Ignoring hundreds of years of contrary evidence and multiple governmental and scholarly studies that proved that hemp was not only extremely useful, but that it’s intoxicating flowers and leaves were about as dangerous as coffee, a cabal of industry and government officials engineered its eventual status as a “demon weed” and so began one of this country’s biggest mistakes. By focusing on the intoxicating part of hemp, and by instituting a concerted campaign of fear and disinformation, the bounty of the hemp plant has languished in darkness for decades, and those who use the plant for recreational relaxation have borne the brunt of this hapless government prohibition.

Yet still, hemp and marijuana have remained alive and well, providing some of the industrial products of days past and continuing to give people a buzz when they feel the urge. And in the last decade or so, over 10 states and several countries have legalized the use of medicinal marijuana despite a federal government that continues to attack.

The latest round of hemp and marijuana propaganda has recently sprung forth from Great Britain where recently published “studies” have warned that smoking pot will turn you psychotic. Shades of William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow journalism” scares and the cult movie Reefer Madness come to mind. But the truth is simply that these “new” reports are not new, and the headlines they engendered are far from truthful.

According to this post, the “new studies” first printed in England’s The Lancet (and subsequently picked up by all the other media hacks) are anything but new. And further, the reports themselves do not claim that smoking pot will make you psychotic. The truth is the “new report” was merely a compilation of seven old studies, all previously published, some decades ago. The truth is that these studies actually showed that the association between cannabis and mental illness is small, about the same as the link between head injuries and psychosis. Get that? Smoking pot or getting a bad head injury both have the same chance of causing some form of psychosis. Should we outlaw head injuries?

Just as in the 1930’s, the hype over these reports may have much more to do with political ambitions that about actual science. It seems that the new Prime Minister in Great Britain, Gordon Brown, has a thing about people who smoke pot. He wants to stiffen penalties against marijuana users, and by getting a supposedly credible medical journal like The Lancet to publish false reports is one way to get the public behind you- much like Hearst did when he began writing about pot-crazed killers back in the day.

But the reality is that investigators really reported that cannabis use was only associated with a slight increase in psychotic outcomes, but that the increase was not really a causal one. Instead, they found that use of intoxicants were higher among people with psychoses, whether that was marijuana, alcohol, or tobacco. In fact, studies have shown that people often turn to cannabis to relieve stress, or for other medical reasons, showing that rather than make people ill, already ill people were turning to pot for relief.

When dealing with shady situations, one of the first things investigators do is “follow the money.” This is no less true with hemp and marijuana. The continued prohibition of this plant, both for industrial and non-industrial uses, is a purely economic one. All the other moralistic and political rationale are simply BS.

(cross posted at Bring It On!)

This is the America they have brought to reality today:

Education is falling farther behind the rest of the world, including some third world countries. Science and math scores are at all time lows. Education costs are at all time highs. Cuts to student grant and loan programs for higher education leave many out of luck. The average reading comprehension ability among adults is judged to be at a sixth grade level.

Health care has become so expensive that many citizens go without, causing preventive care to be ignored at the peril of national health. Hospitals are overwhelmed with uninsured and illegal immigrants and are closing their doors. Seniors are having to go without vital medicine in the wake of a “new and improved” Medicare prescription benefit. The average bankruptcy is due not to reckless, wanton spending, but to unexpected, catastrophic medical costs.

Energy costs have skyrocketed, but energy providers and others in the energy industry have seen their profits explode. The average person has to choose between filling up the gas tank or buying new clothes for the kids. Home heating bills are even worse. Yet the answer from Congress is not to aggressively explore new energy resources, but to offer tax cuts to the industry as they attempt to gut wilderness areas in the quest for more non-renewable energy sources.

Employment is being sent overseas as companies seek to improve their bottom line at the expense of the people they want to buy their goods. For every middle wage job that leaves, a new Starbucks opens so net job loss is negligible. Net income is going way down though. And as inflation rises along with the federal interest rates, average Americans are being squeezed by the financiers and credit companies. Bankruptcy is also tougher to access for those in real need, but companies can shift their obligations like pensions and health care off on the government while receiving subsidies and bail-outs and tax cuts.

Prisons are expanding in both population and power as more citizens are targeted in the worthless war against pot users. Meanwhile, child rapists and convicted murders are paroled and let loose on an unsuspecting society to make way for the dangerous dopers. We have nicer prison complexes than schoolhouses, which is okay since so many will end up there now that they can’t get a good education or a good job anyhow.

