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        <title>Listen 420 - Music for Heads Blog</title>
        <description></description>
        <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
        <lastBuildDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:55:15 +0100</lastBuildDate>
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        <item>
            <title>No need to talk about &quot;why cannabis is illegal</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[There is no point in discussing the "whys" of cannabis prohibition primarily because there are no actual valid, salient reasons involved. Discussions of corporate greed or white racism do not have any discernible bearing on why cannabis remains illegal in our modern, 21st century world.

Americans have wanted cannabis relegalized since before the Nixon Administration. Americans have worked and worked since then to get the cannabis plant relegalized and to stop the all-out war against it and the people who are caught with it. There are many reason cannabis became illegal decades ago but they don't matter tody. The real question to answer today is WHY is it STILL illegal.

The answer to that is Republicans.

Nixon took marijuana prohibition in the late 1960's/early 1970s and solidified reefer madness as a core element of Republican ideology. The exact point was when he trashed his own Shafer Commission report (it didn't say what he wanted it to say) and forged ahead with the "War on Drugs".

Ronald Reagan and Bush 1 spent their time in office boosting the war on drugs (marijuana) further and further. We have them to thank for drug testing.

Clinton came into office and did NOTHING to stem the tide. (And yet he's still called "too liberal" by the nutjob side of the aisle.)

Then came Bush 2: 750,000 to over 800,000 arrests per YEAR for cannabis touching, even after 9/11. They never got bin Laden or the anthrax mailer(s) but they sure arrested a good-size city full of pot touchers. (You get arrested for touching pot, not smoking it. Did you know that? That's what "possession" means.)

Blame the Republican Party. 
It is still illegal primarily – and for all practical purposes - because of the Republican party.  The Repubs made reefer madness a core plank of their party ideology. No repub can advance far in the party without endorsing reefer madness.

In the 1980's, Newt Gingrich was writing medical marijuana laws. When he went on his big Repub power trip, he wrote laws trying to give the death penalty for possession of a pound or more. When that woman from Alaska was approached about Vice-Presidentin' she repudiated her own marijuana smoking as a "bad message to the children." When that Duke Cunningham guy got busted for all his illegal bribe-taking,  he assured everybody that mo matter what else was alleged about him, he has never smoked a marijuana cigarette. It is my sincere hope that even the dullest reader is grasping the the picture, because I have to move on.

OK... sure...the Republican party has had endless assistance from a very spineless Democratic party. Dems have aided and abetted this travesty every step of the way, just like they do with so many other bad republican policies, but they cannot be shown to have "reefer madness" as a central value. They just don't.

It's the Republican's baby, through and through.

And now the Republicans are falling apart.

Now is the time to jump on this.

America has rejected Republican Ideology

With the election of Barack Obama, America has done more than just elect the first African-American person to the Presidency. They have thrown out Movement Conservatism in all it's manifestations.

The prohibition of the cannabis plant is central in that ideology as is reflected in the logjam of mean-spirited laws against possession. And never mind people like Buckley who would claim from time to time that cannabis reform is a conservative value. That was always bullshit.

30-some years of Movement Conservatism is fragmenting and appearing to be headed for the dustbin of history...thankfully enough. As Obama and the Democratic Party curry favor with Americans in the "mainstream", the GOP is descending into blaming and bitterness.

With their demise on the horizon, we can see them losing the power that has plagued and frightened Democratic leadership types for the past several years (or decades).

As I keep saying, Americans are quite ready for cannabis law reform, they are ready to lose the stupidity of all that propaganda they are forced to pay for and watch but which they only laugh at. Nobody but fools believe it.

In 2009, the Democratic party needs to begin to talk about reforming cannabis laws like the intelligent adults we busted our asses to elect.

Republican talking points will have to be smashed and the issue reframed before we can expect any significant progress in Washington DC.

Here are my takes on dealing with the most pernicious framing examples that have to be dismantled.

No - it's not a bad message to the children. 
This is a (if not the) central feature of the Republican anti-marijuana propaganda stream. This invokes both fear and guilt in parents and casts a general pall over anybody - like yours truly - who might try to get a contradictory message through that stream: the messenger is pre-slimed.

Anytime Americans have had anything similar to a ration discussion of cannabis issues break out, were are told - usually in a screeching, histrionic tone -  that ANY move to make marijuana anything less than completely illegal will send a "bad message" to the children.

This is actually really stupid when you stop and think about it (which, of course, is hoped not to occur). Most children are all for adults not smoking anything. I work with children an they tell me this a lot. It's pretty easy to send the message to them. Changing the laws on cannabis has nothing to do with children "being allowed to smoke". How stupid is this?

This is a powerful GOP talking point employed all the time to make people feel bad, scared, and guilty for suggesting any changes in these backwards and draconian laws.

Beer is legal - doesn't THAT send a bad message to the kids? Don't we try to keep kids from beer? How about cigarettes? Deadly tobacco sticks are legal - doesn't that send a bad message to the kids? Are people encouraged to hide their tobacco and alcohol consumption from children?

Of course they aren't.

This is really just plain silly.

GOP anti-marijuana propaganda has insinuated itself in-between parents and their children. Nobody in their right mind can actually realistically suggest that reform of cannabis laws will tell children it's "ok" to 'smoke pot". That's just stupid and people are stupid for suggesting this.

Cannabis will always be illegal for people under a certain age (I am not interested in debating the actual age), just like tobacco and alcohol. Nobody is going to seriously suggest anything otherwise.

Does it really take a $100,000,000 study and advertising campaign to make people grasp this?

Seriously....We really need to move on.

No...It’s not "Soft on Crime" 
This is yet another stupid republican talking point. Dems fall for it oer and over and over. They positively wet themselves to avoid this label, but, alas, they have let Bush skate by without so much as a slap on the wrist and are thus Permanently Soft on Crime. The damage is done - the title is theirs.

The point is specifically that legalizing cannabis is somehow encouraging crime, as if the plant itself causes crime to happen (which it is hoped you will actually believe).

Some repubs will bring up "So what’s next, legalizing bank robbery" Rape?" "Child molestation"? People like Mark Souder say this sort of crap. He's single-handedly responsible for thousands of people to be barred from college loans. That's a hell of an accomplishment, all in the name of Republican Ideology.

Preventing Public Discourse 
The reason for these sorts of talking points is to derail the rational American discourse and inject an emotional red herring that keeps it from really congealing. The fallacy is that the things they bring up are real crimes involving criminal acts against other people – nothing to do with cannabis touching. It's just more republican lying and fearmongering.

The other game going on here is blaming the plant for the effects of prohibition. They expect people not to grasp black market dynamics so that people think crime will continue when the plant is relegalized. People dutifully do not think it it through (often because they think this isn’t an important issue...)

Regulation, just like with alcohol and tobacco, will kill the funding for the black market dynamics. The black markets dynamics encourage and nurture criminal activities of all sort. When people can buy it at the store, they won’t buy from "dealers". And the collateral criminal activity will change.

About Hard Drugs 
I am focusing ONLY on cannabis which is far and away the safest "recreational drug" we know.

Real drugs or "hard drugs" (Cocaine, heroin, pharmaceuticals) are beyond the scope of this effort. 10's of millions of Americans smoke pot but only a tiny fraction are real hard drug users.

And the reality is that those particular substances are going to be serious health issues whether they are legal or not. Illegality exacerbates the problems but I have no intelligent answer for addressing this issue other than being illegal creates a huge amount of violent crime.

This just in.... ho ho ho, legal drugs kill far more people than all illegal drugs combined. Deal with that, will ya?

Cannabis just isn't a similar sort of issue and people have to stop acting like pot is "dangerous".

Relegalization = Regulation.

When I use the term "relegalize" it is specifically used to tell you the plant USED to be legal, once upon a time. Now the time is here for it to be made legal again.

Just like tobacco and alcohol.

Cannabis is no different, on one hand, than tobacco or alcohol. It's ok for adults and not ok for kids. Is that so hard to grasp?

On the other hand, cannabis is not like tobacco or alcohol in that it is not associated with the illness and diseases caused by their use, nor the deaths caused by both legal substances.

400,000 deaths, caused each year by tobacco and alcohol, are not seen as sufficient reasons to make the substances illegal. As cannabis does not cause this sort of death or disease, there should be no logical reason to continue restricting people from possessing the plant.

Medical 
The US Federal government policy is to lie, lie, lie about medical marijuana.

The truth is the plant is ripe with the promise of many new useful medications and drugs and Bayer is already marketing Savitex for the control of muscle spasms in cases of Multiple Sclerosis.

Industrial/Agricultural 
It's simple. The DEA Runaround continues, an all-out effort to prevent the commercial hemp industry from re-emerging, particularly when we are really needing jobs.

[A] lawyer for two North Dakota farmers argues his clients should be able to grow industrial hemp under state regulations without fear of federal prosecution.

Attorney Joe Sandler argued today before the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that his clients' lawsuit against the government should more forward. The lawsuit was dismissed by a U.S. District Court.

Melissa Patterson, a Justice Department attorney, told the appeals panel that the farmers must first go through a registration process with the Drug Enforcement Administration to grow hemp rather than taking the issue to court.

Sandler says that process has taken too long.

The farmers want to grow hemp as a cash crop for its fiber and oil. Hemp is related to marijuana, but generally can't be used as a drug.

Because of the highly emotionalized propaganda, everybody feels compelled to add this "cant be used for drugs" bit - the core of the issue really. Why not allow this?

Cannabis and The Reformation of the Democratic Party 
As we move forward electing more and better Democrats, resolving the cannabis issue helps this by 1)getting the topic out of the way and 2) allowing Dems to take credit and demonstrate real leadership.

Even though I and many others consider this a no-brainer and a popular move, it can still be presented by the Democratic party as "bold leadership".

Other Democratic lawmakers have been working on this already - Obama doesn't have to actually wade into the fray - just sign legislation once we get it there.

The real leadership, however, will begin with simply talking about reform. Reform is not possible until people can talk about it without getting histrionic, regurgitating republican talking points or making the customary "pot shot" comments. Democratic lawmakers talking about reform, about the financial gains, about the improved control and ability to regulate it will be essential before a law can be passed.

So, 2009 is the Year we tell people to STFU with excuses and make people understand this is not going away and it can be resolved easily, quickly, and inexpensively.

The Time has simply come.]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:50:19 +0100</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title>New Drug Survey Demolishes Drug Czar’s Claims</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Well, now we know why federal officials chose to release the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) on a day when the Republican convention’s climax and a string of hurricanes is likely to keep it out of the headlines. The survey pretty much dynamites Office of National Drug Control Policy chief John Walters’ claims of success in reducing marijuana and drug use during his tenure, which he’d like us to attribute to his aggressive policies , and particularly ONDCP’s near-obsession with demonizing marijuana. First, some raw numbers: The total number of Americans (aged 12 and up) who have used illicit drugs is up from 108 million in 2002, the first full year of Walters’ tenure, to 114 million in 2007. And the number of Americans who’ve used marijuana has passed the 100 million mark for the first time — up from 95 million in 2002.

Rates of drug use have gone up as well. In 2002, 46.0 percent of Americans had used an illicit drug at some point in their lives. In 2007 it was 46.1 percent. For marijuana, the rate went from 40.4 percent to 40.6 percent. Both the “any illicit drug” and marijuana use rates had dropped a bit in 2006 and spiked notably in the new survey. Illicit use of painkillers such as OxyContin is up notably — a disturbing trend considering the addictive nature of such drugs, not to mention the risk of fatal overdose (a nonexistent risk with marijuana). “Current” (past 30 days) use of illicit drugs is down only marginally since 2002  – from 8.3 percent to 8.0 percent for all illicit drugs, and the trend for marijuana is similar.

