As of today, Drug WarRant has been going for 12 years, with 6,090 posts and 10s of thousands of comments (don’t have an actual number on comments, since the count on those re-started when I moved to WordPress in 2009 – 70,000 since then).
We’ve seen some great progress in those 12 years (and some things have hardly changed at all).
The thing that really makes this site special is all the commenters who hang out on the couch. Thanks to all of you!
In the “things haven’t changed at all” category: Kansas Man Facing Felony Murder Charge for Telling an Acquaintance Where He Could Find Marijuana
The felony murder rule continues to cause injustice.
Also in the things-haven’t-changed category… Sandra Bland Marijuana Smear Is Another Cheap Trick of Racist Drug War
At a news conference discussing the preliminary findings of an autopsy following Bland’s alleged suicide at the Waller County Jail in Texas last week, officials placed heavy emphasis on marijuana reported to be found in the young woman’s system.
Why this emphasis? What does this have to do with widespread demands for accountability around the circumstances of her death? Are we expected to believe the not so subtle insinuation that marijuana use played a part?
In the category of “we wouldn’t have believed this 12 years ago…
[Via Press Release]: Senate Appropriations Committee Approves Measure Intended to Ensure Marijuana Businesses Have Access to Banking Services
The amendment, offered by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) to the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill, would prohibit the Treasury Department and its enforcement arm, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network or FinCEN, from using federal funds to punish banks that provide financial services to marijuana businesses that are operating legally under state laws.
See also: 10 Reasons Why Federal Medical Marijuana Prohibition Is About to Go Up in Smoke
Or, how about this? A ‘Drugged Driver’ Who Wasn’t Avoids Prison in Pedestrian’s Death
Then something surprising happened. Kane County State’s Attorney Joseph McMahon, after carefully considering the facts of the case, decided to drop the felony charge. “There was no evidence whatsoever of impaired driving,†McMahon told the Daily Herald. “Her THC levels were zero. The metabolite was positive. A metabolite is not what impairs someone’s ability to drive.â€
Baby steps, sometimes, but real change has been happening, and it appears that maybe…
Slowly but surely, the Western world is coming down from the hallucinatory war on drugs
Slowly but surely, the Western world is coming down from the hallucinatory war on drugs. Legalisation and regulation is safer for both users and society at large. One day we will look back with amazement at the idea of handing control of potentially-dangerous markets to the most lethal gangs on earth. These small steps in Derbyshire and Durham on cannabis are one more sign of progress towards a saner world.
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These things are getting better, and I believe that this site is contributing to the improvement.
Thanks for all of your great insight, and creating a community of thoughtful commenters.
I’ve enjoyed my years of visiting the couch.
Preparation method
1. Bring the facts, statistics and science to simmering point slowly over various newspaper comment threads.
2. Whisk the folks, prohibitionists and trolls together while smoking a bowl until well blended.
3. Violently pour the hot statistics and facts on to the folks, prohibitionists and trolls, whisking all the time with a giant balloon whisk.
4. Return to the pan, (add vanilla extract if using) and over a low heat gently stir in the watching journalists with a wooden spatula until properly informed.
5. Pour the ensuing custard into a jug and watch from a safe distance while smoking another bowl.
Don’t be so hard on the trolls, man. Most trolls fully support reform. It is called Poe’s law. Makes the opposition look like total idiots. They are just having a bit of fun. Sucks if you fall for it, though.
Yeah, not the trolls’ fault that prohibitionists are so damn idiotic and rabid that one can’t tell the difference between sincere crazy and crazy trolling that is indistinguishable from the jackassery of the authoritarian a-holes.
Wow! If only Ms. Volkow had the authority to reschedule. Unfortunately, i don’t think there’s much more the NIDA can do.
Researching Marijuana for Therapeutic Purposes: The Potential Promise of Cannabidiol (CBD)
lol, Nora has been forced to admit, because the FDA says they do, that botanical drug substances have a legitimate use in medicine.
Nora admits after not being able to hide it. That “eCB” has potential for medicine and still holds onto the old Nora gossip and fear mongering over whole plant medicine.