Domestic security is a farce with our unsecured borders, unprotected ports and transportation systems, and concern with taking nail clippers away from the elderly and infants. Regular Americans are kept off of airplanes by a “no-fly” list while we look the other way as violent gang members sneak across the border. But at least the president is spying on average citizens to make sure they aren’t calling terrorists abroad. After all, better to monitor the phones than stop them at the border.

Our environment is being assaulted by corporations who continue to ignore regulations and get away with it. Reducing greenhouse gases is just too darn expensive. Ensuring that water is clean takes too much time, and besides, we soon won’t have any scientists to monitor this stuff anyhow.

On the foreign front, we’ve managed to piss off most of our former allies and made some new, duplicitous ones in the process. The “War on Terror” has been turned into a war on innocent foreign citizens while the real dangerous people are left to plan another battle for another day. And let’s not forget about the fact that we’ve hocked the future of the next two or three generations to foreign countries to pay for all of our misdeeds. The mortgage on America is held by everyone but us, and when the bill comes due, it will be our future generations who are left holding an empty purse.

Throw in an assault on the Constitution by a power hungry president and administration, fueled by a religious ideology and sense of American superiority that does not exist and the very tenets of freedom are on the block.

And what has your congressperson or senator done to prevent any of this? The Republican party in congress has created many of these program policies and championed them through couched as family values or moral certitudes. The Democrats have sat idly by and let it happen. Both want only to remain in power and get richer while the average citizen withers away. They are paper tigers and corrupt pawns of corporate hegemony and religious zealotry and neither will help us regain what used to be a given- namely, American freedom, prosperity, integrity, and pride.

Sure, some politicians are trying to do what is right for America and Americans, and by extension, the other people in this world. But the majority are careerist hacks, bent only on their ability to get power and keep power. They’ve made politics a game of partisan bickering without benefiting the taxpayers who keep them in office. They’ve turned us off on politics by their own ineptitude. They’ve made the job of governing so meaningless that we’ve stopped participating. And now they can do as they will, not to make life in this country better, but to keep the people out of the way.

So I ask you again, Why do you support a system and a politician who would sacrifice you and your children’s future freedom and peace? Is it because you believe the rhetoric you read in the paper or the sound bites you see on TV more than you believe what your own experience tells you? If I kick you in the head and tell you it doesn’t really hurt do you believe that too?

There is another way. In America we are allowed, no, we are required, to choose who will govern us. And when those who are in the chair of power do not do their duty, we are supposed to get rid of them. If the Democrats and the Republicans won’t take this country to a place it should be, a place where our tax dollars fund the people who pay them instead of the bureaucracy that has no common sense, then we must find people who will. We must choose to elect people who are like us. People who suffer the inanity that we all endure and want to change it. People who grow weary of the rhetoric and seek to speak the truth. People who will work towards a common goal of returning America to the land of freedom and fiscal sanity and lawful rationality that it was meant to be.

If the two party system has become so corrupt that it cannot right itself, and I fear that it has become just that corrupt, it is time to move away from it to an era of citizen legislators. Don’t be fooled into thinking that we need two parties to move America forward. They obviously have done nothing but move us backwards. We could do better without them, and our very way of life may require that we do just that.

According to the FBI’s latest annual uniform crime report, the Bush Administration is doing a spectacular job in combating what is surely this nation’s number one problem- marijuana users. In fact, more people were arrested for marijuana offenses last year than at any time in this country’s history. Over 770,000 people were cited for marijuana related violations in 2004, but nearly 90% of them were charged only with possession. I don’t know about you, but I feel much safer knowing that the supply of sandwich baggies will now surely increase with these people off the streets.

When are Americans going to stand up and say enough already? According to those same reports, over 96 million Americans have tried marijuana at least once in their lifetime. That represents nearly a third of all people in this country. Of the 19.1 million regular users of illegal drugs, over 75% of those users choose marijuana as their drug of choice. Medical marijuana users notwithstanding (but currently prime targets for the Bush Justice Department), it would seem that marijuana is the drug of choice for a vast majority of people who would rather not drink alcohol for their weekend high. The simple fact of such widespread acceptance of what is basically a harmless intoxicant flies in the face of governmental attempts to eliminate the drug, which have been only marginally successful at best. In fact, studies show only a small decrease in usage among high school students since the beginning of the “Just Say No” and D.A.R.E. programs.

I have previously written about the drug war, its lunacy and wastefulness of people and tax dollars in my essay Ending the War on Drugs, but it bears repeating again. The War on Drugs is nothing more than a War on the American People, and not just those who use pot, but on all of us. Much of this increased enforcement is being done at the behest of the White House. It seems that tracking down pot smokers is of higher importance than tracking down terrorists like Osama bin Laden.