And, strikingly, despite all of Walters’ huffing and puffing about marijuana, the number of Americans starting marijuana use for the first time has not budged during his tenure.

If this is success, someone please tell me what failure looks like.

But wait, there’s more. ONDCP officials regularly argue that maintaining criminal penalties for marijuana possession is essential to stopping drug abuse. So what’s happened with a dangerous drug whose possession is legal: cigarettes? NSDUH conveniently provides figures for past-month cigarette use, and both the number of users and the rate of cigarette use is down markedly. In 2002, 26 percent of Americans were current cigarette smokers; now it’s 24.2 percent, continuing a decades-long decline. And the decline in current cigarette smoking for 12-to-17-year-olds is even more dramatic, from 13 percent to 9.8 percent.

That, of course, is with zero arrests for cigarette possession, compared with 739,000 marijuana possession arrests in 2006 (the last year for which stats are available).

The numbers are in. Marijuana prohibition is a wasteful farce. And John Walters’ tenure as drug czar has been a failure.]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:49:16 +0100</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title>When the shooting stopped, two dogs lay dead</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[BERWYN HEIGHTS - When the shooting stopped, two dogs lay dead.  A mayor sat in his boxers, hands bound behind his back.  His handcuffed mother-in-law was sprawled on the kitchen floor, lying beside the body of one of the family pets that police had killed before her eyes. After the raid, Prince George's County police officials who burst into the home of Berwyn Heights' mayor last week seized the same unopened package of marijuana that an undercover officer had delivered an hour earlier. 

What police left behind was a house stained with blood and a trail of questions about their conduct.  No other evidence of illegal activity was found, and no one was arrested at Mayor Cheye Calvo's home in this small bedroom community near College Park. 

This week Prince George's police arrested two men for orchestrating a plot to deliver marijuana to the addresses of unsuspecting recipients - - among them, Calvo's wife, Trinity Tomsic. 

Yet neither county Police Chief Melvin C.  High nor Sheriff Michael A.  Jackson have apologized to him, his wife or her mother, Georgia Porter, for the raid that traumatized the family and killed their black Labrador retrievers, Payton and Chase. 

Yesterday, Calvo called on the U.S.  Justice Department's civil rights division to investigate the raid and other similar actions by Prince George's law enforcement.  He said officers burst into his house without knocking or announcing themselves, in violation of the warrant they had. 

"Trinity was an innocent and random victim of identity theft.  Apparently, so were four or five other county residents whose names and addresses were stolen and used as addresses on drug packages," Calvo said at a news conference outside his house, near a garden of tomatoes and strawberries. 

"However, Trinity and our family have not been treated as victims of a crime.  Instead, our home was invaded.  Our two beloved Labrador retrievers are dead.  My mother-in-law and I were tied up for nearly two hours," he said.  "We were harmed by the very people who took an oath to protect us."

Berwyn Heights police Chief Patrick A.  Murphy appeared with the mayor yesterday and said his agency was never informed of the investigation, despite an existing memorandum of understanding to work together on such operations. 

He said not knowing about the raid could have led his officers to fire upon the sheriff's SWAT team because its members were wearing street clothes, masks and carrying weapons as they approached the mayor's house. 

"What about the safety of my officers?" Murphy said.  If consulted, he added, "We could have gotten the mayor to put the dogs away and consent to a search."

Police officials in Arizona first intercepted the package when a drug-sniffing dog alerted them to the presence of marijuana.  It was addressed to Tomsic.  An undercover officer in Prince George's delivered the package near 6 p.m.  and was told by Calvo's mother-in-law to leave it on the porch, according to Calvo's attorney, Timothy Maloney. 

Prince George's County police arrested two men involved in a scheme to transport marijuana.  Once packages were dropped off by a deliveryman, a suspect would pick them up - with the addressee oblivious to the plot.  Police seized a half-dozen packages that contained about 417 pounds of marijuana, including the 32 pounds delivered to Tomsic, the Associated Press reported. 

Last Tuesday, the mayor arrived home from his full-time job as an executive with SEED Foundation, which establishes urban public charter schools.  He took the unopened package inside and placed it on a table near the door.  He changed clothes and walked the dogs, waving to the men and women sitting in cars near his home.  He did not know they were police. 

He returned and went upstairs to get dressed for an event.  As he changed clothes, SWAT team members darted across the fenced-in lot.  Porter, 50, was cooking artichokes in the kitchen and screamed when she saw the approaching masked men with guns. 

The door was kicked in and gunshots rang out, Calvo said.  Police killed one dog, Payton - named for football running back Walter Payton - even though Porter was standing next to him. 

Police have said the dogs "engaged" officers.  Calvo confirmed that Payton probably moved toward the door but would have ultimately done nothing more than lick them. 

"He was an aggressive licker," said Calvo. 

Cheryl Compton, a neighbor, said her two sons, 5-year-old Cody and 7-year-old Ty, played with the mayor's dogs all the time, and that everyone but the Prince George's County police knew where Calvo lived. 

"I would have let them stay in a yard by themselves with those dogs," Compton said.  "It really upsets me to think that I don't feel safe in my home.  If they were to shoot our dog, Amber, I would be outraged."

Chase was shot while running away from sheriff's deputies, Calvo said. 

"He was hunted down and shot in the back while he fled," he said.  "They didn't deserve to die.  They don't deserve to be blamed for their deaths."

Calvo, 37, who has been mayor since 2004, was told to walk backward down the stairs with his hands in the air.  He was wearing only boxers and socks.  Police handcuffed him and placed him in the living room.  His mother-in-law was also cuffed and made to lie on the kitchen floor next to Payton's body. 

Police said they were allowed to enter the house without announcing their presence because Porter screamed and because they had a "no-knock" warrant.  Calvo and his attorney, Maloney, say that is not true. 

When Tomsic arrived home, she said, she thought the house had been robbed and that police had responded with an impressive show of force.  But when she saw the blood and learned what had happened to her dogs, she was in shock. 

"They were my kids," said Tomsic, 33, an employee with Maryland's Department of Human Resources.  "All I could see was the blood and the tissue of the dogs."

Cleaning the blood, which police tracked throughout the house, was the top priority after the police left four hours after the raid, Calvo said. 

"The blood was horrendous," Calvo said.  "They had tracked it everywhere."

The couple bought the corner lot home nearly three years ago and asked Porter to move from Utah to live with them about 13 months ago.  On the front fence, supporters have draped an American flag banner that reads, "Cheye & Trinity We Support You." Dozens of people have written personal messages to the family on the banner. 

Robert Kovalchik, a neighbor and Calvo's high school history teacher at Parkdale High School, said he was shocked that county officials had not apologized. 

"This smacks of something from Nazi Germany," Kovalchik said. 

Calvo said he wants federal officials to examine policies that he said have led Prince George's police officials to serve warrants on wrong addresses and kill family pets before. 

In once such case, Prince George's sheriff's deputies executed a warrant on the home of Frank and Pamela Myers of Accokeek in November.  The Myerses told sheriffs that they had the wrong address as their dog began barking from the yard.  The couple asked if they could retrieve their dog, but deputies refused.  Minutes later, two shots were fired and the dog was killed, according to a notice of a tort claims filed by attorney Michael J.  Winkelman.  The Myerses were never charged and nothing was seized from their house. 

"This has happened before, and without oversight, it will happen again," Calvo said.]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:21:17 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Debunking The Hemp Conspiracy Theory</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Scratch a pothead and ask them why marijuana is outlawed, and there's a good chance you'll get some version of the "hemp conspiracy" theory.  Federal pot prohibition, the story goes, resulted from a plot by the Hearst and DuPont business empires to squelch hemp as a possible competitor to wood-pulp paper and nylon. These allegations can be found anywhere from Wikipedia entries on William Randolph Hearst and the DuPont Company to comments on pot-related articles published here on AlterNet.  And these allegations are virtually unchallenged; many people fervently believe in the hemp conspiracy, even though the evidence to back it up evaporates under even minimal scrutiny. 

You could make a stronger case for Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin of John F.  Kennedy; Oswald at least left a not-quite-smoking gun at the scene. 

Pot activist Jack Herer's book The Emperor Wears No Clothes is the prime source for the hemp-conspiracy theory. 

It alleges that in the mid-1930s, "when the new mechanical hemp fiber stripping machines to conserve hemp's high-cellulose pulp finally became state of the art, available and affordable," Hearst, with enormous holdings in timber acreage and investments in paper manufacturing, "stood to lose billions of dollars and perhaps go bankrupt." Meanwhile, DuPont in 1937 had just patented nylon and "a new sulfate/sulfite process for making paper from wood pulp" -- so "if hemp had not been made illegal, 80 percent of DuPont's business would never have materialized."

Herer, a somewhat cantankerous former marijuana-pipe salesman, deserves a lot of credit for his cannabis activism. 

He was a dedicated grass-roots agitator for pot legalization during the late 1980s, perhaps the most herb-hostile time in recent history. 

Despite a substantial stroke in 2001, he soldiers on; he's currently campaigning to get a cannabis-legalization initiative on the ballot in Santa Barbara, California.  The Emperor -- an omnivorous conglomeration of newspaper clippings and historical documents about hemp and marijuana, held together by Herer's cannabis evangelism and fiery screeds against prohibition -- has been a bible for many pot activists. 

Unearthing a 1916 Department of Agriculture bulletin about hemp paper and a World War II short film that exhorted American farmers to grow "Hemp for Victory," Herer more than anyone else revived the idea that the cannabis plant was useful for purposes besides getting high.  Unfortunately, he's completely wrong on this particular issue. 

The evidence for a "hemp conspiracy" just doesn't stand up.  It is far more likely that marijuana was outlawed because of racism and cultural warfare. 

How marijuana was prohibited

Twentieth-century cannabis prohibition first reared its head in countries where white minorities ruled black majorities: South Africa, where it's known as dagga, banned it in 1911, and Jamaica, then a British colony, outlawed ganja in 1913.  They were followed by Canada, Britain and New Zealand, which added cannabis to their lists of illegal narcotics in the 1920s.  Canada's pot law was enacted in 1923, several years before there were any reports of people actually smoking it there.  It was largely the brainchild of Emily F.  Murphy, a feminist but racist judge who wrote anti-Asian, anti-marijuana rants under the pseudonym "Janey Canuck."

In the United States, marijuana prohibition began partly as a throw-in on laws restricting opiates and cocaine to prescription-only use, and partly in Southern and Western states and cities where blacks and Mexican immigrants were smoking it.  Missouri outlawed opium and hashish dens in 1889, but did not actually prohibit cannabis until 1935.  Massachusetts began restricting cannabis in its 1911 pharmacy law, and three other New England states followed in the next seven years. 

California's 1913 narcotics law banned possession of cannabis preparations -- which California NORML head Dale Gieringer believes was a legal error, that the provision was intended to parallel those affecting opium, morphine and cocaine. 

The law was amended in 1915 to ban the sale of cannabis without a prescription.  "Thus hemp pharmaceuticals remained technically legal to sell, but not possess, on prescription!" Gieringer wrote in The Origins of Cannabis Prohibition in California.  "There are no grounds to believe that this prohibition was ever enforced, as hemp drugs continued to be prescribed in California for years to come." In 1928, the state began requiring hemp farmers to notify law enforcement about their crops. 