After 12,000 years of using it shouldn’t that be more than a potential? It potentially can fuel a rocket to Pluto but I’m not packing my bags just yet. Just more obscurity to avoid the inevitable collapse of her racketeering, coersion and murder.
Here’s another. After NIDA’s 40 years they still grip the side of the sinking ship in hope of continuing their profits. Still after admitting to controlling nausea and boosting appetite. Treating autoimmune diseases, inflammation, pain, seizures and psychiatric disorders, including substance use disorders. All the years this medicinal research was banned by her department. How many victims had to suffer and die because it potentially impacts driver safety? Legalization concerns the potential impact on teenagers? Again 12,000 years used by teens and babies as medicine. Also forcing more harm in the notion legal clean trimmed buds with noted potency is far more dangerous than what is on the street for kids. Insane, illogical, immoral, unethical, mean stupid and plain crazy. Norida should be a schedule#1 drug. Definitely a menace to society.
For the times they are a-changin’ If your time to you is worth savin’ Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone. And don’t criticize. What you can’t understand. The old road is rapidly agin’. The order is rapidly fadin’…
strayan, you’re really onto something. The idea that Western medicine and “herbs” would never come together was set up in 1910’s “Flexner Report.”
Eclectic medicine, herbal medicine, or “Injun-medicine” DID NOT make the science-based cut of the day because there was no “evidence” for the use of herbs and herbal synergy.
Fast-forward a hundred years or so and knowledge of the ECS (endocannabinoid system) changed EVERYTHING.
The “biological drug substance” (BDS) cannabis IS of extreme importance, and is very SPECIAL despite NORA Fuck-face’s protestations.
We’re having an “EAST meets WEST” battle that is dragging Western-trained allopathic doctors into the realm of herbal-synergy.” Big Pharma was set up (BY CONGRESS) to both control medicine and be the dominant player.
Epidiolex, from GW Pharmaceuticals, in the U.S. as an orphan drug is a “purified” CBD product unlike it’s whole-plant full extract oil relatives. Problem for NIDA and medical science is, the biological drug substance (BDS) that contains CBD and other cannabinoids is superior to purified CBD.
I can feel a bit of Nora’s “pain” when it comes to reproducible medicine. Cannabis without lab work is always going to be highly variable. However it’s likely that, safety and efficacy may be just as important than having a precise number.
One of the other interesting aspects of the “Flexner Report” was that Harvard’s medical school class of 43 African American’s dropped to “3” following Flexner. Nothing racist about that!
Capitalism ROCKS when it’s able to hide behind changes in social policy. The Flexner Report picked winners-and-losers. Plants and non-whites LOST. The other dividend was fewer doctors increased the overall pay of the ones who fit into Flexner, i.e., the evidence-based allopaths.
Dear Nora FUCKFACE. You cannot call yourself the EVIDENCE-BASED brand if you shit on the evidence. Fuck you UNTIL you get with the program that puts people and democracy in front of the wealth produced by Big Pharma’s control of Western Medicine.
Nora did a great job in that Huffington Post column. She put out a great deal of legitimate science on cannabinoid receptors CB1 and CB2 but where her PROPAGNDIST PORNOGRAPHY really came into play was her “inability” to tie those cannabinoid receptors into the endocannabinoid (SYSTEM) in which they work.
Noting special about marijuana NORA? Not even the way it interacts with the endocannabinoid system? FUCK YOU!
Sorry mom, it’s either liberal use of the FUCK word or punching somebody in the face.
It’s DOCTOR Nora Fuckface, you disrespecting troll.
It occurs to me that even if CBD is rescheduled, it’s not going to make much difference if the plant it comes from is still schedule 1. You’d be OK possessing and using CBD if it were not a controlled substance, but there would still be no legal way to produce it without going through the DEA to get the marijuana. Rescheduling CBD would be mostly symbolic, like those states that allow CBD oil but no way to get it.
Like I keep saying, they have realized they must climb aboard our bandwagon and try to take it over if they wish to survive.
But their past sins are catching up to them, and no matter how much such as Nora-de-NIDA seek to act as if they have just discovered cannabis’s myriad medical uses (after denying their – and perforce, reform’s – existence for decades) the Internet proves them liars, every time.