In study after study, marijuana has been shown to be less harmful than alcohol, tobacco, and even many legal prescription drugs. In fact, the FDA has approved prescription medication that has as its main ingredients a simulated form of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. The obvious hypocrisy of allowing those things to be legal while outlawing marijuana itself isn’t lost on most Americans either, who would rather see use decriminalized and treated than have smokers locked up. This war on pot serves only to create a criminal class where none should exist. It ties up precious tax dollars. It destroys honest, hard working people.

Legislators, for their part, are nothing more than cowards to allow this to continue unchecked. I have yet to hear of a single elected federal official even broach the subject of decriminalizing marijuana. Instead, they skirt the issue or march lockstep with the propaganda, claiming to fight for and protect Americans while allowing the feds to hunt down and lock up average, otherwise law abiding citizens.

The War on Drugs, especially the wrath against marijuana is a waste at so many levels it boggles the mind. Is this really the biggest problem we face today? If it isn’t, why are we wasting so much time and money to eradicate it? Decriminalization would save money and save lives. It would eliminate the black market trade, the gang turf wars, the illegal smuggling, overcrowded prisons; the list goes on and on.

Pro-Life or Pro-Birth?

It’s time to stop allowing the opponents of abortion to label themselves as pro-life. What they really are is pro-birth. They spend their time fighting over the rights of the unborn, the frozen embryo, and the sanctity of life inside the womb, yet turn around and gut social programs that would actually improve the lives of the very people they say they are fighting for. Talk about another case of speaking out of ones rear end.

Pro-birth advocates use religion as the main basis in their arguments against abortion, but when religion is turned back on them regarding the social responsibilities of society in general, they balk at the chance to be consistent in their beliefs. Pro-birth advocates are less about saving and improving the quality of life than they are interested in controlling the behavior of everyone with a penis or vagina. Their aim is not to protect and increase the quality of life, something that the term “Pro-Life” alludes to, but instead they seek to force a religious point of view, specifically their own, on to the rest of the world around them. Curiously enough, abortion statistics show that those of faith are just a likely to have an abortion as those without faith, and Catholics, who are staunchly anti-abortion (at least according to official doctrine) receive over 30% of abortions in a given year.

A true Pro-Life stance would include promoting a social atmosphere that provided accurate information about the cause of pregnancy without all the scare tactics of abstinence only programs. A Pro-Life stance would seek to make access to health care and education more important than punishing a poor, single woman and an unborn child to a lifetime of poverty for an error in judgment or poor planning. Pro-Life should mean working to improve quality of life for the living, defending the freedom of the living, and promoting the welfare of the living. Pro-Birth, on the other hand, cares only about making sure people are born and cares nothing for the circumstances they may be born into.

How many conservative “Pro-Lifers” are taking in the children who would otherwise be aborted? How many abortion protestors are offering to adopt and pay for the pre-natal care of young pregnant women? The answer is few, very few. Instead, these Pro-Birth advocates seek to make it more difficult for people to prevent pregnancy in the first place, as is evidenced by the this administrations refusal to let the FDA pass the Plan B morning after pill that could preclude any need for abortions at all. They go so far as to bemoan the recently discovered vaccine that prevents cervical cancer at a rate of 100% because it will diminish their arsenal in their abstinence only endeavors. (Abstinence only classes are quite the joke anyhow. Telling people with raging hormones not to have sex at any cost while they live in a society that is agog with sexual innuendo and imagery is like throwing a dead horse in a hungry lion’s cage and telling him not to eat. Guess what happens?)

For all their talk of activist judges and the rule of law, the conservative anti-abortion foes can’t accept the fact the abortion freedom IS the law of the land and has been for over 25 years. The fact that they continually seek to have these laws overturned shows again their own hypocrisy, since it is now them who seek to install activist judges who would re-legislate from the bench. For more thoughts on this, read my previous post, The Abortion Debate.

Like the War on Drugs, the abortion debate is nothing more than a smokescreen devised to demonize portions of the population while distracting the American people from the fact the their government is corrupt, uncaring, and unequal to the promise of freedom and democracy.