New York City made cannabis prescription-only in 1914, part to pre-empt users of over-the-counter opium, morphine and cocaine medicines from switching to cannabis preparations, but with allusions to hashish use by Middle Eastern immigrants.  In the West and Southwest, anti-Mexican sentiment quickly came into play.  California's first marijuana arrests came in a Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1914, according to Gieringer, and the Los Angeles Times said "sinister legends of murder, suicide and disaster" surrounded the drug.  The city of El Paso, Texas, outlawed reefer in 1915, two years after a Mexican thug, "allegedly crazed by habitual marijuana use," killed a cop.  By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, 30 states had some form of pot law. 

The campaign against cannabis heated up after Repeal.  "I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigaret can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents," a Colorado newspaper editor wrote in 1936.  "The fatal marihuana cigarette must be recognized as a DEADLY DRUG, and American children must be PROTECTED AGAINST IT," the Hearst newspapers editorialized. 

Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, headed the charge.  "If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marihuana, he would drop dead of fright," he thundered in 1937. 

An ambitious racist ( a 1934 memo described an informant as a "ginger-colored ****" ) who had previously been federal assistant Prohibition commissioner, Anslinger railed against reefer in magazine articles like 1937's "Marihuana: Assassin of Youth." It featured gory stories like that of Victor Licata, a once "sane, rather quiet young man" from Tampa, Fla., who'd killed his family with an axe in 1933, after becoming "pitifully crazed" from smoking "muggles." ( Actually, the Tampa police had tried to have Licata committed to a mental hospital before he started smoking pot.  )

Anslinger's other theme was that white girls would be ruined once they'd experienced the lurid pleasures of having a black man's joint in their mouth.  "Colored students at the Univ.  of Minn.  partying with female students ( white ) smoking and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution," he noted.  "Result, pregnancy."

In 1937, after a very cursory debate, Congress enacted the Marihuana Tax Act, levying a prohibitive $100-an-ounce tax on cannabis.  "I believe in some cases one cigarette might develop a homicidal mania," Anslinger testified in a hearing on the bill. 

The case against the "hemp conspiracy"

The hemp-conspiracy theory blames that law on Hearst and DuPont's plot to suppress hemp paper and cloth. 

The theory is that the invention of a hemp processor known as the "decorticator" made it easier, faster and much more cost-effective to extract hemp fiber from the stalks. 

In February 1938, Popular Mechanics hailed hemp as the "New Billion Dollar Crop." In response, Hearst and DuPont, scared by the prospect of hemp's resurrection as a competitor for their products, schemed to eliminate the plant. 

However, The Emperor makes only three specific claims to support that theory.  One is the anti-marijuana propagandizing of the Hearst newspapers.  Second, it claims that Anslinger's anti-pot crusade was on behalf of Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon, who supposedly was DuPont's "chief financial backer," lending the company the funds it needed to purchase General Motors in the 1920s.  And finally, The Emperor argues that DuPont anticipated the Marihuana Tax Act in its 1937 annual report, which worried that the company's future was "clouded with uncertainties" -- specifically about "the extent to which the revenue-raising power of government may be converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization."

None of these claims stand up. 

Claim 1: Hearst the propagandist

According to W.A.  Swanberg's extensive biography Citizen Hearst, the Hearst chain was actually the nation's largest purchaser of newsprint - -- and when the price rose from $40 a ton to over $50 in the late 1930s, he fell so deep in debt to Canadian paper producers and banks that he had to sell his prized art collection to avert foreclosure.  "It therefore seems that it would have been in Hearst's interest to promote cheap hemp paper substitutes, had that been a viable alternative," Dale Gieringer wrote in his article, calling the hemp-conspiracy theory "fanciful" and a "myth."

In any case, the Hearst papers never needed hidden self-interest to trumpet fiendish menaces. 

The expression "yellow journalism" comes from Hearst's campaign for a war against Spain in 1898.  And from the 1930s on, his papers were finding RED SUBVERSIVES and PINKO FELLOW-TRAVELERS under every bed.  In 1935, a University of Chicago professor accused of being a Communist by the Hearst-owned Herald-Examiner told the Nation that the reporter covering him had admitted, "We do just what the Old Man orders. 

One week he orders a campaign against rats.  The next week he orders a campaign against dope peddlers. 

Pretty soon he's going to campaign against college professors.  It's all the bunk, but orders are orders."

Claim 2: The Anslinger-Mellon connection

There was an Anslinger-Mellon connection.  Anslinger was appointed to head the Bureau of Narcotics by Andrew Mellon, his wife's uncle, who was treasury secretary in the Herbert Hoover administration.  However, it's unlikely that DuPont needed to borrow money to buy GM in the 1920s, as the company had done very well as the leading manufacturer of explosives for the Allied forces during World War I. 

Historians find no evidence of a DuPont-Mellon connection either.  "General Motors was historically associated with the Morgan group during that period," Mark Mizruchi, a professor of sociology and business administration at the University of Michigan, told me in an email interview in 2003.  Sociologist G.  William Domhoff of the University of California at Santa Cruz, author of Who Rules America?, concurred, saying it was safe to state there was no connection.  And in the 440-page tome considered the definitive account of American banking and corporate finance during the Depression era, Mizruchi added, Japanese historian Tian Kang Go does not mention "even the smallest financial connection between DuPont and Mellon."

Claim 3: Dubious DuPont claims

The argument that DuPont's 1937 complaint about federal taxes had anything to do with hemp is an extremely dubious stretch. 

If the company had been talking about the government eliminating a competitor by levying a prohibitive tax, it wouldn't have been worrying about the uncertainty of foreseeing new federal imposts. 

It would have been celebrating its newly cleared path.  Given the context of the times, it's almost certain that this statement was merely typical 1930s corporate-class whining about the New Deal's social programs and business regulations -- akin to current corporate-class complaints about government "social engineering."

Prohibition's racist history

The belief that marijuana prohibition came about because of the secret machinations of an economic cabal ignores the pattern of every drug-law crusade in American history. 

From the 19th-century campaigns against opium and alcohol to the crack panic of the 1980s, they have all been fueled by racism and cultural war, conflated with fear of crime and occasionally abetted by well-intentioned reform impulses.  ( The financial self-interest of the prison-industrial complex has been a more recent development.  ) The first drug-prohibition laws in the United States were opium bans aimed at Chinese immigrants.  San Francisco outlawed opium in 1875, and the state of California followed six years later. 

In 1886, an Oregon judge ruled that the state's opium prohibition was constitutional even if it proceeded "more from a desire to vex and annoy the 'Heathen Chinee'...  than to protect the people from the evil habit," notes Doris Marie Provine in Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs.  In How the Other Half Lives, journalist Jacob Riis wrote of opium-addicted white prostitutes seduced by the "cruel cunning" of Chinese men. 

The path to the 1914 federal narcotics law that limited cocaine and opioids to medical use -- and was almost immediately interpreted as prescribing narcotics to addicts -- was more complex. 

The main rationale was ending the over-the-counter sale of patent medicines such as heroin cough syrup, but there was a definite racist streak among advocates for controlling cocaine.  "Cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes," Hamilton Wright, the hard-drinking doctor-turned-diplomat who spearheaded the first major multinational drug-control agreements, told Congress.  In 1914, Dr.  Edward Huntington Williams opined in the New York Times Magazine that "once the negro has formed the habit, he is irreclaimable.  The only method to keep him from taking the drug is by imprisoning him."

The movement to prohibit alcohol was part puritanical, part racist. 

In the big cities, it was anti-immigrant.  Bishop James Cannon of the Anti-Saloon League in 1928 denounced Italians, Poles and Russian Jews as "the kind of dirty people that you find today on the sidewalks of New York," while in 1923, Imogen Oakley of the General Federation of Women's Clubs described the Irish, Germans, and others as "insoluble lumps of unassimilated and unassimilable peoples ...  'wet' by heredity and habit." In the South, it was anti-black.  "The disenfranchisement of Negroes is the heart of the movement in Georgia and throughout the South for the Prohibition of the liquor traffic," Georgia prohibitionist A.J.  McKelway wrote in 1907.  "Liquor will actually make a brute out of a negro, causing him to commit unnatural crimes," Alabama Rep.  Richmond P.  Hobson told Congress in 1914, a year after he'd sponsored the first federal Prohibition bill.  ( He said it had the same effect on white men, but took longer because they were "further evolved." )

Prohibitionism was an early example of fundamentalist Christians' political strength. 

The midpoint of William Jennings Bryan's odyssey from the prairie populist of 1896 to the evolution foe of 1925 was his endorsement of Prohibition in 1910.  The rural puritans were abetted by middle-class do-gooders who, when they saw a slum-dwelling factory hand come home drunk and beat his wife, would blame the saloon instead of the pressures of capitalist exploitation or the license of misogyny. 

And many industrial employers, including DuPont's gunpowder division, demanded abstinent workers. 

World War I's austerity was the final piece of the puzzle. 

Prohibitionists played key roles in the campaign to outlaw cannabis.  Harry Anslinger had been so hardline that he advocated prosecuting individual users for possession of alcohol.  ( Federal Prohibition, unlike the current marijuana laws, only banned sales, allowed personal possession and limited home brewing, and had an exemption for medical use.  ) Richmond P.  Hobson, who crusaded against drugs in the 1920s as head of the World Narcotic Defense Association, was an early advocate of marijuana prohibition.  In 1931, he told the federal Wickersham Commission that marijuana used in excess "motivates the most atrocious acts." And in early 1936, the General Federation of Women's Clubs joined Anslinger's campaign to make reefers verboten. 

In a country that was puritanical and racist enough in 1919 to outlaw alcohol in 1919, forbidding cannabis was politically very easy.  Alcohol had been the most pervasive recreational drug in the Western world for millennia.  Marijuana was virtually unknown. 

And though Prohibitionists -- like the immigration laws of the 1920s, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and the 1928 presidential campaign against Irish Catholic Democrat Al Smith -- demonized whiskey-sodden Micks, wine-soaked wops, traitorous beer-swilling Krauts and liquor-selling Jew shopkeepers, at least those people were sort of white. 

Marijuana was used mainly by Mexican immigrants and African-Americans. 

The Nixon-era escalation of the war on drugs was one of the few times in U.S.  history when white users were a prime target, as marijuana and LSD provided legal pretexts to attack the '60s counterculture.  Richard Nixon's White House tapes captured him in 1971 growling that "every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish." But Nixon and other law-and-order politicians were most successful when they lumped youthful cultural-political rebellion and black militance with ghetto heroin addiction and the rising crime of the 1970s.  New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws, passed in 1973 as Gov.  Nelson Rockefeller was trying to look "tough on crime," were a harbinger of the federal mandatory minimums of the 1980s.  The result was that more than 90 percent of the state's drug prisoners are black or Latino. 

The crack hysteria of the late 1980s was another example of the fear of dark-skinned demons breeding racially repressive law enforcement.  Both federal and many state crack laws were designed to snare street dealers and bottom-level distributors, giving them the same penalties as powder-cocaine wholesalers.  The racial results were obvious almost immediately.  In overwhelmingly white Minnesota, more than 90 percent of the people convicted of possession of crack in 1988-89 were black. 

In the early 1990s, the U.S.  Attorney's office in Southern California went more than five years without prosecuting a white person for crack. 

That pattern still holds: In 2003, 81 percent of the defendants sentenced on crack charges nationwide were black. 

And law enforcement didn't spare the African-American innocent. 

In an August 1988 drug raid on an apartment block on Dalton Avenue in South Central Los Angeles, 88 city cops smashed walls and furniture with sledgehammers and axes, beat people with flashlights, and poured bleach on residents' clothes -- and arrested two teenagers who didn't live there on minor drug charges. 