They still live in that Warshington bubble, a goldfish bowl where the only people they meet and talk to are other denizens of the prohibitionist cloud-cuckooland, where bureaucracy is reality, whereas reality has passed them by, demographically. Their entire paradigm is tailored to cater to the cultural prejudices of a generation that no longer exists.
And the generation that this conflict was supposedly fought for, in order to ‘save’ it, has repudiated the DrugWar via every nearly election referendum favoring re-legalization since 2012.
But such as Nora soldier on, trying desperately to ignore the voice that had been following them; our voice. The voice of strained, long-suffering patience, telling them they were wrong, all along. Now that it is obvious that it has become ‘steam engine time’ for reform, they are now trying to sound like reformers. As if we couldn’t tell. That’s partly what is so insulting about it; assuming we are as stupid as they have proven to be.
Leopards; spots
Prohibs; mendacity
They never change.
They need to sell the “hippies in a time machine” conspiracy to act as if we snuck back in time and inserted cannabis in those 4,000 year old Chinese medical scrolls in order to claim ignorance of the medical efficacy of the cannabis plant.
Pete, thanks.
Hope my small donation is enough for a few sips of some single-malt scotch to celebrate 12-years.
You really deserve a lot of credit.
It was very generous. Thanks so much! I’ll be thinking of you as I sip my scotch.
😊 Happy Birthday DWR 😇
Happy birthday Drug WarRant!
The great revolutionary, Victor Serge, estimated revolutions take 15 to 15½ years on average, which was true of the French and Russian revolts. Noted revolutionists’ methods included much of what we today would recognize as blogging, minus the efficiency, convenience, and anonymity of the Internet.
If past is prologue, 12 years of well-informed zingers, metaphors, idioms, and ridicule aimed at drug enforcement puts us into countdown territory for the drug revolution.
It’s always difficult to know precisely how a revolution will end, who will grab the reins of power in the political shitstorm that follows, but we can at least be assured that few things about drugs will ever be the same again.
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Does that mean you think it will be about 3 1/2 more years? There’s just no friggin’ way that this thing lasts past 2020. Anyway, what’s going on is not a political revolution. It’s the collapse of a shared mania. Quite frankly I’m betting the whole thing gets settled on Election Day 2016 if CALM can manage to get their proposed initiative to re-criminalize on the California ballot and if the cannabis law reform people can get a workable proposal for re-legalization. It’s a big if…prohibitionists have never had any talent in getting initiatives on the ballot.
your work for the liberty of your country is outstanding. happy anniversary Pete and couchmates. let’s hope it doesn’t take another twelve years to free up this lash-up we call america.
OT, speaking of liberty, here something that has it’s paralells in our contemporary oligarchy:http://tinyurl.com/qjkr3t5
How Carl Sagan Predicted Marijuana Legalization
By Tom Angell on July 27, 2015
Carl Sagan: A Life in The Cosmos
Sagan also proposed the theory that cannabis seed was the accidental prompt that led to the greatest advance in human existence, the development of agriculture. I like to imagine some hunter-gatherers having a feast and smoking a lot of weed, throwing the seeds away and then returning to that spot a few months later to find a choice plantation of their favorite herb. For one early genius, the prehistoric light bulb went on and the potential was grasped.
First domesticated crop. I think it went back to the apes dilating brain capillaries bringing blood to previously dormant areas. More memory storage. More dilation. Simple tools. More capillaries more memory until the additional weight separated the brain like a water balloon straddling a fence. Mammon arrives… Before the apes the seeds probably came from a meteor. Although with its rejuvinating powers it would fit as the Tree of Life in the Bible. It was never prohibited but seemed like the Genesis story would portray it as a hidden fruit also kept from the kids. A test of sorts, if they passed the do not eat the Tree of Knowledge fruit test, then some day they would be given Ganja, Since they ate the forbidden fruit the gods were afraid they would find the Ganja and live forever like them. So they were evicted. Sounds like a Corporate Property Manager disregarding state Ganja laws. Sythians in BC placed hot rocks into a cauldron of buds placed inside a sealed tapastry dome similar to a sweat lodge. Billowing clouds of smoke to bath in. and Norida potentially needs more research… and a brain to go with it.
I consolidated several links into one Carl’s thread.
