(no subject)
Marijuana is a killer, if you ingest 15,000 pounds of the stuff within 15 minutes, a recent figure seen, accredited to the US Drug Enforcement Agency.
Regardless of this dubious 'fact', eight US States have passed Medical Marijuana laws allowing people with a variety of ailments and medical complaints to legally use marijuana.
Voters in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, have all voted in medical marijuana statutes (or legislatively implemented in the case of Hawaii) which specifically allow doctors to 'recommend' pot to patients they feel may benefit from the therapeutic effects pot has on untold numbers of ailments and illnesses. 69 percent of the voters in Washington, DC in November 1998 voted to implement a similar statute, but US Rep. Bob Barr managed to kill a popular vote of American citizens for the first time in US history, both in 1998, and again in 1999, after a Federal judge ruled that Barr's amendment disallowing the votes to be counted in 1998 was illegal and unconstitutional.
In Colorado, also in 1998, then-Colorado Secretary of State Victoria Buckley claimed the petition the Colorado med-mar-advocacy group Americans for Medical Rights had circulated still needed to get more signatures to get Initiative 19, Colorado's med-mar proposition, onto the ballot. After she unexpectedly died of cancer in the Summer of 1999, the missing signatures were found in Buckley's desk by her successor, where she had hidden them for unknown reasons, with the result that I-19 was on the ballot again in Nove,ber 2000.
In California, police in some counties, like Placer Co., are ignoring the Compassionate Use Act, the med-mar law passed by voters in 1996. For years Prohibitionists would say, "You don't like the law, change it," but once California drug-law reformers did just that, the police said, "Write a better law," or "It's against Federal law." This ignores the fact that the US government still mails eight patients within the US 7.1 pounds of pot a year, already rolled into cigarettes, for various medical problems.
Just who is sending the wrong message to kids? The US 9th Circuit Court ruled on September 13, 1999, that "seriously ill patients" should be allowed pot if the need is there.
While this writer sees many more reasons than strictly 'accepted' medical ones to use marijuana, the fact that cannabis has been used for millennia for myriad maladies without one documented death from overdose (DEA figures aside), illustrates clearly that if pot is good for even one in ten people, the utter lack of toxicity means no risk in using it, so if it doesn't help their specific ailment, no harm done, they can move on to another treatment.
Until 1941, marijuana was listed in the US Pharmacopoeia, and only dropped after the Marijuana Tax Act passed. It nearly was grand-fathered into the Comprehensive Drug Abuse & Control Act, as cocaine and morphine were.
The US government has spent millions of dollars on reports and studies, that all refute in one way or another the hard-line Prohibitionist stance when it comes to pot. The DEA's own Administrative Law judge in 1988, Francis Young, ruled that "marijuana is one of the safest therapeutic substances known to man."
US President Jimmy Carter, in 1977 said, "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself," speaking about marijuana.
I say, FREE THE WEED!
Regardless of this dubious 'fact', eight US States have passed Medical Marijuana laws allowing people with a variety of ailments and medical complaints to legally use marijuana.
Voters in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, have all voted in medical marijuana statutes (or legislatively implemented in the case of Hawaii) which specifically allow doctors to 'recommend' pot to patients they feel may benefit from the therapeutic effects pot has on untold numbers of ailments and illnesses. 69 percent of the voters in Washington, DC in November 1998 voted to implement a similar statute, but US Rep. Bob Barr managed to kill a popular vote of American citizens for the first time in US history, both in 1998, and again in 1999, after a Federal judge ruled that Barr's amendment disallowing the votes to be counted in 1998 was illegal and unconstitutional.
In Colorado, also in 1998, then-Colorado Secretary of State Victoria Buckley claimed the petition the Colorado med-mar-advocacy group Americans for Medical Rights had circulated still needed to get more signatures to get Initiative 19, Colorado's med-mar proposition, onto the ballot. After she unexpectedly died of cancer in the Summer of 1999, the missing signatures were found in Buckley's desk by her successor, where she had hidden them for unknown reasons, with the result that I-19 was on the ballot again in Nove,ber 2000.
In California, police in some counties, like Placer Co., are ignoring the Compassionate Use Act, the med-mar law passed by voters in 1996. For years Prohibitionists would say, "You don't like the law, change it," but once California drug-law reformers did just that, the police said, "Write a better law," or "It's against Federal law." This ignores the fact that the US government still mails eight patients within the US 7.1 pounds of pot a year, already rolled into cigarettes, for various medical problems.
Just who is sending the wrong message to kids? The US 9th Circuit Court ruled on September 13, 1999, that "seriously ill patients" should be allowed pot if the need is there.
While this writer sees many more reasons than strictly 'accepted' medical ones to use marijuana, the fact that cannabis has been used for millennia for myriad maladies without one documented death from overdose (DEA figures aside), illustrates clearly that if pot is good for even one in ten people, the utter lack of toxicity means no risk in using it, so if it doesn't help their specific ailment, no harm done, they can move on to another treatment.
Until 1941, marijuana was listed in the US Pharmacopoeia, and only dropped after the Marijuana Tax Act passed. It nearly was grand-fathered into the Comprehensive Drug Abuse & Control Act, as cocaine and morphine were.
The US government has spent millions of dollars on reports and studies, that all refute in one way or another the hard-line Prohibitionist stance when it comes to pot. The DEA's own Administrative Law judge in 1988, Francis Young, ruled that "marijuana is one of the safest therapeutic substances known to man."
US President Jimmy Carter, in 1977 said, "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself," speaking about marijuana.
I say, FREE THE WEED!