Why do people believe it?

Why, then, do so many people believe in the "hemp conspiracy"? First, it's the influence of The Emperor Wears No Clothes; many people inspired to cannabis activism by Jack Herer's hemp-can-save-the-world vision and passionate denunciations of pot prohibition buy into the whole "conspiracy against marijuana" package. 

Another is that many stoners love a good conspiracy theory; secret cabals are simpler and sexier villains than sociopolitical forces. 

The conspiracist worldview, a hybrid of the who-really-killed-the-Kennedys suspicions of the '60s left and the Bilderbergs-and-Illuminati demonology of the far right, is especially common in rural areas and among pothead Ron Paul supporters.  Most people don't have the historical or political knowledge to dispute a conspiracist flood of detailed half-truths. 

Counterculture people who see the evil done by corporations and politicians are often quick to believe that they are thus guilty of anything and everything -- that because the CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar, it's therefore indisputable that it killed Bob Marley by giving him boots booby-trapped with a carcinogen-tipped wire.  Witness the multitudes who zealously argue that because George W.  Bush gained a political advantage from the 9/11 attacks and told a thousand lies to justify the war in Iraq, it's proof that his operatives planted explosives in the World Trade Center and set them off an hour or so after the planes hit. 

The Bush administration's attempt to link buying herb to "supporting terrorism" proved more laughable than lasting. 

Yet the racism-culture war combination is still very potent. 

Among the 360,000 arrests for marijuana possession in New York City between 1997 and 2006, the decade when mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg turned the city into the nation's pot-bust capital, 84 percent of the people popped were black or Latino, mostly young men.  And the oft-cited statistic that there are more black men in prison than in college should be the equivalent of a doctor's warning that the nation has a cholesterol level approaching Jerry Garcia's after years on a diet of ice cream, cigarettes and heroin.]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:12:02 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>What My Cancer Taught Me About Marijuana</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Why I - and a Surprising Number My Friends - Smoke Pot

Ahh, cancer.  One learns so much from being diagnosed with a death-sentence disease. 

Of course, 95 percent of it is stuff you would rather not know, but that other 5 percent is downright interesting.  For example, America's Next Top Model is much more fun to watch when you've lost 15 pounds without trying.  During chemotherapy, vanilla smells good, but vanilla wafers taste disgusting.  And eyelashes really do have a purpose. But the most compelling fact I learned was about my friends.  Not just what you would expect: how they cooked for my family and took me to doctors and pretended not to notice how bad I looked and, most important, that I could not - cannot - survive without them. 

No, what really shocked me was how many of my old, dear, married, parenting, job-holding friends smoke pot.  I am not kidding.  People I never expected dropped by to deliver joints and buds and private stash.  The DEA could have set a security cam over my front door and made some serious dents in the marijuana trade.  The poets and musicians were not a surprise, but lawyers? CEOs? Republicans?

OK, I admit it, in college I smoked dope with the rest of them.  I mean, everybody was doing it - an excuse I do not allow my children.  Plus, I felt my only other option was alcohol, and the sweet drinks I liked were too fattening. 

But that was a long time ago, and since then I have learned to drink bourbon straight, get high on life and appreciate the advantages of not doing anything you wouldn't want your kids to do. 

I thought all my friends felt the same.  Boy, was I wrong.  When I surfaced from my chemo haze enough to care about anyone else, I was curious.  Why do so many 40- and 50-somethings still get high? I asked my suppliers. 

Pain was the No.  1 answer.  Not just the psychic angst of being mothers and fathers to teenagers, but real physical pain.  We're all beginning to fall apart, and a couple of tokes really take the edge off the sciatica, rotator cuff injuries, irritable bowel syndrome and migraines. 

Obviously some of us use drugs to ease the lives of quiet desperation we never thought we would have back when we were getting stoned the first time.  Our drug use now is really the same as in college.  Then I got high to relax, to gain confidence, to forget I was an overweight, mediocre college student terrified of the future.  Now we get stoned to relax, forget our disappointing careers and mask our terror of not just our own future but the future for our kids. 

I spoke to my oncologist about the pros and cons of marijuana use for cancer patients.  He said he was part of a study 25 years ago on the effects of pot on nausea, joint pain and fatigue caused by chemotherapy.  It worked then, he said; it really helped some people.  But now they have great new drugs that keep the nausea and other pain at bay. 

He said the people who use pot now do it because they like it.  Or maybe because they would rather support a farm in Humboldt County than a huge pharmaceutical conglomerate. 

After chemo No.  1, I was violently ill.  Anti-nausea drugs notwithstanding, I was hugging the porcelain throne.  I was willing to try anything, so I lit up.  It helped.  A lot.  I collapsed on the couch, I zoned out watching Project Runway, I was able to take deep breaths without puking. 

My 15-year-old daughter was shocked.  The look on her face was proof that her elementary school DARE program had really done its job.  A friend - not a supplier or a user - explained to her that it was just to make me feel better and that if it worked, wouldn't that be great? My daughter reluctantly agreed, but I knew she didn't mean it. 

I had come full circle in my life.  The next time I had a toke, I stood in my bathroom with the fan on, blowing smoke out the window, but instead of my parents, I was scared my kids would find out I was smoking dope again. 

The biggest pain of cancer is the gnawing, scratching, bleeding dread that they didn't find it all, that you didn't go to the doctor soon enough, that it is growing out of control at this very moment. 

My doctor recommended meditation.  Yeah, right, I thought, more time sitting quietly trying not to think about dying.  But occasionally, only when nothing else would do, I could turn to my friend Mary Jane.  ]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:02:22 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Cannabis Lowers Greenhouse Emissions</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[As environmental consciousness increases, a plant with great potential to accommodate our generation's awareness has re-emerged, but its negative associations leave some obstacles to overcome.  Hemp, which is too often associated with marijuana, does come from the same family of plants, but yields a fraction of the active ingredient, THC. 

Hemp has the uncanny ability to help in solving many of the world's major dilemmas from nutrition problems to the greenhouse effect. 

In 1938, Popular Mechanics named hemp the first "billion dollar crop" for the U.S., which it could use to produce everything from fuel, paper and oil to medicine and dynamite.  According to Jack Herer in his book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, if we still used the same process being used in 1916 to produce hemp paper today, it could replace 40 to 70 per cent of all pulp paper. 

Today, hemp will produce 4.1 times more pulp for paper over a 20-year rotation compared to trees.  For example, supermarket paper bags from trees and chemical-based plastic bags would be replaced with a biodegradable, more durable paper that's acquired from an annually renewable source: cannabis hemp. 

In the U.S., 82 per cent of spending goes towards energy to maintain a home or to produce its products.  Development in biomass energy has exploded in the last few years, and cellulose from things like corn and sugar cane can be converted to methanol and then to a high-octane lead-free gasoline. 

Hemp prevails again, as it produces the most net biomass, and has from four to 100 times more cellulose than other products currently in use.  This variation is due to inadequate research, but suggests hemp's equivalent potential to corn and sugar.  This idea is not as novel as it seems; Ford Motor Co.  was operating this process in the 1930s using tree cellulose, and Henry Ford himself partially constructed a car using hemp. 

Both paper and fuel show major benefits for combating the greenhouse effect, as we would keep trees alive and allow them to grow and keep 10 times more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. 

Hemp is an annually renewable resource, such that the carbon dioxide it emits when used as gasoline is recycled to keep the plant alive during its next generation.  In the ground it expels oxygen and recycles the carbon for our energy uses. 

The seed of the hemp plant also offers critical support to humanity, as it is one of the most complete sources of nutrition.  It provides all the essential amino acids that provide support for our immune system, skin, hair and thought processes.  It can also be made into butter, much like peanut butter.  As Udo Erasmus, a PhD nutritionist and lecturer, said, "Hemp butter puts our peanut butter to shame for nutritional value."

Since hemp can grow in virtually any climate including northern and dessert climates, it offers nutritional support and protein for developing countries. 

These are only a few of the countless benefits of hemp.  It's about time we opened our minds and implemented some thoughtful solutions to secure humanity's future on mother earth.  ]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:38:06 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Cannabis Compound Stops Spread of Breast Cancer</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[A compound of the marijuana plant may prevent aggressive breast cancers from spreading throughout the body, new research from the United States suggests. A team of researchers at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute say cannabis compound CBD (cannabidiol) could provide a non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy for cancer treatments. Previous research has shown the compound can block human brain cancers, and recent lab experiments have shown it may be able to do the same for breast cancer.

"Right now we have a limited range of options in treating aggressive forms of cancer. Those treatments, such as chemotherapy, can be effective but they can also be extremely toxic and difficult for patients," said researcher Dr. Sean McAllister in a release. "This compound offers the hope of a non-toxic therapy that could achieve the same results without any of the painful side effects."

CBD works by blocking the activity of gene Id-1, which is associated with metastasis -- the spread of cancer cells away from the original tumor site. The compound does not share marijuana's psychoactive properties.

"We know that Id-1 is a key regulator of the spread of breast cancer," said senior author Dr. Pierre-Yves Desprez in a release. "We also know that Id-1 has also been found at higher levels in other forms of cancer. So what is exciting about this study is that if CBD can inhibit Id-1 in breast cancer cells, then it may also prove effective at stopping the spread of cancer cells in other forms of the disease, such as colon and brain or prostate cancer."

Researchers stressed that they were not encouraging cancer patients to smoke pot, adding that it would be highly unlikely for patients to receive an effective concentration of the compound in that way. The team's findings were published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:44:42 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Medical marijuana advocate kills herself</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Robin Prosser, a Missoula woman who struggled for a quarter century to live with the pain of an immunosuppressive disorder, tried years ago to kill herself. Last week, she tried again. This time, she succeeded. After her earlier attempt failed, Prosser wound up in even more trouble after investigating police found marijuana in her home. She used the marijuana to help cope with pain.

That marijuana charge was eventually dropped in an agreement with the city of Missoula, and Prosser had reason to rejoice in 2004 when Montanans passed a law allowing medical use of the drug.
*
She was a high-profile campaigner for the Montana Medical Marijuana Act, and like others, she was dismayed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that drug agents could still arrest sick people using marijuana, even in states that legalized its use.

The ruling came to haunt Prosser in late March, when DEA agents seized less than a half ounce of marijuana sent to her by her registered caregiver in Flathead County.

At the time, the DEA special agent in charge of the Rocky Mountain Field Division said federal agents were “protecting people from their own state laws” by seizing such shipments.

“I feel immensely let down,” Prosser would write a few months later, in a guest opinion for the Billings Gazette published July 28. “I have no safety, no protection, no help just to survive in a little less pain. I can't even get a job due to my medical marijuana use - can't pass a drug test.”

Federal prosecutors declined to charge Prosser, but fear spread through the system of marijuana distribution set up in the wake of the medical marijuana act. Friends said Prosser turned to other sources for marijuana, but found problems nearly everywhere she turned.

“Most recently, she had found some people who said they could get her what she needed, but it didn't go well,” said her friend Jane Byard.

Without the relief that marijuana delivered to her, Robin Prosser killed herself at home last week. She was 50.

Prosser suffered from an autoimmune disease that gave her allergic and dangerous reactions to most pharmaceutical painkillers. So she turned to marijuana. When that was no longer available she had no where else to turn.

“She just said she couldn't take it all anymore,” Byard said.

In her guest opinion, Prosser wrote that: “I'm 50 years old, low-income and sick. I spend most days in my apartment in bed, with no air conditioning, unable to go outside because I can't tolerate the sun.”

