Compiled by Brent E. Beltrán
This week’s edition of Looking Back at the Week features articles by San Diego Free Press and OB Rag regulars and at-large contributors on Comic-Con, a proud day for activism, stinky SDPD, the Mayor’s climate indifference, GOP wanting to impeach, minimum wage, Obama and Cap America, Neighborhood House, for-profit colleges, who runs San Diego, bare facts, native solidarity, El Machete, OB planning and lots more. [Read more…]
The answer is ‘Yes!’ as Washington and Colorado have moved to legalization, nine states have decriminalized and twenty-three have introduced medical marijuana legislation.
By Marc Snelling / OB Rag
Dude, is it legal yet?
People have been saying this since the seventies. Speaking to activists from this era, it seems many felt that legalization of marijuana in the US was imminent in the early seventies. But other than Alaska in 1975 (re-criminalized in 1991) the seventies did not see legalization of marijuana come to pass.
The activists of the seventies (Baby Boomers) have now been joined by the next generation – the children of the seventies (Gen X). With these two generations working together public support for legal marijuana is now over 50% and is on the rise. Victories in the battle to change US laws continue as both generations of activists work towards change.
Today the answer to ‘Dude, is it legal yet?’ is becoming ‘Yes!’ for more and more people as Washington and Colorado have moved to legalization, nine states have decriminalized and twenty-three have introduced medical marijuana legislation. [Read more…]
The U.S. is far behind when it comes to drug laws that actually make sense.
By April M. Short / AlterNet
Some Americans, stuck in the Nixon-era “war on drugs” mentality, are panicking about the “unknown dangers” and “potential risks” of loosening marijuana policy in the U.S. Those people have failed to look outside of the U.S. bubble and see that many nations have already implemented health-based, sensible marijuana laws and practices with overwhelming success.
In the U.S. today, 23 states have legalized medical marijuana (New York just this month) and two (Colorado and Washington) have legalized pot for recreational use (although it’s worth noting that in many states medical marijuana laws are severely restricted). The and the majority of American voters think it should be legal and regulated like alcohol. However, it remains safe to say the U.S. is not at the global forefront of progressive, sensible marijuana policy. [Read more…]
Without federal leadership, you can count on marijuana legalization to keep spreading one state at a time.
By Emily Schwartz Greco and William A. Collins / OtherWords
How much longer will it take before the United States declares a truce in the Drug War?
This latter-day prohibition is taking an immense toll. And the stakes ought to be low, given that most Americans don’t want anyone jailed for being caught with small amounts of pot.
But it does require some courage to pipe up. So thank you, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, for joining the swelling chorus that wants to see marijuana legalized.
“The distinction between marijuana and alcoholic beverages is really not much of a distinction,” Stevens said during an interview with NPR’s Scott Simon in April. [Read more…]
The consequences are measured in lives, limbs and cash.
By Alex Kane / AlterNet
It was 1971 when President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one in the United States.” With those words, Nixon ushered in the “war on drugs,” the attempt to use law enforcement to jail drug users and halt the flow of illegal substances like marijuana and cocaine.
Thirty years later, another president, George W. Bush, declared war on another word: terrorism. But the war on drugs hadn’t ended yet. Instead of one failed war replacing another soon-to-be-failed war, both drugs and terrorism remain targets for law enforcement and military action that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and have cost billions of dollars.
In fact, the war on terror and the war on drugs have merged to form a hydra-headed monster that rapaciously targets Americans, particularly communities of color. Tactics and legislation used to fight terrorism in the U.S. have been turned on drug users, with disastrous consequences measured in lives, limbs and cash. And money initially used to combat drugs has been spent on the war on terror. From the Patriot Act to the use of informants to surveillance, the wars on drugs and terror have melted into one another. [Read more…]
They’re talking a lot about pot these days.
By Helen Redmond / AlterNet
For decades the ability to study the medicinal effects of marijuana have been obstructed by the federal government. But in a sign that the marijuana landscape is changing, a bipartisan group of 30 members of Congress wrote a letter to Sylvia Matthews Burwell, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, asking her to remove barriers to obtaining the drug for research purposes. (The full letter appears at the bottom of this article.)
According to a press release by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon):
“Currently, scientists not funded by the NIH seeking to conduct research on marijuana are subject not only to the review process that applies to other Schedule I substances, but to an additional review process by the Department of Health and Human Services that allows for access to the only source of marijuana grown in the United States that can be legally used for research.”
The Public Health Service (PHS) review protocol applies only to marijuana.
Currently, marijuana is a Schedule I drug, meaning it has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse” according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. This is ludicrous and shows how out of touch both the DEA and the federal government are. [Read more…]
Today, over 100 cities in at least 46 countries will speak out.
By Owen Poindexter / AlterNet
Today, over 100 cities in at least 46 countries will speak out against the war on drugs.
It is difficult to overstate how much of a failure the War on Drugs has been. By any reasonable standard it has done much more harm than good. Drug trafficking-related violence has soared, our prisons are stuffed with drug offenders (many of them non-violent), with minorities disproportionately represented. It is a costly, global economic disaster with economic gains from cannabis and other drugs restricted to the black market.
