As President Jimmy Carter told Congress in 1977:

“Penalties against a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use. The National Commission on Marijuana and Abuse concluded years ago that marijuana use should be decriminalized, and I believe it is time to implement those basic recommendations.

Therefore, I support legislation amending federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana.”

Economics of Cannabis Legalization

Facts and talking points regarding the false information, fear tactics and propaganda of law enforcement officials and politicians regarding the issue of marijuana decriminalization. Aside from the discredited gateway theory, there is a lot of false information and fear that has been spread over the past six decades that has resulted in the demonization of hundreds of thousands of Americans over that time, and is responsible for the incarceration of 85,000 today, many of them minorities. Here is an honest look at what the impact of decriminalization would be.

Here are two articles provided by NORML.

Marijuana Decriminalization and its impact on use

Decriminalization talking points

Unlike alcohol, which is known to increase drivers’ risk-taking behavior and is a primary contributor in on-road accidents, marijuana’s impact on psychomotor skills is subtle and its real-world impact in automobile crashes is conflicting.

Despite the fear propaganda that is spread by law enforcement and politicians, who have their own agendas for spreading the propaganda of fear in our communities, there are numerous studies that support what millions of smokers have known all along, that although there are some minute impairments associated with marijuana and driving, they are relatively negligible. Here is a sober look at drugged driving.

Click here to read the full article

The basics. Every user should know the basics of marijuana testing. Here is a short list of definitions.

Click here for the NORML guide to marijuana testing

20 million people were sentenced as criminals between 1935-1941 in the USSR. Half of those were executed. The other half were sent to labor camps and rehabilitation camps where most of them died. The gulag system provided a free work-force of millions in mining and timber industries in Siberia. All farmers were collectivized into labor units and told what to grow and were shot if they were caught stealing. By the blood of millions of people the USSR catapulted from a third world agrarian culture to an economic power. But all the agriculture and industry was taken by the state, and exports just made a few communist bureaucrats wealthy.

It seems that it really doesn’t matter what the system is. One thing is clear, and that is that from time immemorial there is always a gang of thieves who obtain the power necessary with which they can control most of the resources of a nation. Politics is the same in every country no matter what kind of system of control. It tries to dictate what is acceptable and how to be acceptable through propaganda, while politicians debate one another in fixed forums. With their henchman like Rupert Murdoch they dream of questions to address the answers they have already formulated and then circulate them on the evening news entertainment shows.

All state history boils down to coalitions that strive to gain power over the state’s assets. A state’s net worth is its natural resources and the ability of its workforce to create assets. It doesn’t matter if it’s communism or capitalism. They are opposite sides of the same objective, to hold power in order to gain can control of the nation’s assets. It’s why regulations that would benefit everyone, and that everyone obviously would agree to, are not even discussed in the so-called elected congress. People must have healthcare, drugs, utilities, banking services. But if a group of people can control the assets of any of these industries they obviously can get extraordinarily wealthy.

We have a modern equivalent of the boom and bust economic measures taken by Stalin in the 1930s and the American capitalist equivalent of the 1920s lacking the interest in developing resources and industry in America, and willing to use its power over the Congress and the President to pass laws not only making it legal to fire its labor force and profit from cheap labor, but in an added measure of outrageous audacity allows these companies tax breaks for doing so. Governments are pretty much the same. They hide behind quantitative figures, ignoring the individual elements that make up the totality behind the methods utilized to achieve success.

The phone flashed, indicating there was a message. A Florida call. Intrigued, I dialed up the voicemail.

“Yes, Mr. H_ your prescription is ready to be shipped. We just need to verify the address.”

I wanted to be sure my credit card number hadn’t been stolen so I called back the number. It was a pharmaceutical company. I forget the guy’s name who answered, but it was fictitious anyway.

“Yes, I was left a message on my phone that my prescription was ready. I placed no orders for any prescriptions with anyone. Why is your company calling me?”

“We are a pharmaceutical company. Are you sure you haven’t placed any orders for any drugs, any needles or anything like that?”

“I only take medications I can buy over the counter, or prescriptions I get from a physician.”

“Oh, I wonder why someone here would call you then?”

By this time I realized what was going on. “I just want to make sure my credit card number hasn’t been stolen.”

“No, no. I don’t even see your name listed in our directory.”

“It’s rather odd then, that someone would be calling me from your number.”

“Yes, it is. I will make sure the people on the floor know that you haven’t placed any orders.”

“All right, thanks.”

I thought police were trained better than that. Why would anyone “on the floor” need to know about someone who wasn’t in their database? Did he really think that if I had attempted to purchase drugs without a prescription I would be stupid enough to offer that information in a phone conversation with a stranger? It is pathetic that law enforcement wastes so much time and energy on entrapment tactics. It amounts to a beginning salesman who tries cold calling and finds one customer for one thousand numbers dialed. It seems more a ploy to keep the prisons filled.

The truth is I had received emails from a newsletter that advocated the use of steroids to a broader public. It offered alternative information that refuted much of the hysterical nonsense in the media. I am research minded and wanted to hear issues from all angles. I have never taken steroids except when they may have been issued by a physician as most medications are a form of steroid. As far as I know I have never known anyone who sells illegal steroids or growth hormones. I have never taken any bulk building steroids, and even if I were diabetic I would have to have someone else give me the shot. I could never stick myself with the needle.

Here is the definition of steroid per the American Heritage Dictionary: n. Any of a large class of naturally ocurring, fat-soluble organic compounds based on a structure having 17 carbon atoms bound in a ring, including many hormones and sterols.