Beset by financial problems, troubled by depression, unable to find a reliable source of pain relief, she took her own life three months after the piece was published.

“Give me liberty or give me death,” she wrote in July. “Maybe the next campaign ought to be for assisted-suicide laws in our state. If they will not allow me to live in peace, and a little less pain, would they help me to die, humanely?”

Before being disabled by her disease, Prosser was a concert pianist and a systems analyst. After the disease hit her, she became a tireless advocate for legalized use of marijuana in medical situations.

“She had so many difficulties, but she was a wonderful person,” Byard said. “She was kind and funny and just as smart as a whip. She was a very good friend to me, and it's a very sad story what happened to her.”

Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or by

e-mail at mmoore@missoulian.com

http://missoulian.com/articles/2007/10/27/news/local/news02.txt]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Sat, 27 Oct 2007 17:52:56 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Marijuana is a valuable medicine</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: A new study in the journal Neurology is being hailed as unassailable proof that marijuana is a valuable medicine. It is a sad commentary on the state of modern medicine that we still need "proof" of something that medicine has known for 5,000 years. The study, from the University of California at San Francisco, found that smoked marijuana was effective at relieving the extreme pain of a debilitating condition known as peripheral neuropathy.

It was a study of HIV patients, but a similar type of pain caused by damage to nerves afflicts people with many other illnesses including diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

Neuropathic pain is notoriously resistant to treatment with conventional pain drugs. Even powerful and addictive narcotics like morphine and OxyContin often provide little relief. This study leaves no doubt that marijuana can safely ease this type of pain.

As all marijuana research in the United States must be, the new study was conducted with government-supplied marijuana of notoriously poor quality. So it probably underestimated the potential benefit.

This is all good news, but it should not be news at all. In the 40-odd years I have been studying the medicinal uses of marijuana, I have learned that the recorded history of this medicine goes back to ancient times.

In the 19th century it became a well-established Western medicine whose versatility and safety were unquestioned. From 1840 to 1900, American and European medical journals published over 100 papers on the therapeutic uses of marijuana, also known as cannabis.

Our knowledge has advanced greatly over the years. Scientists have identified over 60 unique constituents in marijuana, called cannabinoids, and we have learned much about how they work. We have also learned that our own bodies produce similar chemicals, called endocannabinoids.

The mountain of accumulated anecdotal evidence that pointed the way to the present and other clinical studies also strongly suggests there are a number of other devastating disorders and symptoms for which marijuana has been used for centuries.

They deserve the same careful, methodologically sound research.

While few such studies have so far been completed, all have lent weight to what medicine already knew but had largely forgotten or ignored: Marijuana is effective at relieving nausea and vomiting, spasticity, appetite loss, certain types of pain and other debilitating symptoms. And it is extraordinarily safe — safer than most medicines prescribed every day.

If marijuana were a new discovery rather than a well-known substance carrying cultural and political baggage, it would be hailed as a wonder drug.

The pharmaceutical industry is scrambling to isolate cannabinoids and synthesize analogs and to package them in non-smokable forms. In time, companies will almost certainly come up with products and delivery systems that are more useful and less expensive than herbal marijuana.

However, the analogs they have produced so far are more expensive than herbal marijuana, and none has shown any improvement over the plant nature gave us to take orally or to smoke.

We live in an antismoking environment. But as a method of delivering certain medicinal compounds, smoking marijuana has some real advantages: The effect is almost instantaneous, allowing the patient to fine-tune his or her dose to get the needed relief without intoxication.

Smoked marijuana has never been demonstrated to have serious pulmonary consequences, but in any case the technology to inhale these cannabinoids without smoking marijuana already exists as vaporizers that allow for smoke-free inhalation.

Hopefully the UCSF study will add to the pressure on the U.S. government to rethink its irrational ban on the medicinal use of marijuana — and its destructive attacks on patients and caregivers in states that have chosen to allow such use.

Rather than admit they have been mistaken all these years, federal officials can cite "important new data" and start revamping outdated and destructive policies.

Such legislation would bring much-needed relief to millions suffering from cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and other debilitating illnesses.]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:23:54 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>All Democratic Presidential Candidate Pledge to End Medical Marijuana Raids</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Last night in Nashua US Senator Barack Obama became the latest Democratic presidential candidate to say that if he were elected president he would end raids from federal law enforcement agencies against those who use medical marijuana in the dozen states where it is legal to do so. According to Granite Staters for Medical Marijuana, this means that now all 2008 Democratic presidential candidates have agreed to stop raids, something the group says has been on the rise this summer, especially in California.

Three New England state -- Maine, Vermont and Rhode Island -- allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes.]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Sat, 25 Aug 2007 23:17:49 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Marijuana Cuts Lung Cancer Tumor Growth In Half, Study Shows</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Source: American Association for Cancer Research Date: April 17, 2007

Science Daily — The active ingredient in marijuana cuts tumor growth in common lung cancer in half and significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread, say researchers at Harvard University who tested the chemical in both lab and mouse studies. They say this is the first set of experiments to show that the compound, Delta-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), inhibits EGF-induced growth and migration in epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expressing non-small cell lung cancer cell lines. Lung cancers that over-express EGFR are usually highly aggressive and resistant to chemotherapy.

THC that targets cannabinoid receptors CB1 and CB2 is similar in function to endocannabinoids, which are cannabinoids that are naturally produced in the body and activate these receptors. The researchers suggest that THC or other designer agents that activate these receptors might be used in a targeted fashion to treat lung cancer.

"The beauty of this study is that we are showing that a substance of abuse, if used prudently, may offer a new road to therapy against lung cancer," said Anju Preet, Ph.D., a researcher in the Division of Experimental Medicine.

Then, for three weeks, researchers injected standard doses of THC into mice that had been implanted with human lung cancer cells, and found that tumors were reduced in size and weight by about 50 percent in treated animals compared to a control group. There was also about a 60 percent reduction in cancer lesions on the lungs in these mice as well as a significant reduction in protein markers associated with cancer progression, Preet says.

Although the researchers do not know why THC inhibits tumor growth, they say the substance could be activating molecules that arrest the cell cycle. They speculate that THC may also interfere with angiogenesis and vascularization, which promotes cancer growth.

Preet says much work is needed to clarify the pathway by which THC functions, and cautions that some animal studies have shown that THC can stimulate some cancers. "THC offers some promise, but we have a long way to go before we know what its potential is," she said.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by American Association for Cancer Research.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070417193338.htm]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Mon, 06 Aug 2007 22:55:39 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Cannabis Has &quot;Clear Medical Benefits&quot; For HIV Patients</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[New York, NY: Inhaling cannabis significantly increases daily caloric intake and body weight in HIV-positive patients, is well tolerated, and does not impair subjects' cognitive performance, according to clinical trial data to be published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (JAIDS). Investigators at Columbia University in New York assessed the efficacy of inhaled cannabis and oral THC (Marinol) in a group of ten HIV-positive patients in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. All of the subjects participating in the study had prior experience using marijuana therapeutically and were taking at least two antiretroviral medications.

Researchers reported that smoking cannabis (2.0 or 3.9 percent THC) four times daily "produced substantial … increases in food intake … with little evidence of discomfort and no impairment of cognitive performance."

On average, patients who smoked higher-grade cannabis (3.9 percent) increased their body weight by 1.1 kg over a four-day period. Researchers reported that inhaling cannabis increased the number of times subjects ate during the study, but did not alter the average number of calories consumed during each meal.

Investigators said that the administration of oral THC produced similar weight gains in patients, but only at doses that were "eight times current recommendations." The US Food and Drug Administration approved the prescription use of Marinol (a gelatin capsule containing synthetic THC in sesame oil) to treat HIV/AIDS-related cachexia in 1992.

Subjects in the study reported feeling intoxicated after using either cannabis or oral THC, but remarked that these effects were "positive" and "well tolerated."

Although not a primary outcome measure of the trial, authors reported that patients made far fewer requests for over-the-counter medications while taking either cannabis or oral THC than they did when administered placebo. Most of these requests were to treat patients' gastrointestinal complaints (nausea, diarrhea, and upset stomach), investigators said.

Patients in the study also reported that smoking higher-strength marijuana subjectively improved their sleep better than oral THC.

"The data demonstrate that over four days of administration, smoked marijuana and oral [THC] produced a similar range of positive effects: increasing food intake and body weight and producing a 'good [drug] effect' without producing uncomfortable levels of intoxication or impairing cognitive function," authors wrote.

They added, "Smoked marijuana … has a clear medical benefit in HIV-positive [subjects] by increasing food intake and improving mood and objective and subjective sleep measures."

A previous preliminary trial by Columbia investigators published in the journal Psychopharmacology in 2005 also reported that inhaling cannabis "produce[s] substantial … increases in food intake [in HIV+ positive patients] without producing adverse effects."

Survey data indicates that an estimated one out of three HIV/AIDS patients in North America use cannabis therapeutically to combat symptoms of the disease or the side-effects of antiretroviral medications.

Clinical trial data published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2003 reported that cannabis use by HIV patients is associated with increased CD4/T-cell counts compared to non-users. A separate study published in JAIDS in 2005 found that HIV/AIDS patients who report using medical marijuana are 3.3 times more likely to adhere to their antiretroviral therapy regimens than non-cannabis users.

Most recently, investigators at San Francisco General Hospital and the University of California's Pain Clinical Research Center reported this year in the journal Neurology that inhaling cannabis significantly reduced HIV-associated neuropathy (nerve pain) compared to placebo.

The Columbia University study is one of the first US-led clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of smoked cannabis to take place in nearly two decades, and it is the first to compare the tolerability and efficacy of smoked marijuana and oral THC in HIV patients.

For more information, please contact Paul Armentano, NORML Senior Policy Analyst, at: paul@norml.org. Full text of the study, "Dronabinol and marijuana in HIV-positive marijuana smokers: caloric intake, mood, and sleep," will appear in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. Further discussion of this trial is available on the Thursday, June 28 edition of the NORML Daily Audio Stash, online at: http://www.normlaudiostash.com. ]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jun 2007 05:07:06 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Marijuana may help fight lung cancer</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[An ingredient found in marijuana may help fight lung cancer, the most lethal of all cancers worldwide, say scientists. In lab and mouse studies, the compound known as THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) cut lung tumour growth in half and helped prevent the cancer from spreading, said Anju Preet, a Harvard University researcher in Boston who tested the chemical. Earlier researches suggest that cannabis compound could help fight brain, prostate and skin cancers as well.

The latest finding builds on the recent discovery of the body's own cannabinoid system, Preet said. Known as endocannabinoids, the natural cannabinoids stimulate appetite and control pain and inflammation.

THC seeks out, attaches to and activates two specific endocannabinoids that are present in high amounts on lung cancer cells, Preet said. This revs up their natural anti-inflammatory properties. Inflammation can promote the growth and spread of cancer.

In the new study, the researchers first demonstrated that THC inhibited the growth and spread of cells from two different lung cancer cell lines and from patient lung tumours.

Then they injected THC into mice that had been implanted with human lung cancer cells. After three weeks, tumours shrank by about 50 percent compared with tumours in untreated mice, reported the online edition of health magazine WebMD.

While a lot more work needs to be done, "the results suggest THC has therapeutic potential," Preet was quoted as saying. The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jun 2007 05:09:57 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Legalise Cannabis Alliance: No evidence for mental health risk</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[ No empirical evidence exists to link cannabis use to mental health problems, a spokesperson for the Legalise Cannabis Alliance (LCA) said today.
 Alun Buffry said that "anecdotal reports" exist which indicate that a "small minority" of people who are already disposed to mental illness may suffer problems from cannabis use.

