“Sorry I’m Illegal” is the statement, but the reasons marijuana is illegal make no sense…

Why such a simple plant is so feared I will never understand. Potted plants are ok but pot plants are persecuted, go figure.

Hemp and cannabis are an American tradition, Uncle Sam says so…

Grown in the USA via: Cannabist by:Miles Anderson

The City Council of Seattle, the largest city in the state of Washington, voted to establish a municipal licensing and regulation system for medical marijuana distribution under a new state law that takes effect later this week.  A spokesman for Mayor Mike McGinn said he expects to sign the measure quickly, making Seattle a beacon of compassion and forward-thinking surrounded by several other municipalities who have placed all kinds of restrictions on medical marijuana dispensaries and cultivation facilities.

According to Reuters:

The 8-0 vote in favor of the measure comes nearly three months after Governor Christine Gregoire signed into law a new measure allowing cities to regulate and license production, processing and distribution of medical marijuana on a limited basis.

That statute, which takes effect on Friday, requires storefront dispensaries and other medical pot suppliers to reorganize themselves as small, cooperative ventures serving up to 10 patients. These “collective gardens” are confined to growing 45 plants total but no more than 15 per person.

A spokesman for the mayor said he anticipates the mayor will sign this ordinance today, Tuesday the 19th, and the measure would go into effect in another 30 days.  It would be my guess that the local economy in Seattle will have a slight “boom” in a months time.

Do the math yourself.

According to the Reuters article,  there are more than 25,000 medical marijuana patients in Seattle.  The article also states that there are currently 80 dispensaries already in operation.  Those existing places of business will only be allowed to provide service to 800 patients, leaving the additional 24,200 with no place to go and creating a potential need for another 2,420 shops to open their doors to fill the need.  I do not know exactly how many individuals each medical marijuana dispensary and the required grow houses will employ, but even if they only employ ten people each this will create around 25,000 new jobs and generate a huge amount of new, taxable income for the city, state, and even the federal government.

Anytime a new law or ordinance creates this large of a boost to the economy, local or national, it is obviously something that is long overdue.

There are so many reasons to love Willie Nelson, I can’t even begin to count them.  The grizzled Texas outlaw country singer-songwriter, legendary for his music, is an unabashed cannabis smoker and legalization activist.  Willie recently teamed up with NORML, The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, for an informative Public Service Announcement concerning marijuana.  You can check it out below.

Amsterdam without weed?

What is the first thing that most North Americans think of when considering traveling to the Netherlands?

Some people think of tulips, windmills, and bicycles.  These are a mandatory and unavoidable part of the Dutch experience.

Some people think of the famous Red Light District located in one of the most beautiful and oldest parts of Amsterdam.

For the rest of us, we think of the famous coffee shops and the great times to be had within.  Well, it seems the Dutch government no longer wants our tourism money and wants to increase the local crime rate.

On Friday, May 27th, the Dutch government decided to restrict access to cannabis coffee shops so that tourists will no longer be able to enjoy a relaxing smoke break between visiting over priced museums and avoiding rain showers.

The rest of this story can be found here, at 420News.co

Marijuana ‘Hemponomics’ and Drug Policy information from Nicholas Ivan Ladendorf aka NIL

Hemponimics Information Graphics by:NIL

Drug Policy Information Graphics by: NIL

Find Nicholas Ivan Ladendorf 2010 US House Candidate at NIL or FaceBook

Put Out That Butt and Smoke a Bud! Tobacco Causes Many Forms of Cancer, Marijuana on the Other Hand Does Not! So next time you decide to light one up, please consider the implications. PS the revenuers are coming, the revenuers are coming…

While there are no benefits in smoking tobacco cigarettes, the tobacco manufacturers have continued to market their paper wrapped toxins for decades. Cigarette smoking is now banned in all 50 states to one degree or another. Oklahoma does not ban the smoking per se but they do have requirements for ventilation if smoking is to be allowed.

On the other hand, smoking marijuana was outlawed for the longest time and in the recent years, several states have come to realize there are in fact medical benefits with the herb. To date, there are 14 states who allow the use of marijuana; Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, Michigan, New Jersey, Maine, Vermont and Rhode Island. In a Senate Bill signed into law on January 18, 2010, New Jersey was the 14th State to allow marijuana for medical purposes. Two of the remaining states are somewhat confusing. Arizona allows physicians to prescribe marijuana but not to smoke and Maryland has allowed the defense of medical marijuana usage.

If states allowed marijuana for recreational purposes then regulated and taxed marijuana as they do liquor or tobacco, perhaps their deficit would be much lower.

Video of Harvard Economist Jeffrey Miron on the reasoning for Marijuana Legalization and Ending the American Drug War, a statistical factorial example by technical deconstruction.

