Speech Prep

Posted on February 26, 2018 by Pete

Couch friends: As I’ve mentioned before, I will be the luncheon speaker at the 2018 Libertarian Party of Illinois Convention this Saturday.

I’ve got a number of points I’m looking to cover, based on past presentations I’ve given, but I’m always looking for ways to punch it up.

What’ve you got? In particular, what’s the best data out there that would be of interest to those advocating political positions in Illinois right now, either regarding public perception/priorities or the state’s pressing issues, where drug policy reform could be a winner? (Or national interests that would affect Illinois.)

What would you want to hear me talk about?

Thanks!

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27 Responses to Speech Prep

  1. darkcycle says:
    February 26, 2018 at 3:35 pm

    Hit ’em in the Harm Reduction zone!!! More than ever we now need different approaches to hard drugs. As we all knew here on the couch decades ago, marijuana legalization is only the first part….and the easy part at that. Drug testing, supervised consumption spaces, HAT, and treatment (a science based, not twelve steppin’ based unscientific cult approach) on demand.
    Git ’em Pete!! We got you back…or you couch, you know…

  2. jean valjean says:
    February 26, 2018 at 3:45 pm

    Trump: big government, anti immigrant, drug war increases, insane foreign policy risking more war, corporate pandering, cannabis as part of the solution to opioid addiction, to name just some of the issues with the buffoon in chief. The hardest part Pete will be what to leave out.

  3. Mouthy says:
    February 26, 2018 at 3:57 pm

    The Border issue and Europe/America’s slant towards right wing policies and rhetoric is significantly attached to the war on drugs. Without drug money increasing the harms of Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Mexico, then the violence would be reduced, thus the influx of refugees would be reduced. We know drug money played a significant part in the attacks on Paris and Belgium, which further pushes others to the right out of fear, plus the wasted money on prohibition and the war on terror simply wastes other needed resources and as long as America’s War on Drug exists, then we’ll never stop sending troops to Afghanistan, which hasn’t yet to be paid off in whole, thus hurting all of America’s long term economic plans. Hemp could supplement the war time economies of America, England, Mexico, Afghanistan, Syria, etc, which would further reduce the influx of immigrants and right wing fear/policies.

  4. Servetus says:
    February 26, 2018 at 10:00 pm

    Perhaps you could talk about the immensity of the drug war, how it impacts everyone’s life on this planet no matter who they are or what they do, how drug enforcement screws up everything it touches; and about governments and police killing people, and sometimes getting killed in the process, over simple access to certain psychoactive chemical compounds, as if anything like that should make sense.

  5. DdC says:
    February 26, 2018 at 10:06 pm

    Well Pete, why don’t you ask them if enough time has elapsed to validate the use of the “F” word yet? Fascist.

    Tom Angell @tomangell
    Just in: Federal judge acknowledges plaintiffs’ claim that “medical marijuana has, quite literally, saved their lives,” dismisses rescheduling lawsuit anyway.
    https://t.co/pENPUEcJID

    25 Years Ago: DEA’s Own Administrative Law Judge Ruled Cannabis Should Be Reclassified Under Federal Law

    “It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record.”
    1988 by US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
    Chief Administrative Law Judge Francis Young

    40 Years of Drug War Failure Represented in a Single Chart

    Once-Secret Nixon Tapes Show Why the U.S. Outlawed Pot

    “Marijuana is one of the least toxic substances
    in the whole pharmacopoeia”
    ~ Professor Lester Grinspoon,
    Harvard Medical School, USA

  6. kaptinemo says:
    February 27, 2018 at 12:18 am

    I’d call attention to the corrosive effects of the DrugWar on civil liberties, and how the further erosion of those civil liberties took place immediately after 9/11, with the drug laws and their destructive ‘exceptions’ to the Bill of Rights being amplified by such abominations as the (choke, cough, barf, spitting the words) ‘PATRIOT Act’, which in turn provided the ‘excuse’ for all the latest abuses of power, such as unbridled spying on all Americans, as well as unilateral foreign interventionism engendered by our global ‘bad cop’ role in the (asinine) ‘War on Terror’ leading to the threat of a new Cold War.

    The DrugWar has been an orchard comprised of poison trees that have covered the ground in so much equally poisoned fruit that all you have to do is randomly reach down, grab one, hold it up and you’ll have a subject to discuss, one that has both domestic and international connections. Just wear some gloves while you’re doing it; you don’t to touch that toxic crap with your skin.

