcohol prohibitionists from last century.
Glorious days, indeed!
Here’s two brilliant cartoons for your Tuesday reading pleasure:
It warms the heart to think that, within just a few short years, commentary like those contained in these cartoons could very well grow obsolete. Then, once we’ve done away with the war on drugs and war in general, we can look back on ourselves today and wonder why it took us so long to restore sanity to our domestic and foreign 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.
(‘Looks good, but do we really need a sink _and_ a toilet? Get rid of one or the other – and presto – room for one more guest!’)
Canadians are renowned for resilience in the face of adversity, able to bear freezing winters for the brief but sensational summers. It is this willingness to take the good with the bad which leads Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party to believe Canadians will stomach their new Omnibus Crime bill.
Bill C-10 – the government’s new crime legislation – lumps together nine previously introduced bills which never passed, now repackaged into one all-encompassing document.
However, you can forget taking any time to discuss the matter – the Tories have decided to limit discussion to just two days! This means the opposition parties will have their work cut out for them, trying to call attention to all the bill’s glaring problems in such a short period of time.
First, there’s the plan to crack down on Marijuana cultivation, imposing new mandatory minimum sentences for minor offenses. Come on, Harper, in a nation that boasts the highest pot usage in the developed world, you’re alienating a good chunk of the population (not that most pot-smokers are likely to vote Conservative).
But forget the votes. Instead, consider how the whole drug prohibition strategy has proven itself to be a complete and utter failure. Why throw more money into that hole? Just look at the thousands who’ve been slain along the Mexican borders – they’d still be alive if drugs were legalized and the criminal gangs were no longer fueled by the billions they earn off the black market.
If the Conservatives really cared about protecting society, they’d take a rational, proven approach, like decriminalizing all drugs. Portugal did it, and it’s been a resounding success 10 years on. Screw the DEAs and drug gangs… let them find new jobs!
But sound policies are not what Harper stands for. Instead, the priority seems to be to appease trade partners – like the US, who’ve been steadfast in their funding of the failed war on drugs for decades.
And where will all these newly criminalized Canucks be housed? Why, in Canada’s new super-prisons, of course. Taking another page out of America’s playbook, privatized prisons can be huge money makers offering juicy kick-backs, provided the population is willing to tolerate having minor offenders locked up with hardened criminals.
Last but not least, this new crime bill will let police gather information from ISP’s without the need for a subpoena. Right, because we’re all sure to be safer when law enforcement has access into the private lives of every single Canadian.
Meanwhile, the world’s economies are teetering on the edge, and crime across the nation is at a 20 year low, but Harper and his party seem intent on dropping a few billion bills to see a larger percentage of Canadians get imprisoned.
Sadly, the financial costs of bill C-10 may very pale next to the long term societal damage to be incurred should Canada continue to follow in America’s footprints – a path the Conservatives seem hellbent on sending us down.
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.
(It seems anyone can get on the Internet these days.)
Drug prohibition is a scourge on the planet. Not just because it wastes billions of tax payer dollars a year, or because criminals can grow strong off the lucrative black markets, but because the so-called ‘war on drugs’ prevents humankind from fully utilizing the amazing plant known as Cannabis.
It is time to end the war on drugs, just as it is time to end war in general.
As you’ve heard by now, Proposition 19’s bid to legalized small amounts of Cannabis has failed.
But it was close to passing. Really close. Just under half. So if more pro-pot people had just gotten off their asses to vote, marijuana would now be somewhat legal in California.
And this would have been huge! For an influential state in America – one of the world’s most prohibitionist countries – to legalize the bud may have been considered a pivotal blow in the movement to end drug prohibition. In the very least, it would have would have served as a case and point example of how ending prohibition results in a resounding success, like it did in Portugal when they legalized all drugs.
I know what you’re thinking, if “ifs” and “buts” were segway’s then we’d all have fat bottoms. But don’t give up! Drug prohibition is such a flawed, draconian policy and a blight to our species that it is integral that we end it ASAP.
And don’t forget, Prop 19 stands as an awesome step forward. For one, many more people were exposed to new ideas about the war on drugs. As well, these efforts lead the way for other states (and provinces) to follow suit.
Heck, we should try something like that up here in Canada, seeing as we’re home to the most dope smokers (per capita) in the industrialized world.
