Drug war exceptions can be the rule in US law. Chief among domestic drug war violators are drug rehabilitation facilities that recruit and provide drug addicts to businesses where they work for no pay. The jobs can include plucking chickens on poultry farms, working 80-hour weeks in senior care centers, or laboring for wealthy corporations like Exxon, Shell, and Walmart, minus any labor or health protections, benefits or cash. The Center for Investigative Reporting has examined the legality of the practice:
…the regulatory agencies and laws don’t really matter. The judges don’t really care. They don’t look into this. They think they’re doing, what, God’s work, or—you know, because sometimes there’s a big Christian aura over the whole thing, and required church attendance, required Bible study. And now go out and pluck chickens on an assembly line. […]
…a common theme among all of these programs is that they tend to be unregulated. They’re not licensed, they don’t have medical staff or other aspects to their program that would typically have to fall under regulation in these states. On top of that, many of them are Christian-based or faith-based, and many Christian-based programs in the United States are eligible for licensing exemptions from state to state. […]
“We forget the founders faced a situation in society where we had a lot of people who were held in the stockade or something, because ‘Oh, you violated the terms of your employment,’ or what have you…†[…]
The 13th Amendment basically outlawed slavery in the United States. And it states that involuntary servitude is not OK, except essentially as a punishment upon conviction of a crime. And so when you have participants who are getting sent by courts to these programs, ostensibly for rehab and treatment for their addictions, what lawyers have told us is there’s an argument that that violates the 13th Amendment. Because not only sometimes are there no convictions in these cases yet, but a lot of the time, even if there are convictions, the courts are saying: this is not for punishment. This is to rehabilitate you. This is to provide treatment so that you can recover from your addictions and become a productive member of society. […]
California requires licensing and regulation for non-medically assisted drug rehabs. Under the DHCS system, slaves and indentured servants are not allowed to compete in the job market no matter how disgusting the job. With the advent of marijuana legalization serving to spotlight these activities, non-medical rehabs in the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Texas are being investigated or sued for illegal labor practices.
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Once again the sycophants of prohibition have pushed the envelope and expanded the outer limits of stupidity. How the heck are these people even alive? Is there no such thing as being to stupid to live after all?
Apologies for the off-topic comment, but I was pretty sure I’d get an educated response here.
Just read an article about Bernie Sanders saying he would legalize marijuana federally by executive order. Setting aside opinions of him politically and assuming that isn’t just an empty campaign pledge, my question is this:
The way the CSA is written, would that be allowed? Does the CSA dictate at least some of the drugs specifically that are to be scheduled, or is the law written specifically to leave those decisions up to the DEA?
Sanders’ Plan to Legalize Marijuana Is More Complicated Than It Seems https://tinyurl.com/yy4pzvfr
That should cover your question Mr Robot.
Medical experts agree that the psychotropic effects of marijuana can be very harmful, even deadly. Small children are being maimed and murdered from injecting marijuana; you should all be locked up forever.
Oh, we deserve it…. forever and a day. Meanwhile I’m off to ingest some weed…. where’s that syringe?
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I’ve got some RSO that came in a syringe. Man that stuff is wicked potent. I use it as a brain enema about once a month. Full spectrum and 2 parts CBD to 1 part THC. Be advised that it may well be the most foul tasting item I’ve ever encountered. Always wash your reefer before extracting. The nasties are water soluble. The magic is not.
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People just don’t understand the risk…if a marijuana escapes the first thing it does is find the nearest elementary school and get the childrens addicted to heroin!
But doesn’t it go without saying that anything bad that happens at any time anywhere in the general vicinity of cannabis was caused by the cannabis?
This has just got to stop!
Trippin’ balls is a sin unto the Lord.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=trippin%20balls
You Da Bomb bro!
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You mean like the infamous Chinese porn star Hung Wei Lo used to trip over his balls from time to time ruining the shoot? It surely isn’t my parents fault that I’m an apostate. For 14 years every Sunday and “holy day of obligation” they dragged me to mass. Twice on each HDO when it fell on a Sunday. Catholic school until I put my foot down and refused. Immersive indoctrination in catholic catechism and I never once heard that it’s a sin to be a klutz. Venial or mortal?