  7. kaptinemo says:
    February 27, 2018 at 12:44 am

    OT: I’m not surprised that Judge Hellerstein pitched the legal grenade of the lawsuit out of his lap; he made his sentiments very clear, but his rationale seems more than a little specious in re. the petitioning process.

    But Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ruled on Monday that advocates have “failed to exhaust their administrative remedies” to alter cannabis’s legal status, and should pursue changes through the administration and Congress instead of in the courts.

    “[P]laintiffs’ claim is an administrative one, not one premised on the constitution,” he wrote, and “is best understood as a collateral attack on the various administrative determinations not to reclassify marijuana into a different drug schedule.”

    DEA, NIDA, HEW, etc. have been engaging in an (screamingly!) obvious circle-jerk vis-a-vis the petitioning process for decades, even to dragging out lawsuits to 20 years or more. I must assume that at least one reference to this demonstrable fact had been made during the presentations. Yet Hellerstein chose to turn a blind eye to it.

    Pontius Pilate couldn’t have done a better job of washing his hands. Incontrovertible proof of the innate corruption of the legal system has been made abundantly clear; there’s no fast tunneling through the mountains, we have to keep slogging on over them in the ‘Long March’ of prohibition repeal through the States.

    But…when we finally arrive, an accounting must be made…

  8. strayan says:
    February 27, 2018 at 3:16 am

    Talking points:

    Police having access to what prescription medication you are taking (largely via prescription drug monitoring programs)

    Pissing in a cup for employers and to access welfare.

    Drug users being forbidden from talking precautions (like injecting heroin in a supervised setting so they don’t die.)

  9. VapeMeUp says:
    February 27, 2018 at 5:13 am

    Denver approves first social marijuana license, allowing vaping and edibles in Lincoln Park coffee shop.

    DENVER – Officials in Denver on Monday approved the city’s first legal marijuana club and joined a small number of businesses across the country allowing people to consume in states where adult use has been broadly legalized.

    https://tinyurl.com/VapeMeUp

  10. jean valjean says:
    February 27, 2018 at 8:22 am

    Pete, for local interest you might think about the Chicago City Farm project and the scope for urban renewal it would bring. Combine food production with high quality cannabis and it could become the wealth generator of the future. In Chicago you have a trifecter of vacant land, unemployment and massive food waste for composting all in a tight area. Instead of blocks of abandoned houses you could have populated urban garden farms providing employment and helping the environment, all with low transport costs. The small business potential of this should appeal to Libertarians. Hope to see you on video?

    https://cityfarmchicago.wordpress.com/

  11. Thinking Clearly says:
    February 27, 2018 at 5:10 pm

    Here is a twist for an Illinois congressional race:

    “Who Is Benjamin Thomas Wolf? Former FBI Agent Smokes Weed in Illinois Congressional Campaign Ad”
    https://tinyurl.com/ybbxfs7f

    I like it.

  12. Eliyahu Neiman says:
    February 28, 2018 at 11:30 am

    How we could improve poor communities on Chicago’s South and West sides by not turning drug addicts into lifelong criminals, ruining families in the process. How we would rather pay for rehabilitation instead of incarceration.

  13. Servetus says:
    February 28, 2018 at 12:26 pm

    The Windy City is a sanctuary city. Coincidently, the current political situation in Chicago regarding immigrants allows for the conveyance of the idea that prohibitionists collectively form a type of hate group.

    The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) documents hate groups and their leadership. It just revealed the latest claptrap coming from a certain hate group that scapegoats immigrants as being actively complicit in the US opioid crisis:

    February 27, 2018 — On Thursday, February 15, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security hosted a hearing titled, “The Effect of Sanctuary City Policies on the Ability to Combat the Opioid Epidemic.” Two of the featured witnesses who testified included Jessica Vaughan of the group Center for Immigration Studies * (CIS) and Jackson County, Texas, Sheriff A. J. Louderback, one of the anti-immigrant movement’s law enforcement allies. Both individuals are opposed to so-called sanctuary cities and used their respective testimonies to conflate them with criminal activity and tie them to the nation’s opioid crisis. “Nowhere is it clearer than sanctuary cities which is creating a safe haven for criminality,” Louderback said during his testimony. During her remarks, Vaughan called on Congress to pass legislation that would prosecute pro-sanctuary city government officials for their supposed refusal to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. “Congress must act to clarify the legal authorities that support immigration enforcement and to impose consequences on sanctuary jurisdictions and the officials who are responsible for these destructive policies,” she stated. Vaughan’s organization, CIS, has long opposed sanctuary jurisdictions and puts out biased material attempting to equate them with criminals. […]

    * anti-immigrant hate group

    https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/02/27/anti-immigrant-roundup-22718

    Groups such as CIS apparently enjoy dumping all their hate into one convenient basket.