However, he dismissed the suggestion that chemicals in the drug are dangerous in and of themselves, pointing out that a pharmaceutical company is using THC and other substances found in cannabis to produce medicines for multiple sclerosis and psychiatric problems.

Legalisation of cannabis may actually help protect people at risk, Mr Buffry proposed.

He said: "Regarding young or other people who develop problems associated with cannabis use, legalisation would mean less alienation and fear and a greater openness leading to earlier diagnosis and treatment.

"Legalization would lead to greater benefit to people in need through safer access."

On Sunday, Antonio Costa, the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, warned Britain not to underestimate the dangers of cannabis use.

http://news.netdoctor.co.uk/news_detail.php?id=18102539]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jun 2007 05:08:43 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Richardson to Legalize Medical Marijuana</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) - Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson, poised to sign a bill making New Mexico the 12th state to legalize medical marijuana, said Thursday he realizes his action could become an issue in the presidential race. ``So what if it's risky? It's the right thing to do,'' said Richardson, one of the candidates in the crowded 2008 field. ``What we're talking about is 160 people in deep pain. It only affects them.''

The legislation would create a program under which some patients - with a doctor's recommendation - could use marijuana provided by the state health department. Lawmakers approved the bill Wednesday. The governor is expected to sign it in the next few weeks.

Richardson has supported the proposal since he first ran in 2002. But he pushed especially hard for it this year, leaning on some Democrats to change their votes after the bill initially failed.

``Give him credit. It's not something you do because you're going to garner great political support for it. It is a bit controversial,'' said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. By the same token, Mann says, it is not likely to hurt him in the Democratic contests.

``If he were to surprise us all and actually win the Democratic nomination, he's got an interesting mix of positions'' that would not be undercut by his support of medical marijuana, Mann said.

``It's an interesting risk,'' added Lonna Atkeson, professor of political science at the University of New Mexico. ``I'm somewhat surprised, because I think he's sort of cautious, usually.''

A majority of the states that have legalized medical marijuana are in the West, and Atkeson suggested his position could play well in the region. But it could also give Richardson's rivals a potential issue to focus on.

Drug Policy Alliance New Mexico said Richardson will be the first presidential candidate ever to advocate medical marijuana ``by vocally supporting and signing legislation.''

In signing the measure, Richardson ``will be sending a strong message that states can and should exercise their right to do what is in the best interest of their citizens free from intrusion from the Federal government,'' said Reena Szczepanski of the advocacy group.

Richardson said he has been asked about the issue by only a few voters while campaigning in Iowa. He said the White House had urged him not to sign the bill.

``I don't see it as being a big issue,'' he said. ``This is for medicinal purpose, for ... people that are suffering. My God, let's be reasonable,'' he said.

The federal government declares marijuana an illegal controlled substance with no medical value.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled on Wednesday that a woman whose doctor says marijuana is the only medicine keeping her alive can face federal prosecution on drug charges.

The Supreme Court ruled against the woman two years ago, saying medical marijuana users and their suppliers could be prosecuted for breaching federal drug laws even if they lived in a state such as California where medical pot is legal. ]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Fri, 16 Mar 2007 16:01:59 +0100</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title>Marijuana, the wonder drug</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: A new study in the journal Neurology is being hailed as unassailable proof that marijuana is a valuable medicine. It is a sad commentary on the state of modern medicine that we still need "proof" of something that medicine has known for 5,000 years. The study, from the University of California at San Francisco, found that smoked marijuana was effective at relieving the extreme pain of a debilitating condition known as peripheral neuropathy.

It was a study of HIV patients, but a similar type of pain caused by damage to nerves afflicts people with many other illnesses including diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

Neuropathic pain is notoriously resistant to treatment with conventional pain drugs. Even powerful and addictive narcotics like morphine and OxyContin often provide little relief. This study leaves no doubt that marijuana can safely ease this type of pain.

As all marijuana research in the United States must be, the new study was conducted with government-supplied marijuana of notoriously poor quality. So it probably underestimated the potential benefit.

This is all good news, but it should not be news at all. In the 40-odd years I have been studying the medicinal uses of marijuana, I have learned that the recorded history of this medicine goes back to ancient times.

In the 19th century it became a well-established Western medicine whose versatility and safety were unquestioned. From 1840 to 1900, American and European medical journals published over 100 papers on the therapeutic uses of marijuana, also known as cannabis.

Our knowledge has advanced greatly over the years. Scientists have identified over 60 unique constituents in marijuana, called cannabinoids, and we have learned much about how they work. We have also learned that our own bodies produce similar chemicals, called endocannabinoids.

The mountain of accumulated anecdotal evidence that pointed the way to the present and other clinical studies also strongly suggests there are a number of other devastating disorders and symptoms for which marijuana has been used for centuries.

They deserve the same careful, methodologically sound research.

While few such studies have so far been completed, all have lent weight to what medicine already knew but had largely forgotten or ignored: Marijuana is effective at relieving nausea and vomiting, spasticity, appetite loss, certain types of pain and other debilitating symptoms. And it is extraordinarily safe — safer than most medicines prescribed every day.

If marijuana were a new discovery rather than a well-known substance carrying cultural and political baggage, it would be hailed as a wonder drug.

The pharmaceutical industry is scrambling to isolate cannabinoids and synthesize analogs and to package them in non-smokable forms. In time, companies will almost certainly come up with products and delivery systems that are more useful and less expensive than herbal marijuana.

However, the analogs they have produced so far are more expensive than herbal marijuana, and none has shown any improvement over the plant nature gave us to take orally or to smoke.

We live in an antismoking environment. But as a method of delivering certain medicinal compounds, smoking marijuana has some real advantages: The effect is almost instantaneous, allowing the patient to fine-tune his or her dose to get the needed relief without intoxication.

Smoked marijuana has never been demonstrated to have serious pulmonary consequences, but in any case the technology to inhale these cannabinoids without smoking marijuana already exists as vaporizers that allow for smoke-free inhalation.

Hopefully the UCSF study will add to the pressure on the U.S. government to rethink its irrational ban on the medicinal use of marijuana — and its destructive attacks on patients and caregivers in states that have chosen to allow such use.

Rather than admit they have been mistaken all these years, federal officials can cite "important new data" and start revamping outdated and destructive policies.

Such legislation would bring much-needed relief to millions suffering from cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and other debilitating illnesses.]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jun 2007 05:12:24 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title> Medical pot cuts pain, study finds</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Doctors at San Francisco General Hospital reported Monday that HIV-infected patients suffering from a painful nerve condition in their hands or feet obtained substantial relief by smoking small amounts of marijuana in a carefully constructed study funded by the state of California. Although the study was small, it is the first of its kind to measure the therapeutic effects of marijuana smoking while meeting the most rigorous requirements for scientific proof -- a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trial.

As such, the results of the trial are being hailed by medical marijuana advocates as the most solid proof to date that smoking the herb can be beneficial to patients who might otherwise require opiates or other powerful painkillers to cope with a condition known as peripheral neuropathy.

The federal government has taken a hard line against marijuana use for medical purposes, maintaining that smoking it is harmful and that there is no scientific evidence to support its legitimacy for treatment in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 ruled that medical marijuana patients can be prosecuted by the government, even in states like California where medical use has been legalized.

"It's time to wake up and smell the data," said Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, a group advocating the legalization of the drug for medicinal purposes. "The claim that the government keeps making that marijuana is not a safe or effective medicine doesn't have a leg to stand on."

The study found that most volunteers who were given three marijuana cigarettes a day experienced a significant drop in the searing pain of peripheral neuropathy, which patients liken to a stabbing or burning sensation, usually on the bottoms of their feet. HIV patients are not the only group to experience peripheral neuropathy -- many types of the condition have been identified, and it can also afflict diabetics, cancer patients and people with injuries or infections that affect nerve tissue.

On average, the experiment's participants reported at the start that their pain was roughly at midpoint on a 100-point scale, where zero was no pain at all and 100 was "the worst pain imaginable."

At least half the volunteers who smoked the active marijuana experienced a 72 percent reduction in pain after their first cigarette on the first day of the trial. Over five days, the median reduction in pain reported by the marijuana smokers was 34 percent, compared with 17 percent reported by those who smoked placebo cigarettes that had the active ingredient THC removed in a process akin to decaffeinating coffee.

"This is evidence, using the gold standard for clinical research, that cannabis has some medicinal benefits for a condition that can be severely debilitating," said Dr. Donald Abrams, lead author of the study released Monday by the journal Neurology.

The trial was conducted over a two-year period beginning in May 2003, during which 50 volunteers each spent a week at a secured laboratory at San Francisco General. Patients were required to stop their marijuana use before the start of the experiment. After a two-day orientation period, they were given one cigarette three times a day. Half of the volunteers received marijuana containing about 3.5 percent THC, the active ingredient of the drug. That's significantly weaker than what can be purchased on the street or in medical marijuana dispensaries. The other half received the placebo.

Abrams said that the placebo cigarettes looked and smelled identical to the ones containing active ingredients.

One volunteer, Diana Dodson, a 50-year-old Santa Cruz woman, subsequently learned she had been given the active ingredient. She has tried the FDA-approved pill containing THC, a drug known as Marinol, but said it does not control her pain as well. "For four or five hours, it puts me in a fog," she said.

Smoking marijuana, she said, helps control nausea and her peripheral neuropathy. "I attribute my cannabis use to my staying alive 21 years with HIV," she said.

Dobson described the pain of peripheral neuropathy as a constant sense of burning on the bottoms of her feet, with periodic jabbing pains "like a sharp ice pick, or an electric shock."

After stopping her marijuana use for the required two-day period and then resuming it for the experiment, she said the effect of receiving the real drug again was powerful. "I was a little surprised the results were so dramatic, as they were using low-quality cannabis," she said.

Because of the unusual nature of the experiment, Abrams first had to receive clearance from eight different government agencies, including the University of California, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The cigarettes were made from marijuana grown on a federal marijuana farm in Mississippi, and stored in a locked freezer at San Francisco General.

Publication of the paper is a milestone for Abrams, who has been exploring the medicinal effects of marijuana among AIDS patients since 1984 and fought a long battle to win permission from federal agencies to conduct the study.

In the end, it took the taxpayers of California to pay for the research. Under legislation signed by then-Gov. Gray Davis in 1999, the state created the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, headquartered at UC San Diego and operating in partnership with UCSF.

Dr. Igor Grant, executive director of the research center, said a total of $8.7 million has been allocated to the program by the state Legislature since it was launched in 2000. Abrams' study, the first of a dozen similar clinical trials now under way, cost $849,000.

Grant said that the findings were "very promising," but stressed that the results of any single trial, no matter how well constructed, are not necessarily definitive. He said that data are now being analyzed from a similar trial that was conducted at UC San Diego. A second trial, also completed at UCSD, enrolled volunteers who were not HIV patients. Their sensitivity to pain was measured using well-established monitoring tests using capsaicin, a cream that stimulates heat-sensing nerves.

E-mail Sabin Russell at srussell@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Wed, 14 Feb 2007 08:02:31 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>N. Dakota issues first hemp licenses</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[BISMARCK, N.D. -- North Dakota issued the nation's first licenses to grow industrial hemp Tuesday to two farmers who still must meet federal requirements before they can plant the crop. The farmers must get approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which treats hemp much the way it does marijuana and has not allowed commercial hemp production but has said it would consider applications to grow it.

Hemp is a cousin of marijuana that contains trace amounts of the chemical that causes a marijuana high, though hemp does not produce the same effects. The sturdy, fibrous plant is used to make an assortment of products including paper, rope, clothing and cosmetics.