Keith Humphreys’ new hot take: people who campaigned for an end to cannabis prohibition are in fact responsible for it:
https://twitter.com/keithnhumphreys/status/1161830805070422016?s=21
Well, just fancy that!
“Fears of public health emergency as drug deaths hit record levels”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/aug/15/drug-poisoning-deaths-in-england-and-wales-at-highest-level-ever-recorded
Not one mention of a cannabis drug death, for some reason… (maybe because we be locked up forever!)
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So the sycophants of prohibition have been constantly pounding the differentiation without distinction between today’s “super potent” cannabis and the inaccuracate potentcy from the “60s and 70s.” So what the fuck did they think would happen?
“Although the numbers are small, it is the only age group to have seen their reported usage increase.”
3% to 5% is a 66.667% increase. We just gotta love their definitions of “small” and “large” which obviously depends on what they want the numbers to be. Think it wouldn’t be a ***HUGE*** increase and time to ***PANIC*** if it were a ***66.667%*** increase in the age 12 to 17 cohort?
Even myself is shocked by how much money the Canadian licensed producers are spending on clinical research into medicinal cannabis.
Canada Might Have Found a Back Door to End the War on Drugs
https://t.co/ivsjgtqWqf?amp=1
Vancouver knows how to do it . . . from a temporary Canadian Amsterdam in the 1990s, Marc Emery, and now this. With fewer illicit flowers to harvest, the black market will take a hit. The Heroin Users Handbook by Dr. Moraes might become defunct in certain parts. Fewer overdoes, more recoveries, and an easier to acquire sustainable living will lead to a fundamental change in the public perception of addiction and opiates. There will be fewer dealers on the street, which means gangs will have their revenue dwindle and soon their membership will resemble the size of a gang in a world that doesn’t deploy runners, stick-up kids, drivers, muscle, and dealers. Payoffs will become fewer. Corruption will lessen. And a court in Mexico has ruled in favor of cocaine use (according to the HT article). I think Mexico could do an Amsterdam coffee shop sort of thing with cocaine, being closer and cheaper for Americans. Drug addictions will be the victim of the war on drugs . . . if Switzerland and Portugal are any indicators and what we learned from the years after 1964 with Great Britain outlawing heroin–what’s not to lose with legalizing methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, Cannabis, MDMA, mushrooms. Users won’t prostitute themselves and gangs high on drug money won’t have the muscle to organize as many prostitutes themselves . . . fewer children in far off lands that Americans just don’t understand. If Canada, why not Camaroon? Drugs are just cheaper in poorer countries and as prevalent in strict religious nations. Africa won’t be used as a traffickers paradise and war will have less money.
If the world isn’t quick enough to legalize the top selling illicit drugs now, more future drugs–worse will be created to add to the black market–to the ‘you cannot do this thrill list’. And in all Irony, the song I just heard over the radio while typing this, had a rift about a kid becoming hooked on oxy and loosing his money and car.
Every time you get high, God throws another puppy out of heaven.
Our cell phones and other modern tech are drug gulags. Smartphones etc and oil based plastics come from Afghanistan and Iraq. Drug money finances terrorism and fuels the war, while the war keeps contracts alive and moving, thus enabling us to rob Iraq and Afghanistan blind and even more blind when we pay taxes on anything in this country since those taxes go back to the war and or corporations selling tech and plastics.
The victims of Iraq and Afghanistan are drug war victims.
The couch and myself are pure when it comes to what we buy because we want every drug legalized and have spent years attempting to. We want a world where drug money doesn’t finance the estimated 60% of America’s enemy and their war with us. And if that was the case, Afghanistan and Iraq would be stable enough to kick these corporations out or enable themselves to keep more of the minerals/profits from their country.