Scientists are kept from studying cannabis, a plant that has proven to ease the suffering of countless medical patients—and those patients are forced break federal law if they want to obtain their medicine. Even by the drug war’s own misguided metrics, the project has failed. The US alone has invested $51 billion annually but drug use and availability have not decreased. Drug potency has steeply risen over the last several decades and the public is not safer for the drug war’s efforts.
Other countries, while not spending this absurd amount, have seen similar self-inflicted harm from their repressive drug policies. Criminalization has not done anything to stem the demand for mind-altering substances. Rather, it has created an ecosystem that fosters gang activity on a neighborhood level, and violent, politically connected cartels on a countrywide scale. [Read more…]
There would be far more literature about cannabis’ efficacy if the feds didn’t impede studies.
By Paul Armentano / AlterNet
Those who work in marijuana policy reform have long been aware that federal regulations and agencies significantly impede investigators’ ability to conduct clinical studies of cannabis, in particular those protocols designed to evaluate the plant’s therapeutic potential. During recent testimony on Capitol Hill, Nora Volkow, the director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, admitted this fact publicly to members of Congress. (View the entire June 20 hearing, titled “Mixed Signals: the Administration’s Policy on Marijuana, Part Four,” here.)
Though Volkow appeared Friday before the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform ostensibly to speak about her recent review in the New England Journal of Medicine (a paper I previously critiqued for AlterNet here), she spent a significant portion of her time defending her agency’s virtual stranglehold on investigators’ ability to engage in cannabis-specific clinical research. [Read more…]
By David McClellan / medium
Even if you don’t use Marijuana, you should be supporting getting it decriminalized.
Tax Marijuana, Hit Cartels Where it Hurts
About 1 in 4 people have claimed to have used Marijuana at least once in their life and according to the Federal Government about 15 million Americans are currently using Marijuana at least once per month. Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug in the world and has shown no signs of slowing down.
Economics 101 states that where there is demand, there will be a supply and right now, the supply is mainly coming from Mexican drug cartels. These drug sales are grossing Mexican cartels a healthy $64 billion in untaxed drug revenue each year. In the last 5 years, police and drug cartels have killed a staggering 55k people and cartels are growing Marijuana in National Forests while running drug distribution networks in over 1k cities across the U.S. The legalization of Marijuana will put a big dent in the cartel revenue, reducing crime, lowering money spent fighting cartels while adding another source of revenue for the U.S. government. [Read more…]
The largely misunderstood distinction now has two correct answers.
By Angela Bacca / AlterNet
What is the difference between hemp and marijuana? The short answer: semantics. The long answer: the difference is a largely misunderstood distinction that now has two correct answers, a legal one and a scientific one. And like all things proven by scientists, it is somehow up for public and political debate.
Thanks to nearly 80 years of federal cannabis prohibition, public knowledge on the topic is limited to rumors and misinterpretations perpetuated online—everything from “hemp plants are male and marijuana plants are female” to “one is a drug and the other is not.”
The legal definitions also have muddied the water as legislators have passed laws at both the federal and state levels defining hemp in the pursuit of both fiber and medicine.
So what exactly is the difference between marijuana and hemp? Let’s start with semantics. [Read more…]
Documents reveal they’ve viewed marijuana as both a rival and potential product.
By Stanton Glantz / Alternet
It turns out that the history of Big Tobacco companies and marijuana is more intertwined than was previously known, according to a new study in The Milbank Quarterly. Based on previously secret tobacco industry documents, the study reveals that, since at least the 1970s, tobacco companies have been interested in marijuana as both a rival and potential product. As a result of litigation against the tobacco industry, more than 80 million pages of internal company documents became available at the University of California San Francisco’s Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. This study, led by Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, is the first to systematically review these documents specifically about marijuana.
The authors write that “despite fervent denials, three multinational tobacco companies”—Philip Morris, British American Tobacco, and RJ Reynolds—have all “considered manufacturing cigarettes containing cannabis. “People have suspected for a long time that Big Tobacco was interested in marijuana,” says Glantz. “The documents we review show that they have been considering legalized marijuana as both a competitor and an opportunity.”
One of the goals of the study, say the authors, is to make policymakers and public health advocates aware that tobacco companies are prepared to enter the marijuana market with the intention of increasing its widespread use. As states like Colorado and Washington legalize the recreational use of marijuana (and many others are considering it), the authors make a compelling case for policymakers to adopt regulatory frameworks similar to existing tobacco laws in order to prevent youth initiation and tame market domination by companies seeking to maximize profits with the sales of another addictive substance. [Read more…]
An amendment that would prohibit the Fed from interfering in state medical pot laws is still up in the air.
By April M. Short / AlterNet
The GOP-controlled House surprised just about everyone when it voted 218 to 189 for a pro-medical marijuana amendment on Friday. The amendment, tacked onto the much larger criminal justice funding bill (H.R. 4660), would prohibit the Department of Justice (DOJ) from using federal taxpayer funds to interfere with medical marijuana laws in 22 states that have passed them.
The House vote was historic. It was the first time since the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 that the majority of a chamber of Congress voted in favor of something that would alter national marijuana policy. [Read more…]
