Crossposted from Greenstate Project
The ACLU has decided that cannabis laws are not fair and has decided to join in the effort to fix them.
I'll try to keep it short and sweet on the flip.
The Seattle Times report starts with the necessary reference to the failure of alcohol prohibition and makes a quick jump to the racial issues. Good stuff.
Saying the laws disproportionately affect minorities and can impose severe consequences for possessing as little as 40 grams (roughly the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes), the state ACLU received funding from the national organization to create an informational program it hopes will air on television stations and the Internet. Steves appears in the program.
There's a great lead-in to talking about this subject: getting the negative comparison to tobacco AND information about racial disparity into one sentence.
I am glad to see an "informational program" about cannabis and reform issues coming out with the credibility of the ACLU behind it.
So often I have seen "liberal and progressive" folks commenting on relegalization articles, deeply offended by the suggestion that the inequities visited upon us by the fervent enforcement of cannabis possession laws rise to the status of prejudice and deprivation of civil liberties.
Well, here it is: the ACLU is seeing fit to finally wade into this unacceptable and artificially-created morass that is so big and tangled up, it has several different names: The war on Drugs, cannabis prohibition, reefer madness (no, really - it's a great term).
The ACLU reports developing a program to educate people on the realities of this issue. Most people have only anti-marijuana propaganda in their heads where actual information should be. They are filled with it.
And like fish floating in water, they are unaware of it. They even get agitated when one managed to point this out. People with perfectly good brains, but the file in their brains where all their marijuana knowledge is stored is corrupted and filled with nonsense and emotional hyperbole. Nothing resembling verifiable knowledge - just reefer madness.
American minds are full of this nonsense because of folks like Tom Riley and the ONDCP, a federal agency that gets BILLIONS of your tax dollars every single year so they can keep burying the American public discourse on cannabis reform in fresh layers of absolute bullshit.
This has to somehow be corrected before the necessary legislation can be approached.The ACLU program will hopefully help fix this problem of "cannabis ignorance".
The ACLU's decison to approach the issue with information also reinforces my thoughts on approaching the Democratic party to help fix this issue. The main thing we need right now is talking. Rational, responsible adult talking.
Leadership.
Legislation is almost a distraction from the central need to train people to talk about cannabis like normal, intelligent adults, not propaganda-babbling fanatics.
And speaking of propaganda-babbling fanatics, no mainstream media news article on cannabis reform is complete without a visit from those high-paid liars in the Federal Government.
Throughout most of the country, the popularity of decriminalizing marijuana use has waned, said Tom Riley, spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The potency of the drug has tripled in the last 10 years and its use is not "a harmless pastime," he said, "but a much bigger part of substance abuse and a much bigger part of mental-health issues."
None of that means a friggin' thing.
Let's disassemble it real quick and call it good.
- the popularity of decriminalizing marijuana use has waned
- The potency of the drug has tripled in the last 10 years
- its use is not "a harmless pastime
Nonsense. The issue continues to be placed on ballots each election and the medical marijuana movement is slowly spreading across the country. This is pure propaganda.
Thanks to years of heavy-handed drug war enforcement, folks moved marijuana production indoors and potency = profitability - just like in the days of Alcohol prohibition and the rise of moonshine. Potency means increased profits.
But with pot, never mind that the increased potency - if you can even find it: it's a rare treat for me - usually means people smoke less. This is called making a mountian out of a molehill: another propaganda technique.
Completely meaningless but very distracting hot air. What is "harmless"? We can talk about this until the sun goes down and get nowhere. Forks are possibly harmful. Cars are certainly harmful. Eating McD's is harmful.
How about prescription drugs, eh? Where's the outrage when a major pharmaceutical company, with the utter complicity of the FDA, allows over 22,000 people to die from a drug known to cause problems?
Dr. Dennis Mangano, the study's researcher, said during the program that 22,000 lives could have been saved if Trasylol had been taken off the market when he first published his study in January 2006, according to a CBS News report on its Web site ahead of a broadcast slated for next Sunday.
He said in the broadcast that Bayer failed to disclose to the FDA during an FDA advisory panel meeting in September 2006 -- at which Mangano's negative findings were discussed -- that the German drugmaker had conducted its own research which confirmed the same dangers established by his study.
The chairman of the FDA advisory panel, Dr. William Hiatt, told 60 Minutes he would have voted to remove Trasylol from the market had he been informed about Bayer's study, according to the CBS report.
Take these dangerous, ridiculously expensive drugs but don't smoke non-lethal mar-ju-wanna, ya hear? Especially medical marijuana. Don't do that.
Folks, they really do think you are stupid.
Here's the last myth to tackle:
Completely misleading again: this is supposed to raise the "specter" of mental illness being "caused" by pot smoking. Scare-mongering, pure and simple.
Actually, the folks over in the UK really get off on a lurid sort of reefer madness - the myth that smoking pot will make you hopelessly schizophrenic.
It's nonsense. This propaganda vector involves both a complete lack of understanding about schizophrenia combined with the standard reefer madness meme that pot smoking can cause anything known to be bad and scary.
Not only is this entirely wrong, it is a gross disservice to folks with serious mental illnesses by perpetuating nonsensical myths that hamper needed progress in society really understand these illnesses.
It's just not true. Schizophrenia affects about 1% of the human population, period. It's a complex syndrome of co-occuring illnesses in the brain and nervous system. You don't just "catch it".
Now, I will agree and clarify that IF one is predisposed to have such an illness lingering in one's biological make-up cannabis CAN precipitate onsets of the illness. This appears to happen in only a percentage of folks who ultimately have experiences of psychotic decompensation, what percentage it is, I don't know and won't speculate. If we had a more honest scientific look at all this, we'd know better. But my firsthand professional experience is that some people who are "loaded" for psychotic illness can smoke without adverse affects and some cannot. I don't have a problem telling a client to not smoke pot. I get paid to help them get well and stay well and if they need to not smoke pot, that's what I support.
I digress.
Notice how the ONDCP got one small paragraph at the end of a pro-reform article, I suppose to provide "fairness and balance", but it takes a lot of space and time to dissect it and attempt to undo the damage they do to the proper discourse with few bullshit-packed sentences.
3 Cheers for the ACLU: This is exactly their sort of fight and it's about time they really joined in.
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