Carl Sagan
http://endingcannabisprohibition.yuku.com/topic/2026/
The discovery of cannabis by early man gives a possible biological reason for our species developing brain size so much more rapidly than other species. Only recently they discovered that cannabis users brains have structural changes,,of course NIDA immediately jumped to bad conclusions on the research and the actual researchers had to refute their propaganda by explaining the structural changes were beneficial changes,,,now multiply those changes by hundreds of thousands of years.
That is how I see it Vern.
Thank you, Pete, for your wisdom and persistence. DWR has been a light of hope in the darkness.
A scathing drug scandal is rocking merry olde England. Lord Sewel has resigned from the House of Lords:
Milord, when “Blackmail” is on the telly you have to call before the film shows your face. Don’t sit there and masturbate to it.
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What the heck is so special about any of that? It sounds a lot like my life in the late 1980s. OK, a little toned down and I never could do the cross dressing thing without making everyone laugh out loud, but a lot of guys can pull it off.
Oh wait, is it because an orange bra is so darn tacky? You know, foreign fashions are different. Just because I wouldn’t be caught dead in an orange bra doesn’t mean that it isn’t an everyday thing among foreigners.
Another thing, I thought that the Lords owned their seats in the House of Lords? Oh never mind. I’ll never understand British politics anyway. Those people are just plain weird.
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Huh, I thought this was already a done deal:
Early marijuana sales bill for Oregon signed by Kate Brown
Politicians lowering taxes established by initiative, allowing sales to start sooner than required…whoda funk woulda thunk it possible?
Thanks for this news! Our own ActionNewsTeam in southern OR strangely didn’t mention it.
here ‘s a little ray of sunshine: Link
[Edit: link fixed]
non valid address. If you just go to Raw Story, there is a link on their home page.
here’s another ray of sunshine: http://tinyurl.com/ozhtnxz hope the link is stronger this time.
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Before you read this post I highly recommend that you sit down and no fluids in your mouth. This one is from the “hold onto your hats, it’s raining bricks and they’ve given me a headache” category:
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Who the heck knew that Gov Christie was in a Monty Python movie?
A bucket for monsieur
But that does explain why he’s got so much talent when it comes to regurgitating hysterical rhetoric.
Christie to Colorado: Pot party ends with me
Is Mr. Christie playing the role played by George Wallace in the 1968 Presidential campaign? Will Donald Trump ask him to be his V.P. if Mr. Christie gets ousted in the primaries? If he wins can we at least make him pay for his own food? Is Air Force One wide enough to accommodate him or will it have to be retrofitted with new doors and bathrooms? We can’t have the POTUS getting stuck in an airplane’s bathroom every other day you know. Do the current jet engines have enough thrust to even get the plane off of the ground with him in it?
Trump/Christie 2016! Somebody get me a bucket!!
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I haven’t had time to check your website yet, but I’m bringing a group of dopers to Spain and we’ll need a hotel. It must be able to accomodate a “brony party” and have all-weather carpet.
Ha ha. Love it.
LOL. My boys have been watching MLP, and I must admit, I like it too. You’re the favorite of one of them, Rainbow Dash!
I don’t think I’m gonna Google brony party, though, or why all-weather carpet is needed.
Thanks for the laugh.
Gasoline Cans are used to enter the battlefield and fight for rewards and expertise to extend your degree.
having fun with someone young on FB, they’re busy correcting and insulting me and explaining my horrific writing skills – it’s FB junior! Wait til I start making up words on him…
High all, not neglecting you, just photographically busy. And Little Miss Appleseed is moving back in! Yay! My muse is back… *grins*
Working yourself to the bone for Art!
the sacrifices Frank!
butt cereally… not since a kid have I had the freedom of time and circumstance to work at it like this and it is awesome. And never have I felt so backed up by so many in fighting the WOD – I’d go fishing if I could. But the state has closed fishing on my fave (and most other trout and salmon waterways) river.
We alk about the one-console futrure of pphones
and what will happen to the mobile computing space once system
specs all converge. Show access-lists – shows stanndard andd extended access-lists on all interfaces.You can focus specifically on people who need the goods or
services you provide and those living in ykur city.