Today we have the War on Drugs. Though not enacted through a constitutional amendment, our prohibition on the use of some drugs has had the exact same result as the prohibition on alcohol, only more so. According to the Federal Prison Bureau, nearly 60% of convicted inmates are serving sentences for non-violent drug offenses. According to the DEA, nearly 40 million Americans use some type of illegal drug each year. In 1995, the federal government spent over $13 billion just for enforcement of the nations drug laws. This figure does not include the costs of incarceration, treatment programs, or arrogant foreign policy. Nor does it take into account the number of families torn apart by the arrests of people whose only crime is ingesting something into their own bodies for their own sense of pleasure. Despite these draconian figures, drug use has remained fairly constant, with the only real negative effects being those caused by the laws themselves Obviously, there is something seriously amiss in these policies.

I could write pages and pages regarding the historical and political machinations that have been employed to create the current state of drug laws in this country, but several good works have already documented these facts. (You can find some of this yourself at www.druglibrary.org or by reviewing The Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Herrar, among others.) Instead, I will discuss how the current anti-drug regime contradicts the notions of common sense governing and inhibits personal responsibility and freedom. Suffice it to say that the War on Drugs has become a marriage between religious morality and big business and is more about maintaining money and power than about public safety. Drug laws are arbitrarily applied and lacking the scientific and practical evidence necessary to back up the claims used to maintain their illegality. In fact, the current regime of drug laws creates a self-perpetuating cycle by making criminals out of ordinary citizens for the purpose of rationalizing their very existence. And the economic windfalls realized by private incarceration, treatment programs, defense lawyers and testing centers exert pressure on the politicians to maintain the status quo.

Why then do we allow the current drug laws to remain? Study after study shows that the application of drug laws is unevenly enforced. Sentencing of drug offenders is not commensurate to the act, especially when compared to the penalties given to violent criminals. Our overburdened prisons and overtaxed public finances can’t keep up with the demands created by these drug laws, and the loss of otherwise productive citizens from the social and economic grid creates staggering consequences for families and business alike. Further, potential harmful effects of drug use are infinitesimal compared to the harm caused by legal drugs like alcohol, nicotine, and pharmaceuticals. While I can concede that on an individual level, drug abuse can have grave consequences for the user and their close family members, on a societal scale, drug use is of no concern to a free nation, except when it causes great harm. In that context, the real criminals are the drug laws themselves.

The only logical answer is to follow the same course that ended the prohibition of alcohol. From both a social and political standpoint, the eradication of the War on Drugs provides a way to strengthen moral values without legislating them, while reducing the drain on government funds and the strain on society.

From a social standpoint, decriminalization of drug use and sales would put an end to the scourge of broken families that incarceration creates. The stigma surrounding drug use would lessen and the user would no longer have to feel threatened or need to hide from society because their actions would no longer carry criminal penalties. Similarly, drug manufacturers and sellers would no longer stand to make great profits through the underground market, thus eliminating the criminal element from the economic side of drugs. Society benefits through the reduction of street gangs vying for territory and market share, creating safer neighborhoods for everyone. The absence of criminal status would further reduce the instances of people using drugs simply because they were taboo, because the element of danger would be eradicated as would the so-called “coolness” factor that accompanies such actions.

On the governmental level, the amount of tax money saved by the reduction of enforcement, prosecution, and incarceration costs could be funneled into educational efforts that provided honest information to students regarding the effects, uses, and potential problems associated with drug usage, as well as providing a proper social context for their use. Further, the legalization of drugs would allow for increased tax revenue to be generated by the creation of a new legal product that could in turn be used to fund social programs that benefit everyone. Also, the need for ever increasing prison space would become a non-issue, allowing for violent criminals to be kept incarcerated until such time as they could be rehabilitated rather than releasing them back into society due to lack of prison space.

For those who claim that legalized drug use would lead to an increase in crazed individual’s who would be more likely to commit crimes to support their drug habits, I would support strict criminal penalties for anyone who commits a criminal act while under the influence of a drug, much like we do today with the alcohol laws. Through increased public education, without the propagandized scare tactics, citizens would grow up knowing that drug use as a recreational endeavor is not an excuse for unacceptable or dangerous, anti-social behavior. Finally, by allowing drugs to be sold in the open market, society could regulate the quality, potency, and purity levels of a given drug, much like we do with alcohol, tobacco, and the legal pharmaceuticals today.

While the use of drugs may seem morally unacceptable to some people, that is not reason enough to maintain a legal prohibition. The War on Drugs has proven itself to be ineffective at preventing drug use, financially unsupportable and wasteful of tax dollars, and constitutionally questionable with regards to personal freedom. It has created a violent sub-culture of distributors and manufacturers and has caused otherwise productive citizens to become a drain on the social coffers. Never mind the implications of legislating individual morality; these reasons alone are enough to put an end to it.