Industrial hemp cultivation is legal in Canada and other countries but is banned in the United States. Law enforcement officials worry that industrial hemp can shield the growing of marijuana, although hemp supporters say that fear is unfounded.

The North Dakota Agriculture Department approved rules late last year for hemp production with the DEA's concerns in mind, State Agriculture Commissioner Roger Johnson has said.

The state issued permits Tuesday to Wayne Hauge and Dave Monson, who is also a legislator. The state Agriculture Department is processing 16 other hemp applications, Johnson said.

"It's taken us a lot longer than (expected) to get here, and I'm thinking we still have a ways to go," said Monson, the House assistant Republican majority leader.

Joseph Rannazzisi, an administrator with the DEA, said federal law does not allow the agency to delegate its ability to regulate hemp to state officials. Although the DEA may waive registration requirements, it has done so only for law enforcement officers and other officials, he said.

Johnson asked the DEA in December to waive its $2,293 registration fee, but federal officials rejected that request. Johnson said he will hand-deliver Hauge's and Monson's applications when he meets with DEA officials in Washington early next week to try again to persuade them to relax the annual fee requirement.

North Dakota is one of seven states that have authorized industrial hemp farming. The others are Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana and West Virginia, according to Vote Hemp, an industrial hemp advocacy organization based in Bedford, Mass.

http://www.jacksonholestartrib.com/articles/2007/02/07/news/regional/af9e5693a57095ca8725727a007bf1d2.txt]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Wed, 07 Feb 2007 14:21:53 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Cannabis, otherwise known as Marijuana</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Cannabis, otherwise known as Marijuana was thought to have originated in the Himalayas and The first Archaeological remains found there date back to 400 AD. The first recorded use of Cannabis was in 2700 BC when it was used medicinally in China. Hemp was originally cultivated and valued for the Strength and versatality of its Fibers and by 100 BC the Chinese were making paper from Hemp. In 1563 under Queen Elizabeth's rule, if you owned over 60 acres of land you were fined 5 pounds a day if you didn't set aside at least 5 acres for the cultivation of Marijuana. Hemp ropes and sails made their way to North America in 1621 and began being grown in Virginia by the British, in fact, it was mandatory that it was grown in Virginia. The Declaration of Independence was written on Hemp paper and later George Washington and Thomas Jefferson was convinced that Cannabis was the Cash Crop of the day and encouraged the growth of Cannabis instead of Tobacco, by 1850 Marijuana was the 3rd largest Agricultural Crop in North America. In 1856 the Encyclopedia Britannica described Cannabis as producing "inebriation and delerium of a decidedly hilarious character, inducing violent laughter jumping and dancing" Thus began the controversy...in 1915 Utah was the first state to criminalize Marijuana, other states followed suit in 1923 and by 1937 the Federal Government passed the Marijuana Tax Act prohibiting the Cultivation of Marijuana. To date Marijuana is still highly misunderstood. Believed to be a "Gateway" narcotic, leading the way to more addictive and damaging drugs, research has put these theories to rest. Marijuana is also used to relieve the effects of several different illnesses such as AIDS, MS, Gloucoma and relieves the side effects of Chemotherapy in Cancer sufferers such as nausea and loss of appetite. There are several Groups, such as NORML, that are paving the way to have Marijuana legalized and for Cannabis to be enjoyed just as an after work drink is enjoyed with no legal repercussions.

Thanks Ganja Granny]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:39:00 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Drug deals or mercy missions?</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Exhausted, angry, and tearful, Lezley Gibson sat in the dock, shaking her head, silently mouthing the words: “It’s just not fair”.

The 42-year-old former hairdresser, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 21 years ago, had just heard Judge John Phillips explain a court ruling that effectively scuppered her defence in this week’s gruelling cannabis trial. With her husband Mark, 42, and co-defendant Marcus Davies, 38, she had helped create an operation that supplied cannabis-laced chocolate to 1,600 people.

Like herself, all had been diagnosed with the neurological condition multiple sclerosis (MS).

From her own experience, and from months of research, Lezley knew there was compelling evidence suggesting cannabis can produce dramatic benefits in people with the condition.

Twenty years ago her doctor’s prediction was that she would be in a wheelchair in five years. 

Mainstream medicine offered little help: anabolic steroids left her with horrendous side effects, her weight ballooning to 14 stones. Then Lezley discovered cannabis.

She became – and remains convinced – that using it has kept her out of a wheelchair.

In 2000 that contention was tested in a trial at Carlisle Crown Court and – despite clear evidence that she was using the drug – the jury accepted her medical justification for using cannabis and acquitted her.

In the months that followed Mark and Lezley turned their home into a mini cannabis chocolate production line, determined to ensure that anybody with MS who needed the drug should get it.

Marcus Davies, who used cannabis to ease symptoms associated with his epilepsy and diabetes, agreed to help, setting up a website, under the banner of their THC4MS campaign group.

From the start, the couple tried to ensure that only genuine sufferers could get the chocolate, produced with what the couple said was only the best quality cannabis.

Only those who could produce a doctor’s or MS nurse’s written confirmation of diagnosis could get it.

But everything changed on May 27, 2005, when law lords at the Appeal Court gave a decisive ruling in the case of a man called Barry Quayle, a 38-year-old double amputee who had grown and used cannabis to ease his chronic pain.

Along with four others, he had pleaded medical necessity, but the court ruled that this defence should not be available to defendants in cannabis trials.

It meant the defence the Gibsons and Davies thought they had – they were accused of conspiring to supply cannabis between January 2004 and February of last year – was taken away.

Yet throughout their trial this week, the Gibsons and Marcus Davies clung to that argument.

Three MS sufferers – one of them a middle-aged solicitor – spoke of how the drug had benefited them.

Quizzed about whether she made money from the operation, Lezley Gibson told police: “You’ve seen my house, my clothes. 

“You’ve seen my car. There’s no profit in this whatsoever. I could give you a few people who would do it to line their pockets, but not me.” She said their supply was an attempt to take “scumbag” drug dealers out of the equation. 

Her barrister Andrew Ford described Lezley Gibson’s motive in a single word: altruism.

Marcus Davies also contested that there was nothing genuinely criminal about what he and the Gibsons did.

“We lost loads of money doing it,” he said. “Crime is something where you have a victim, but there is no victim in this.”

Lezley Gibson’s defence barrister urged the jury of six men and six women to defy the 2005 Appeal Court ruling on medical necessity defences.

He spoke of the celebrated book A Time to Kill by US author John Grishman, which tells the story of a black man who kills the two white men who raped his daughter and walked free from court.

When the case goes to court, the fictional US jury refuse to convict, recognising a moral justification for this most serious of crimes.

“Ultimately,” Mr Ford told the jury, “this case is about the tension between the law and what is just.”

For his part, Mark Gibson’s defence barrister Greg Hoare echoed the words of US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt following Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, almost 55 years ago to the day.

Mr Hoare said: “It would be an infamous day in the English criminal calendar for people to be rendered liable to conviction for serious offences where they had no moral blame or criminal intent.”

The facts of the trial were never in any doubt: this was a trial not only of the three defendants, but also of the current law on cannabis that had landed them in the dock.

Lezley said yesterday that the effect of the trial on her health has been dramatic.

“It’s crippled me,” she said. “At the start, my immune system crashed: I ended up on antibiotics, with boils and pins and needles across my face, nose and mouth. I haven’t slept for two weeks.”

Mark Gibson too is adamant that the prosecution was fundamentally unjust.

Speaking after the verdict, he said: “We’ve got 65 letters from doctors and nurses saying their patients could benefit from our cannabis chocolate. So you could say that they are all co-conspirators. That information was available to the prosecution so why were these doctors and nurses not put in the dock?”

Marcus Davies said THC4MS would now revert to being a pressure group and would not supply cannabis-laced chocolate.

Both Cumbria’s Crown Prosecution Service and Cumbria police defended the prosecution.

A CPS spokesman said: “We prosecuted this case because it is an offence to possess or supply cannabis, or to conspire to supply it. We don’t make the law, we simply prosecute the laws made by Parliament.

“The Gibsons sent out cannabis chocolate bars and had no control over who ultimately consumed it.”

Superintendent Steve Johnson said: “The law has been upheld. Class C drugs are illegal and it’s an offence to supply them. It’s a political debate as to whether cannabis has medicinal benefits – a debate that is for agencies other than the police.”

He said the police decision to initially not pursue the Gibsons in 2002 was based on the facts as known to senior officers at that time.

By January of last year, the scale of their operation had grown to such an extent that officers had to take action.

“We’ll take each case on its merits,” he said. “It’s an offence to possess and supply it and people who are in possession of or supplying illegal substances will be investigated.”]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:41:28 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Real Reason Hemp Is Illegal</title>
            <link>http://www.listen420.com</link>
            <description><![CDATA[The Marijuana Conspiracy
THE REAL REASON HEMP IS ILLEGAL
by Doug Yurchey

And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land.
                                                                               -- Ezekiel 34/29

The real reason Cannabis has been outlawed has nothing to do with its effects on the mind and body.

MARIJUANA is DANGEROUS. Pot is NOT harmful to the human body or mind. Marijuana does NOT pose a threat to the general public. Marijuana is very much a danger to the oil companies, alcohol, tobacco industries and a large number of chemical corporations. Various big businesses, with plenty of dollars and influence, have suppressed the truth from the people. The truth is if marijuana was utilized for its vast array of commercial products, it would create an industrial atomic bomb! Entrepreneurs have not been educated on the product potential of pot. The super rich have conspired to spread misinformation about an extremely versatile plant that, if used properly, would ruin their companies.


Where did the word 'marijuana' come from? In the mid 1930s, the M-word was created to tarnish the good image and phenomenal history of the hemp plant...as you will read. The facts cited here, with references, are generally verifiable in the Encyclopedia Britannica which was printed on hemp paper for 150 years:


* All schoolbooks were made from hemp or flax paper until the 1880s; Hemp Paper Reconsidered, Jack Frazier, 1974.


* It was LEGAL TO PAY TAXES WITH HEMP in America from 1631 until the early 1800s; LA Times, Aug. 12, 1981.


* REFUSING TO GROW HEMP in America during the 17th and 18th Centuries WAS AGAINST THE LAW! You could be jailed in Virginia for refusing to grow hemp from 1763 to 1769; Hemp in Colonial Virginia, G. M. Herdon.


* George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers GREW HEMP; Washington and Jefferson Diaries. Jefferson smuggled hemp seeds from China to France then to America.


* Benjamin Franklin owned one of the first paper mills in America and it processed hemp. Also, the War of 1812 was fought over hemp. Napoleon wanted to cut off Moscow's export to England; Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Herer.


* For thousands of years, 90f all ships' sails and rope were made from hemp. The word 'canvas' is Dutch for cannabis; Webster's New World Dictionary.


* 80f all textiles, fabrics, clothes, linen, drapes, bed sheets, etc. were made from hemp until the 1820s with the introduction of the cotton gin.


* The first Bibles, maps, charts, Betsy Ross's flag, the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were made from hemp; U.S. Government Archives.


* The first crop grown in many states was hemp. 1850 was a peak year for Kentucky producing 40,000 tons. Hemp was the largest cash crop until the 20th Century; State Archives.


* Oldest known records of hemp farming go back 5000 years in China, although hemp industrialization probably goes back to ancient Egypt.


* Rembrants, Gainsboroughs, Van Goghs as well as most early canvas paintings were principally painted on hemp linen.