Harvard Economist Jeffrey Miron on why marijuana should be legalized and the reasoning behind ending the American drug war.

Video of Harvard Economist Jeffrey Miron on the reasoning for Marijuana Legalization and Ending the American Drug War, a statistical factorial example by technical deconstruction.

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron deconstructs the reasons why the war on drugs needs to stop. From the documentary HIGH: The True Tale of American Marijuana, out now on DVD and iTunes. via:TrueHigh

Miron really sinks some hard facts and data into the consciousness. If the fellows from places as prestigious as Harvard reach out and prove such points… Why in the world does our government of the people not hear our cries from on high nor down below?

This is the official trailer for HIGH it’s rather interesting:

HIGH: The True Tale of American Marijuana (Final Release Trailer)

The trailer for the film HIGH: The True Tale of American Marijuana, the documentary that takes a critical look at the war on drugs.

National Cannagraphic Magazine Tagged: drugwar, harvard, legalization, marijuana, video

A nice piece with some interesting links showcasing the new sentencing guidelines established for crack and some of the politicians balking at it being retroactive. The statistics are scary and border on racism.

By Molly Kenney of iVoryTowerz

Tragedy will ensue if new sentencing guidelines for crack offenses are made retroactive, Attorney General Michael Mukasey told the House Judiciary Committee this week. Did someone just tell him about the sentencing shift now?

Last year, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to reduce the sentences for crack cocaine offenses in an attempt to address the startling inequalities between crack and powder cocaine penalties. Prior to that ruling, 5 grams of crack cocaine carried the same penalty as 500 grams of powder; more than 85 percent of incarcerated crack offenders are black. In December, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Kimbrough v. U.S. that judges were no longer bound by the sentencing guidelines. Within a day, the Sentencing Commission announced retroactive sentencing changes, making almost 20,000 inmates eligible for consideration for early release in the next decade.

On behalf of the brilliant Bush administration, Mukasey asked Congress to block the retroactive sentencing changes. According to The Washington Post, he warned that “tragic, but predictable results” would come from releasing crack offenders who were sentenced under the former guidelines. Mukasey is terrified for communities which will receive these criminals, “among the most serious and violent offenders in the federal system.” I guess that means communities shouldn’t be worried about the silly little (read: white suburbanite) powder cocaine offenders, or the average of 1,600 U.S. offenders of all stripes released daily.* The so-called “War on Drugs” isn’t that different from other wars this administration is waging — same scare tactics, same illogical reasoning.

So what is Mukasey doing raising this issue in February? Perhaps water sports or a short attention span kept him from addressing this last year, but his statement to the House will now likely fall on deaf ears. Congress made no move to block the guidelines last year, although it could have done so any time between May and November. Congress certainly is not going to act in the next three weeks before releases begin, just because Mukasey’s asking now. The federal judiciary, defense attorneys, and several probation and prison reform groups have all lauded the Sentencing Commission’s decision. Retroactive changes for unfair sentences are strongly backed, and this preoccupied Congress (one that is getting ready to pass a widely-supported, bipartisan offender reentry bill, the Second Chance Act) won’t care about Mukasey’s last inning rumblings.

Even the stances of Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the retroactive sentencing guidelines went almost unnoticed. Predictably, Sen. Clinton (D-NY) opposes the retroactive changes, continuing her habit of playing the Republican in Democratic clothing. Also expectedly, Obama wants change but undefined change. When asked in a December debate about this issue, he talked instead about the larger issue of young male involvement in drugs. With only vague hints from Obama, I’m going to have to assume that this means he is in favor of the retroactive sentencing changes. Obama is sponsoring the Second Chance Act, and with former Senator John Edwards gone from the presidential sweepstakes, I’m not supporting Hillary.

By objecting to righting wrongs such as racist sentencing, the Bush administration may be playing the “tough on crime” card, usually a guaranteed political boost, at a time when a boost is sorely needed. But this is just another bad move by a bad administration. Thankfully, this time, no one is listening to them, and the end is only 11 months away.

*This statistic from the Urban Institute circa 2001.

(For more background on this issue, please see: “Crack Sentencing Guidelines Revisited;” and “The Court on Crack.”)

Link: From the Independent.ie and posted Sunday September 14, 2008

The US government succeeds in over 90 per cent of its prosecutions, which indicates that the system is a stacked deck. US criminal justice is based on the plea bargain, which is essentially the exchange of immunity or a reduced sentence for inculpatory perjury against targeted people. It is an evil and repulsive system based on intimidation, suborned falsehoods, and impoverishment. Irish, British and Canadian prosecutors using these tactics would be disbarred.