So, when people who are not like us (anti-drug war) and don’t throw away their smartphones and boycott future ones, what does it say about their moral compass? That rape and murder are justified? Maybe mass-shooters and school shooters are as bad as Americans who own tech and plastics circa 2015. If I pay a man a couple of dollars to kill a human and he does it, I’m a murderer. If I pay Apple for my smartphone, I’m a murderer and a rapists . . . same thing when I decide to buy anything made from plastics or packaged in plastic. Mexican oil, Russian oil, Arab oil, American oil etc are too expensive and thus better for fuel . . . Iraq is broken and oil production is cheaper and would be better spent on plastics. Same thing for mining in Afghanistan.
OT
More than $1 million in cocaine was found hidden in boxes of bananas at three grocery stores
“Clean up on the produce aisle! Oh, and bring a box of straws!”
and that last paragraph, oh my!
Let’s make American mothers and politicians pick a verbal scenario they’d rather have happened to a loved one. A) Your sister, whom you get along with and love, has 5 kids and she later becomes a junkie and so does the father, and the kids have to deal with it and the ‘possible’ consequences of less food, having unstable shelter, and possibly choosing a similar lifestyle as an adult.
B) Your sister, whom you love has five kids with her husband and life is as expected: good. She and her husband and two of the kids were killed by a drug money funded weapon. The other three range from being paralyzed, The other is missing one leg, half and arm and just has one ear and eye, and the last one just walks with a limp for the rest of her life and survivors guilt strong enough to slice her throat open with (PTSD)
Choose, but choose wisely. Is the necessary outcome of drug money funding violence worse than the existence of a drug addicted life–and or being raised in that kind of environment? One could add other things, like rape, being persecuted by a drug money driven Taliban or ISIS, killed by gangs who use guns only, or have swords saw their heads and captured on camera. My 9 months in a Federal Maximum Security prison in Baghdad taught me very much about drug money and how car bombers in Iraq are linked to the Italian Mafia, Brazilian drug traffickers, Nigerian gangsters, etc.
Legalize drugs, we could afford more child welfare people and other charities for said victims of drug abuse/neglect.
And is America an OPEC nation? Because drugs are illegal? Drug money can buy airplane tickets for would be hijackers who piss off a country enough to go to war with them in the mountains and allow that momentum to guide us to a war in Iraq based on lies and terrorism threats, where had it not been for 9/11, might not have happened at all–the Invasion and war in Iraq . . . because drugs are illegal. Would America be an OPEC nation because drugs are illegal? I think we’ve got Iraq by their oily balls, contracts wise and they still bow-down to our Saddam, be it Bush, Obama, or Trump. Our occupation of Iraq would make Iraq our territory, making America a member nation due to our absorption of Iraq, because drugs are illegal.
Let’s be honest: Iraq isn’t independent. America is an OPEC member because drugs are illegal.
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Hmmm, you know, hysterical rhetoric sounds exactly the same no matter the claimed political orientation of the person regurgitating the hysterical rhetoric.
Hmmm, hysterical rhetoric when there is ample evidence of facts, still sounds like . . . facts. A parent screaming that their child is in the way of a speeding car going through the park isn’t any less factual. Quit thinking like an American who hasn’t seen massive death and war right in front of your eyes. Quit living like you’ve never lived in a violent third world country. Quit thinking of your own personal experience as being void of witnessing massive corruption and death during a Financial Crisis of 08′ and with new mega-expensive contracts popping up like dispensaries.
Some people just like black coffee. Me, I add cinnamon, local honey, a two types of creamers . . . caffeine comes in many flavors . . . just because I used a salted caramel and hazelnut combination doesn’t make the cup any less real.
The millennials absorb information differently. Handing them a different flavor of facts might let them see that the drug war is bad and its more than just cannabis legalization.
Whatever you do, never read a single page of Hunter S. Thompson . . . talk about hysterical. I bet you all of Oklahoma’s medical cannabis you’ll not understand a single word of his. But first, Attempt Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ before dividing the drug war out into all it’s parts. If you read books on physics, poetry, and philosophy in Baghdad, do you experience enlightenment and knowledge differently?