* In 1916, the U.S. Government predicted that by the 1940s all paper would come from hemp and that no more trees need to be cut down. Government studies report that 1 acre of hemp equals 4.1 acres of trees. Plans were in the works to implement such programs; Department of Agriculture


* Quality paints and varnishes were made from hemp seed oil until 1937. 58,000 tons of hemp seeds were used in America for paint products in 1935; Sherman Williams Paint Co. testimony before Congress against the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act.


* Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, 'grown from the soil,' had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel; Popular Mechanics, 1941.


* Hemp called 'Billion Dollar Crop.' It was the first time a cash crop had a business potential to exceed a billion dollars; Popular Mechanics, Feb., 1938.


* Mechanical Engineering Magazine (Feb. 193<img src="http://www.listen420.com/images/smilies/face-glasses.png" border="0" style="vertical-align:middle;" alt="8)" title="8)" /> published an article entitled 'The Most Profitable and Desirable Crop that Can be Grown.' It stated that if hemp was cultivated using 20th Century technology, it would be the single largest agricultural crop in the U.S. and the rest of the world.


The following information comes directly from the United States Department of Agriculture's 1942 14-minute film encouraging and instructing 'patriotic American farmers' to grow 350,000 acres of hemp each year for the war effort:


'...(When) Grecian temples were new, hemp was already old in the service of mankind. For thousands of years, even then, this plant had been grown for cordage and cloth in China and elsewhere in the East. For centuries prior to about 1850, all the ships that sailed the western seas were rigged with hempen rope and sails. For the sailor, no less than the hangman, hemp was indispensable...

...Now with Philippine and East Indian sources of hemp in the hands of the Japanese...American hemp must meet the needs of our Army and Navy as well as of our industries...

...the Navy's rapidly dwindling reserves. When that is gone, American hemp will go on duty again; hemp for mooring ships; hemp for tow lines; hemp for tackle and gear; hemp for countless naval uses both on ship and shore. Just as in the days when Old Ironsides sailed the seas victorious with her hempen shrouds and hempen sails. Hemp for victory!'


Certified proof from the Library of Congress; found by the research of Jack Herer, refuting claims of other government agencies that the 1942 USDA film 'Hemp for Victory' did not exist.


Hemp cultivation and production do not harm the environment. The USDA Bulletin ..404 concluded that hemp produces 4 times as much pulp with at least 4 to 7 times less pollution. From Popular Mechanics, Feb. 1938:


'It has a short growing season...It can be grown in any state...The long roots penetrate and break the soil to leave it in perfect condition for the next year's crop. The dense shock of leaves, 8 to 12 feet above the ground, chokes out weeds.
...hemp, this new crop can add immeasurably to American agriculture and industry.'


In the 1930s, innovations in farm machinery would have caused an industrial revolution when applied to hemp. This single resource could have created millions of new jobs generating thousands of quality products. Hemp, if not made illegal, would have brought America out of the Great Depression.


William Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane) and the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division of Kimberly Clark owned vast acreage of timberlands. The Hearst Company supplied most paper products. Patty Hearst's grandfather, a destroyer of nature for his own personal profit, stood to lose billions because of hemp.

In 1937, Dupont patented the processes to make plastics from oil and coal. Dupont's Annual Report urged stockholders to invest in its new petrochemical division. Synthetics such as plastics, cellophane, celluloid, methanol, nylon, rayon, Dacron, etc., could now be made from oil. Natural hemp industrialization would have ruined over 80f Dupont's business.



THE CONSPIRACY

Andrew Mellon became Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury and Dupont's primary investor. He appointed his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.


Secret meetings were held by these financial tycoons. Hemp was declared dangerous and a threat to their billion dollar enterprises. For their dynasties to remain intact, hemp had to go. These men took an obscure Mexican slang word: 'marihuana' and pushed it into the consciousness of America.



MEDIA MANIPULATION

A media blitz of 'yellow journalism' raged in the late 1920s and 1930s. Hearst's newspapers ran stories emphasizing the horrors of marihuana. The menace of marihuana made headlines. Readers learned that it was responsible for everything from car accidents to loose morality.


Films like 'Reefer Madness' (1936), 'Marihuana: Assassin of Youth' (1935) and 'Marihuana: The Devil's Weed' (1936) were propaganda designed by these industrialists to create an enemy. Their purpose was to gain public support so that anti-marihuana laws could be passed.


Examine the following quotes from 'The Burning Question' aka REEFER MADNESS:


a violent narcotic.
acts of shocking violence.
incurable insanity.
soul-destroying effects.
under the influence of the drug he killed his entire family with an ax.
more vicious, more deadly even than these soul-destroying drugs (heroin, cocaine) is the menace of marihuana!

Reefer Madness did not end with the usual 'the end.' The film concluded with these words plastered on the screen: TELL YOUR CHILDREN.


In the 1930s, people were very naive; even to the point of ignorance. The masses were like sheep waiting to be led by the few in power. They did not challenge authority. If the news was in print or on the radio, they believed it had to be true. They told their children and their children grew up to be the parents of the baby-boomers.


On April 14, 1937, the Prohibitive Marihuana Tax Law or the bill that outlawed hemp was directly brought to the House Ways and Means Committee. This committee is the only one that can introduce a bill to the House floor without it being debated by other committees. The Chairman of the Ways and Means, Robert Doughton, was a Dupont supporter. He insured that the bill would pass Congress.


Dr. James Woodward, a physician and attorney, testified too late on behalf of the American Medical Association. He told the committee that the reason the AMA had not denounced the Marihuana Tax Law sooner was that the Association had just discovered that marihuana was hemp.


Few people, at the time, realized that the deadly menace they had been reading about on Hearst's front pages was in fact passive hemp. The AMA understood cannabis to be a MEDICINE found in numerous healing products sold over the last hundred years.


In September of 1937, hemp became illegal. The most useful crop known became a drug and our planet has been suffering ever since.


Congress banned hemp because it was said to be the most violence-causing drug known. Anslinger, head of the Drug Commission for 31 years, promoted the idea that marihuana made users act extremely violent. In the 1950s, under the Communist threat of McCarthyism, Anslinger now said the exact opposite. Marijuana will pacify you so much that soldiers would not want to fight.


Today, our planet is in desperate trouble. Earth is suffocating as large tracts of rain forests disappear. Pollution, poisons and chemicals are killing people. These great problems could be reversed if we industrialized hemp. Natural biomass could provide all of the planet's energy needs that are currently supplied by fossil fuels. We have consumed 80f our oil and gas reserves. We need a renewable resource. Hemp could be the solution to soaring gas prices.





THE WONDER PLANT

Hemp has a higher quality fiber than wood fiber. Far fewer caustic chemicals are required to make paper from hemp than from trees. Hemp paper does not turn yellow and is very durable. The plant grows quickly to maturity in a season where trees take a lifetime.




ALL PLASTIC PRODUCTS SHOULD BE MADE FROM HEMP SEED OIL. Hempen plastics are biodegradable! Over time, they would break down and not harm the environment. Oil-based plastics, the ones we are very familiar with, help ruin nature; they do not break down and will do great harm in the future. The process to produce the vast array of natural (hempen) plastics will not ruin the rivers as Dupont and other petrochemical companies have done. Ecology does not fit in with the plans of the Oil Industry and the political machine. Hemp products are safe and natural.


MEDICINES SHOULD BE MADE FROM HEMP. We should go back to the days when the AMA supported cannabis cures. 'Medical Marijuana' is given out legally to only a handful of people while the rest of us are forced into a system that relies on chemicals. Pot is only healthy for the human body.


WORLD HUNGER COULD END. A large variety of food products can be generated from hemp. The seeds contain one of the highest sources of protein in nature. ALSO: They have two essential fatty acids that clean your body of cholesterol. These essential fatty acids are not found anywhere else in nature! Consuming pot seeds is the best thing you could do for your body. Eat uncooked hemp seeds.


CLOTHES SHOULD BE MADE FROM HEMP. Hemp clothing is extremely strong and durable over time. You could hand clothing, made from pot, down to your grandchildren. Today, there are American companies that make hemp clothing; usually 50emp. Hemp fabrics should be everywhere. Instead, they are almost underground. Superior hemp products are not allowed to advertise on fascist television. Kentucky, once the top hemp producing state, made it ILLEGAL TO WEAR hemp clothing! Can you imagine being thrown into jail for wearing quality jeans?


The world is crazy...but that does not mean you have to join the insanity. Get together. Spread the news. Tell people, and that includes your children, the truth. Use hemp products. Eliminate the word 'marijuana.' Realize the history that created it. Make it politically incorrect to say or print the M-word. Fight against the propaganda (designed to favor the agenda of the super rich) and the bullshit. Hemp must be utilized in the future. We need a clean energy source to save our planet. INDUSTRIALIZE HEMP!

The liquor, tobacco and oil companies fund more than a million dollars a day to Partnership for a Drug-Free America and other similar agencies. We have all seen their commercials. Now, their motto is: It's more dangerous than we thought. Lies from the powerful corporations, that began with Hearst, are still alive and well today.

The brainwashing continues. Now, the commercials say: If you buy a joint, you contribute to murders and gang wars. The latest anti-pot commercials say: If you buy a joint...you are promoting TERRORISM! The new enemy (terrorism) has paved the road to brainwash you any way THEY see fit.

There is only one enemy; the friendly people you pay your taxes to; the war-makers and nature destroyers. With your funding, they are killing the world right in front of your eyes. HALF A MILLION DEATHS EACH YEAR ARE CAUSED BY TOBACCO. HALF A MILLION DEATHS EACH YEAR ARE CAUSED BY ALCOHOL. NO ONE HAS EVER, EVER DIED FROM SMOKING POT!! In the entire history of the human race, not one death can be attributed to cannabis. Our society has outlawed grass but condones the use of the KILLERS: TOBACCO and ALCOHOL. Hemp should be declassified and placed in DRUG stores to relieve stress. Hardening and constriction of the arteries are bad; but hemp usage actually enlarges the arteries...which is a healthy condition. We have been so conditioned to think that: Smoking is harmful. That is NOT the case for passive pot.

Ingesting THC, hemp's active agent, has a positive effect; relieving asthma and glaucoma. A joint tends to alleviate the nausea caused by chemotherapy. You are able to eat on hemp. This is a healthy state of being.

The stereotype for a pothead is similar to a drunk, bubble-brain. Yet, the truth is ones creative abilities can be enhanced under its influence. The perception of time slightly slows and one can become more sensitive. You can more appreciate all arts; be closer to nature and generally FEEL more under the influence of cannabis. It is, in fact, the exact opposite state of mind and body as the drunken state. You can be more aware with pot.

The pot plant is an ALIEN plant. There is physical evidence that cannabis is not like any other plant on this planet. One could conclude that it was brought here for the benefit of humanity. Hemp is the ONLY plant where the males appear one way and the females appear very different, physically! No one ever speaks of males and females in regard to the plant kingdom because plants do not show their sexes; except for cannabis. To determine what sex a certain, normal, Earthly plant is: You have to look internally, at its DNA. A male blade of grass (physically) looks exactly like a female blade of grass. The hemp plant has an intense sexuallity. Growers know to kill the males before they fertilize the females. Yes, folks...the most potent pot comes from 'horny females.'

The reason this amazing, very sophisticated, ET plant from the future is illegal has nothing to do with how it physically affects us..

POT IS ILLEGAL BECAUSE BILLIONAIRES WANT TO REMAIN BILLIONAIRES!

Thank You Doug Yurchey for all the great information]]></description>
            <author>brad</author>
            <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jan 2007 15:44:15 +0100</pubDate>
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