The prosecutors routinely try to freeze assets of targeted people, ex parte, on the basis of affidavits they know to be fraudulent. They did so with me. Few people can afford to go the distance with the Justice Department, and are conducted to their confinement by the Judas Goats of the public defender service, pawns of the prosecutors, understaffed, and paid on the basis of supposed merit by the judges, most of whom are also ex-prosecutors. The longer the trial, the more certain it is that the jurors will be unqualified to sort out the facts, especially as they cannot consult the transcripts, and must rely on their memories.

The Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth constitutional amendments — guarantees of due process, the grand jury as an assurance against capricious prosecution, no seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel, an impartial jury, speedy justice, and reasonable bail — were all assaulted by the prosecutors in my case. We didn’t know the grand jury was sitting and never saw a record of its activities. The proceeds of the sale of an apartment I owned in New York were seized on the basis of what the jury later recognised as a false affidavit, in order to frustrate my ability to pay the retainer required by my lawyer.

I had to go to less well informed and qualified counsel. The US government has been harassing me for five years, and I had to post bond in the outrageous and almost unheard of amount of $38m.

All of the principal government witnesses had negotiated their testimony in exchange for immunities or a reduced sentence, and all lied repeatedly and were implicitly disbelieved by the jurors. Although not conversant with complicated commercial matters, and having to rely on their recollections of evidence in a four-month trial (although two of them slept through most of the case), the jurors threw out 80 per cent of the entirely false allegations against us.

I have no complaint with my present surroundings, but thoughtful Americans may want to reflect on why this country has eight to 12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Up to the Seventies, the US was a reasonably liberal country in these matters and had about as many imprisoned people per capita as those countries, had a prison system that gave some attention to rehabilitation, and an active prison reform movement.

The US media has for decades hyped the violent crime problem out of all proportion to its real importance. This was almost the only way for local news programs to attract viewers. Virtually all politicians went berserk hammering crime as an issue. Absurdly repressive laws tumbled forth: Mandatory Minimums, the Three- Strike Rule, “Truth in Sentencing”, and the artificially inflated mystique of the death penalty as a macabre ritual of moral and social purification.

The consequence of this was that designated crimes received draconian sentences, with no discretion to the judges to alter them. A third conviction, no matter how trivial or far apart the convictions were, is grossly over-penalised, and no federal sentence could be reduced by more than 15 per cent.

Despite all the fear-mongering about violent crime, for the first time since Prohibition, there were more Americans imprisoned for non-violent than for violent crimes. Only four per cent of three-strike prisoners in Los Angeles were violent. In the whole country, only 15 per cent of the nearly 2.5 million prisoners are repeat violent offenders.

Prison reform collided with the feminist movement, which claimed that violence against women was out of control and was tacitly sanctioned by a large part of male America. The bloody riots in San Quentin and Attica prisons in the early Seventies caused the confusion in the public mind of prison reform with black radicalism and the blood-curdling ambitions of Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, and other black extremists, and brought down a heavy backlash on all accused and confined people.

The crime rate declined as the 20 years of Reagan, Bush Sr, and Clinton were basically full-employment, inflation-free decades of huge job creation, and because police techniques were improved and numbers of police increased. The politicians sold the public the bunk that they were responsible for bringing down crime by conducting a war on crime and a war on drugs based on more arrests, high conviction rates, more imprisoned people and longer sentences.

The drug trade was, in fact, a perfect case of supply-side economics, as the price has come down through greater supply, product quality has improved, and there has been no reduction in demand, despite the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of small fry easily replaced by the drug trade kingpins.

The War on Drugs has cost $750bn and has almost nothing to do with violence. Drugs are involved in one third of property crimes, but only five per cent of violent crimes. People growing 1,000 marijuana plants get mandatory life sentences. The Congress declined money requested by the Clinton administration for more methadone treatment, though it is 15 times more effective than imprisonment for reducing drug use, and hugely less expensive.

The public happily approved countless state referenda authorising bond issues for building new prisons. When this cut into welfare and education budgets, and the public in many states voted down the special prison-building bond issues, the state governments gave long-term leasebacks to private sector companies that built the prisons, and guaranteed them a high occupancy level and rental payments whether the facilities were full or not. This saddled the states with an effective average interest rate of 37 per cent, but excused the politicians from an insupportable referendum or the dread appearance of being soft on crime.

Tens of thousands of shareholders of Wackenhutt and Corrections Corporation of America and other prison companies demanded more and more prisons and prisoners, and steadily more absurdly draconian laws.

The prison companies hire former prison and security officials as executives and directors, including former directors of the FBI and CIA. The correctional officers are militantly unionised, and their unions are rivalled only by the National Rifle Association as the most effective political lobbying organisation in the country over the past 30 years. Overflow prisoners are shipped from one state to another, and often housed in abominable conditions.