Being jealous that someone has an advanced insight on a new experience when doing something about defusing the drug war isn’t something to brag about . . . I’d love to wake up to the realization that drug money just doesn’t exist, so don’t be jealous of me watching a curse that keeps me up . . . a curse that even weed cannot handle when allowing me to get a good sleep. How have you experienced the drug war? Hardly, I would guess. My experience goes from jail for weed to dealing grass and powders to cooking dope to watching 13 and 14 yr olds play with light bulbs . . . an Iraqi prison with a heavy CIA presence because of banking and being in front of a Paris terrorist threat at Printemps department store on December of 2008. Drug money is everywhere and I just don’t know why you are in denial that the war on drugs is a global thing and not just a Latin America/America thing.
Count yourself blessed that someone out victim(ed) you.
I’ve been inviting doubters on the couch to travel to Iraq since I first parked down in 2012. Clearly I’m right because your own personal experience in living in the Middle East says so. Or, do you not know how to get there? Before I went to Iraq, I used to read books on the global war on drugs and read bits in it about ‘terrorism’ in Asia . . . books published in the 1990s. The books on Narco-trafficking/drug war published in the 1990s never talked about American troops in Afghanistan or Iraq. Any idea why? Maybe because the writer couldn’t experience an American war until there was one?
Please Wall St. quit thinking like a person who has never experienced a deployment to a war zone in the middle east . . . that’s getting old . . . I don’t act like a civilian anymore. Just start thinking of how life is after you’ve had a totally different experience in a violent land and then you’ll have your eyes open up even more to the light.
Don’t take the Pepsi Challenge if you cannot handle it. Your tone indicates you haven’t even visited Mexico in the past five years and using that experience to absorb the tragedy from within . . . and if I’ve been to Iraq, wouldn’t the tragedy of Mexico not feel differently to me? Paris in 2008?
The Couch is for new and innovative approaches to winning the war on drugs, not smoking roaches and getting the last bits of salsa out of the bowl with some leftover broken chips.
So you don’t think that the instability of that region, which so happens to border a nation with some of the highest rates of drug use, Iran (black market as hell, unlike all the legal junk floating in America’s ‘free’ clinics), gives America more control of Iraqi crude? Does anyone not think that America has nothing to do with Iraq and her oil? If we could have reduced half the instability by legalizing drugs, though we couldn’t do anything about Iran and illicit oil funding the insurgencies after the 2003 invasion, then would our strategies not have changed? Would less money bring less players and weapons to the table? Would it have cost America less money?
Show of hands who believes Iraq would have been invaded without the existence of 9/11? Ahmad Shah Massoud told us about a plan of attack, then he was assassinated. The WTC had been hit before, so the odds of it being hit again were higher . . . an inside job–if one existed, could have been simply knowing about it and calling in sick that day. Whatever, I’m not an inside conspiracy kind of guy when it comes to 9/11. I believe drug money to be the bread and butter of Al Qaeda because of the use of poppy when financing war against Russia in the 80s proved to be a useful strategy. Why on Earth would North Korea send loads of crystal meth to Australia with their ambassador? Was it for money? Maybe. Human nature is as human nature does.
And ISIS only chopped and burned down pot plants in the region as a way to show that drug use will not be permitted. They had authority in that region and had to destroy crops planted by local drug dealers who showed disrespect for the law, and thus they had to destroy the marijuana because it was a symbol of the law. Let us not forget who ISIS had ties with before they broke from Al Qaeda. I’m not that burnt out on medical cannabis to forget that Africa plays a huge role in drug smuggling and terrorist organizations. Dope is illegal in America, but the CIA, Clinton, Oliver, Daddy Bush–they did it and they are Christians who us a coin and paper currency praising the Hebrew God of the most High.
This isn’t for the choir, but an example of stuff I’ve been known to submit or ask to random people. The couch is a place to regroup and vent. It’s not some ‘rest’ home . . . old hippies don’t just die in front of a spinning Doors record with a bong, they go off with a pound of grass and protest against the man and go up against mean cops with hate in their eye for justice.