    For decades, prohibitionists (a notorious and deadly hate group) have been hating and hunting down drug consumers while doing everything possible to bring about their demise. Now the haters have messed up. They just placed drug heretics on the same stage with immigrants. Fortunately, the peace and love and marijuana types outnumber CIS and the rest of the proto-fascists combined. Peace, love and cannabis will prevail—CIS and other proto-fascists will not.

  14. StellaSplendidly says:
    February 28, 2018 at 3:36 pm

    The allegations filed against the former top police commanders in Veracruz show all the signs of the human rights abuses of Mexico’s notorious anti-guerrilla counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1960s and 70s.

    ‘Impunity has consequences’: the women lost to Mexico’s drug war
    Read more
    Police in marked patrol cars picked up youths but never recorded their arrests. Instead they turned them over to specialized interrogation and torture squads working at the police academy itself, according to the indictment, and they were later killed and their bodies disposed of.

    >>

    “The groundbreaking thing is that prosecutors built a case by demonstrating there was a whole governmental structure that was designed to disappear people,” he said.

    >>

    They were apparently picked up if an initial police inspection turned up suspicious messages on their cellphones. After that, they were allegedly taken to the police academy, and from there they disappeared without a trace.

    Nineteen current or former Veracruz state police officials and officers are now on trial facing charges of “forced disappearance”, including the state’s former public safety secretary – in effect the top police commander – and his directors of special forces, prisons and state police.

    https://tinyurl.com/MexicanDeathSquad

  15. DdC says:
    February 28, 2018 at 5:45 pm

    March is going to be a huge month for marijuana in Illinois, with the state’s biggest county voting on a cannabis ballot question, pro-legalization candidates poised to win March 20 gubernatorial and attorney general primaries and state lawmakers considering legalization legislation.
    https://marijuanamoment.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2b103be7b5d7ad4abd40bfebc&id=1f922ac353&e=8bff18e77b

  16. Mouthy says:
    February 28, 2018 at 6:51 pm

    In line with ‘The Center Will Not Hold’ from Yeats and Didion: The War on Drugs is just plain bad for Capitalism. No Capital Gains, No Dividend, No Bonds, No RMBS, No ABS, No Mutual Fund and no Stock is safe from the wasted spending of the War on Drugs and its ability to damage and create collateral maleficence on those with nothing to do with the War on Drugs. Would the 2008 Financial Crisis have been as big or even created without the war on drugs? Bush II told the Americans to not embrace saving, debt, taxes, and austerity measures to finance a long expensive war fighting drug money, which lead the bankers to continue the speculation of debt (credit) and assets. A few Trillion was already deleted from American Taxes because of 9/11 and the wars, so there was no CENTER to hold the drunken bankers who kept on jumping up and down on the economy like some sort of trampoline. Things Do Fall Apart when we have illogical laws as our guide for setting up regulation and future results.

  17. StellaSplendidly says:
    March 1, 2018 at 4:20 am

    “I’m only chief of police in Lumberton that likes to smoke weed,”

    Mayor Rogers said he had heard about a video of Chief Flynt and was told the Board of Aldermen had it, but never showed him.

    Board member Jonathan Griffith said he had never seen the video and wasn’t aware of any other board member having seen it either.

    “Everyone in life makes mistakes. And, so, it is our intent to make sure that we investigate this matter properly,” Griffith said.

    Griffith questions the video and why it was released, saying everyone deserves a second chance.

    The mayor says the city will take action, but did not specify what it would be.

    Chief Flynt reportedly volunteered to take a drug test, but the results were incomplete.

    https://tinyurl.com/MississippiPipeDream

  18. jean valjean says:
    March 1, 2018 at 5:53 am

    The British government drags its feet as it slouches towards allowing desperately needed cannabis-oil treatment for epilepsy.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/01/alfie-dingley-home-office-considers-medical-cannabis-trial-to-help-boy-with-epilepsy

  19. Daniel Williams says:
    March 2, 2018 at 3:03 pm

    Say whatever’s on your mind. Just don’t tell ’em taxation isn’t theft. That would be awkward.

  20. hellena says:
    May 23, 2018 at 2:06 am

    we have rehabilitation centres

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