To establish federal jurisdiction, charges are ridiculous inter-state technicalities like wire fraud. Charges come in large bunches, as jurors are normally reluctant to give their government nothing at the end of a long trial. Unconscionable delays are allowed for prosecutors to hand over documents, defence witnesses are frequently intimidated, while government witnesses are ring-fenced from the defence and carefully scripted, and exempted from prosecution for perjury.

Summaries of interviews with potential witnesses are withheld from them and are frequently falsified. Impossibly vague statutes arm the prosecution with the ability to threaten anybody with unfounded but dangerous charges.

I was convicted of not giving “honest services” to our company, although this was never defined; the company suffered no economic loss, and there was no evidence to support the charge.

Prosecutions in the US have become steadily more numerous, are almost always at least partially successful, and the political class, from left to right, claim success against crime through righteous severity. The public was screaming for blood, judges were named or elected on the basis of their propensity to aid the prosecutors and become, with few exceptions, the zeitgeist in robes.

Almost no one can afford to fight it out, as defendants are denied the ability to pay counsel by spurious asset seizures. Unconstitutional laws like RICO and CAFRA (seizure of assets under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act and Civil Assets Forfeiture Reform Act, gross misnomers), were enacted and misapplied. Both were thrown at me, including the uniquely American concept of civil racketeering.

Prosecutors sit immediately in front of the jury in court, making faces at and flirting with jurors like schoolchildren, have the last word in trials, and benefit from huge procedural advantages.

The concept of the criminal defendant’s day in an impartial court receiving justice that is blind to all but the evidence, with the sides equally balanced and weighed by Solomonic judges and Chestertonian juries, has been hollowed out to a farce with a few trappings of justice decorating a state-prosecution steamroller.

In California, from 1977 to 1998, the number of prison employees multiplied by six (to 24,000) and of prisoners by eight (to 160,000, a higher number than the UK, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Singapore combined, which have 11 times California’s population). Since then, the number of California’s prison employees has grown from one-fourteenth of its employees to one third, and the prison budget has exceeded the state’s university budget.

Five million African-Americans have been disenfranchised because of their legal records, and we are now getting back to the level of black disenfranchisement that prevailed prior to Lyndon B Johnson‘s Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1965. The per capita number of blacks to whites in prison is 10 times greater. More than a third of American black males between 20 and 29 are under some form of criminal justice supervision.

The population of the US mental hospital system has declined by 90 per cent in 35 years, as these people were just tossed into the prison system. Unemployment figures were improved by putting 1,500,000 unemployed people into prison and employing 750,000 mainly unskilled workers, many of whom would also otherwise be unemployed, to watch them.

Imprisonment has become a discreditable substitute for racial segregation, chunks of the welfare system, treatment of mental illness, and amelioration of the effects of drugs on American society. The prison industry in the States has become a horrible, gigantic Frankenstein monster, involving hundreds of billions of dollars annually, feeding on public ignorance and paranoia, political corruption and cowardice, and with the rails greased by the endless media portrayal of heroic police, prosecutors and judges, and uniformly horrible and psychotic criminals.

The myth has been built up that property must be defended as fiercely as people’s persons. Because Congress and the administrations funked on disparity of wealth, the totemistic persecution of a few prominent people who strayed into the cross-hairs, like Martha Stewart and Michael Milken, was substituted for a comprehensive public policy debate about why there are 45 million poor people in such a rich country, and what to do about it.

In our case, while obviously innocent people have been convicted of a few of the false charges that were brought, in the briefly holy name of corporate governance, our company’s share price has descended from $21 when I departed it, to 18 cents. The Canadian company, for which I offered $7.60 per share in 2005, has been plunged into bankruptcy and is worthless. The court-protected defenders of the public shareholders have obscenely enriched themselves with hundreds of millions of dollars, while destroying these fine companies and vapourising $2bn of shareholder value. Splendid titles have deteriorated in the UK, the US, and Canada. Such is the current state of American corporate governance. The courts and regulators of the US (and Canada) are complicit in this debacle and they will have much to answer for.

America is becoming a prosecutocracy and a carceral state. In a democratic country, the people are always right, and if the American people are happy with their justice system, their will is sovereign. But the majority of Americans, massed at their great public spectacles, hand over heart, singing their splendid patriotic anthems, have no idea how far their justice system has putrefied.

When the number of victims of official injustice and their families and supporters become so numerous and aroused that every congressman receives 50 messages a week from them, change will be possible. That is democracy too, but as long as these problems are not addressed, the human and moral damage to American society will become steadily more severe.

Time and sober analysis are already revealing that it is that system, and not I, that has been disgraced in these legal travails.