What kind of person thinks about drugs and drug use and drug users when talking about legalizing marijuana or crystal meth? I picture jungles with fewer kidnapped children who are forced to become child soldiers. I think of a few goats that were tortured and burned in front of the locals because the village talked to Americans and that the Taliban and the others in the region have enough drug money to terrorize. I want restitution for the kids killed in Africa in the early 2000s and before–because a few kilos in Euros went a long way.
I’m not going to talk to religious conservatives to have pitty for drug addicts and users who have messed up on their own personal choices (You’ve got to know the language of a region/tribe). But many of these Christians do understand blood and freedom and they scream at rape and fantasize about beating gangs off the streets. Plus they have a soft spot for kids of all races.
Why criticize someone for practicing their game–Well, gosh, why? If the CIA can change Iran in 1953–slowly going from friend to deadly foe, then America CAN BE AN OPEC nation.
Sad the drug war stole a whole lot of college options for a vast amount who’ve gotten arrested, but I got lucky on mine and I’m taking research literally. The next time you visit the beach, get a newspaper and look at the snapshots of dead people while sipping coffee in Puerto Vallarta. What if you asked your wife to marry you on that same beach in 2004 and honeymooning at it in 2010 . . . it was a noticeable change because of the cartels making the place feel shaky. And I’m naturally long winded, but don’t mind having fun with all this.
Greetings all,
Good article in the Times this morning about Seattle taking clues from Portugal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/opioid-crisis-drug-seattle.html
Hope you’re all well.
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Here’s another one from the “who’da feckin’ thunk it” category: As you may be aware the State authorized cannabis vendors have been in a M&A frenzy. Two very remarkable events have occurred. Cresco Labs has agreed to buy Origin House (nee Cannaroyalty Corp) and Harvest Health has agreed to buy Verano. The DoJ is reviewing the proposed deals because of anti-trust concerns. I guess we sure wouldn’t want our Federally illegal vendors engaging in anti-competitive behavior. Just look what happened when they let Al Capone run amok!
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Substantially good news…Abbott (NYSE:ABT) has announced that the company is 30 days from launching a roadside device to detect cannabis addled drivers. IMO this event which will propel cannabis law reform to the next level. It doesn’t matter that it won’t make an iota of difference in the lives of the fans of cannabis or that it’s just plain irrational fear. The invention and acceptance by the judiciary of a roadside test to identify cannabis addled drivers will drive a stake through the heart of the sycophants of prohibition hysterical rhetoric about no way to identify them. After almost 42 years I’m not even worried about getting pulled over and I’ve made it through 4 sobriety checkpoints with only one stern lecture to not smoke tobacco while waiting to submit.
speaking of idiots… (and because, well gosh)
Joe Arpaio announces run for seventh term as Maricopa County sheriff
But these faith based workhouses are cheaper than prison, so what’s the big deal? I don’t have to worry about going to jail anymore because cannabis is legal and I never got hooked on the other stuff, no matter how much I did. The people I grew up with makes me see drug addiction as a character flaw. And we all used the same amount and kind while growing up. Addiction is a choice, just like going to jail. They knew it was illegal and still did it. I paid for my cannabis possession charge. I knew the risks while possessing, using, dealing and cooking.
Is there a better alternative than jail or the workhouse? If it can help them kick the habit, then what monster would be against these faith based options? My co-worker told me stories about prison that is wore than getting injured while working, and Iraq is by far more damaging and dangerous to the individual than addiction and a workhouse ever will be. Its a way out, even in a rigged system with narrow exists.
Drug addicts who won’t stay clean for a job or probation officer should not be receiving free handouts . . . we spend too much money on other things as it is that their plight is not important. Children locked up for crossing the border illegally have it worse, and they were just trying to escape Central American drug gangs. They need our attention way before a drug addict does.
Instead of caring about some poor shmuck who picked jail and addiction, let’s open up only free drug clinics for meth, cocaine, and opiates. This will take away the drug money that arms the Central American drug gangs who are killing families and tossing Central American families into our very American jails.
What’s the big deal? You mean other than Faith-Based rehab is BIble-Belt Bullshit?
I’d rather do prison.