The larger issue here is that somehow law enforcement had gotten my phone number and linked it to my name from an email list. I had never given it to anyone in an email or text message except to a family member in a private email. The government snooping hearkens us back to the Hoover years when that stupid paranoid asshole kept secret tabs on a host of others in the name of “protection”. Do we really want this kind of “service” to the community?

Following politics requires a willful suspension of disbelief. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckaby made a bizarre statement that after Mexican illegals Pakistani illegals constituted the second largest group of illegal immigrants in the U.S. with 660. Aside from the fact that he was at pains to reveal his source, Huckaby would have us believe that there were less than 660 illegal Chinese immigrants last year. Perhaps we can ask any shop owner in New York’s Chinatown what he thinks. That is, if you can get him to stop laughing long enough.

But Huckaby isn’t alone in requiring our suspension of disbelief. We only need recall the claims by GW Bush that he was going to bridge the divide among republicans and democrats. I didn’t find it that funny because of the sheer number of people around me who actually believed this petty tyrant wannabe could ever be a communicator. He said that he believed the American military was fighting too many wars and was being spread too thin, but one could see Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld
Cheney and others whispering in his ear and their documented desire to occupy the middle east available for the public to heed. And let us not forget he said he was going to be the education president and that he was a secular candidate. To believe any of these absurdities required an insane amount of willful disbelief of reality.

When I pointed this out to co-workers I was laughed and hissed at. I didn’t know what I was talking about. A Vice President of the bank asked if I was going to listen to Bush speak at the local rally because it was important to hear all sides of the issues. I remember thinking how sad it was that she didn’t recognize that I had studied the candidates and that she was one of the many sheep who was being duped by “the issues” and the stupid rhetoric that keeps us from making sober judgments. Perhaps her ego made her forget that being a supervisor of tasks doesn’t make one superior in anything but performing those tasks.

Earlier today I had the tv on while I worked and a news entertainment program was broadcasting coverage of the Iowa caucuses. The reporters were discussing the number of voters who were undecided yet and could still be swayed in the next couple of days. Among things they were discussing were the answers given to questions put forth by the candidates in the public arena and political advertisements. And I couldn’t help but notice that to be swayed by either implies a suspension of disbelief beyond measure. It calls into question the legitimacy of politics in America to consider that the best snake oil salesman is declared the winner by a duped public. Or in Bush’s case the loser could be declared the winner by the Supreme Court.

The citizens of a nation become suspicious of a government that makes decisions in secret. And in a nation whose constitution supposedly grants equal rights, secrecy and consolidation of power cause the rise of conspiracy theories. It is an age where the secret agents of power and wealth have openly challenged the impoverished and the middle class with class warfare.

GW Bush with all his “I am the commander” rhetoric has openly joined a Russian tradition where under the Tsars and the Communists all important political decisions are made in secrecy. The difference, though, is that Bush and his cronies have to maintain a facade of democracy. But all they have done with their lies is make democracy a byword throughout the world. While European countries understand that there are arenas in which profit taking is immoral, such as medical care; where other countries understand the importance of communication and good will, the Bush government and the corporate patsies in Congress have pursued a path that moves a majority of U.S. citizens towards serfdom. This is at heart the real issue regarding illegal immigration and the Bush/Crony/Congress conspiracy against the middle class. Their prophet Alan Greenspan has long been a critic of the level of wages for the middle class and has consistently pointed toward a need to lower wages among Americans.

The lesson learned by the upper class warriors of America is one learned from Russia. As Adam Hochschild writes in The Unquiet Ghost, “for almost all the Soviet period, historians treated serfdom merely as one more evil of the old order. Today, however, writers are much more likely to talk about it as the source of a deep passivity that allowed dictatorship to flourish long after serfdom itself had ended” (pg118).

It is no secret that the unprecedented corporate prosperity of the past three decades has come at the expense of the lower standard of living through stagnant wages compounded by the year on year accumulation of inflation. The money that should have been spent on the social well being of a nation has been handed to corporations in the form of corporate welfare. The credit debt of the government is the result of greed and power. The credit debt of citizens is largely due to the fact that wages alone do not provide the needs of the statistically ordinary worker. Living is more than simply eating and sleeping. There are some luxuries that are necessary to make life acceptable otherwise their is discontent and rebellion. Those who say that Americans do not know how to save money are simply ignorant. You cannot save what you haven’t got, and you cannot passively accept a life whereby any form of entertainment is a luxury that induces guilt. That is the rhetoric of an empire; it is the rhetoric of Stalin. The Huns are attacking, but this time they are wearing suits and ties and riding in corporate jets.

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Click here to read the full article

Here is another silly story. Of course, the so-called country of the Lakota Indians is fictitious and has no constitutional or legal authority. It amounts to play acting. These people would be better off dredging up the aboriginal ancestry of all of the other nations of the world and seeing how seriously they are taken by other countries when they claim some sort of rights of inheritance. As for the ridiculous charge that “white man has stolen our culture”, one’s culture can no more be stolen than his ego. It’s personal. Others can learn things from you, but they cannot steal your mind, and that is where the inheritance of culture lies. No one can steal your philosophy. They can learn from you, but because they assimilate parts of your philosophy without adopting your way doesn’t mean they have stolen anything or fail to understand. Enter into the world of post-reformation society like the rest of the world. You have to ask yourselves where all of your hatred has gotten you. You would be better off assimilating yourselves as ordinary citizens into the American race and forget about all the stupid nonsense that people don’t accept you because your this or that. It’s bullshit. If you apply yourselves to whatever you feel is your personal path, even the few who do feel prejudice towards you will fail to stop you. Only when you continue to teach your generations fear, hatred and your own brand of prejudice and racism do you perpetuate misery.

Click here to read about the Lakota Indian nation breaking away from the United States