NORML Responds To Phelp’s Pot-Smoking Controversy

Washington, DC: Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps and tens of millions of other successful Americans have smoked marijuana; America’s laws should reflect this fact not deny it, NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano wrote on The Hill.com’s influential Congress blog this week.

The Hill is a popular Washington, DC publication that is widely read by members of Congress and their staff.

Armentano writes: Sure, there will be some who will say that this latest chapter in Phelp’s life is deserving of criticism because the 14-time gold medalist is sending a poor message to young children. And what message would that be? That you can occasionally smoke marijuana and still be successful in life. Well sorry if the truth hurts.”

Earlier this week, Phelps acknowledged that he used marijuana while attending a college party in November. A photograph of Phelps smoking cannabis at the party appeared in a British tabloid on Sunday.

To date, more than 200 readers have posted feedback to NORML’s commentary, making it one of the most commented on essays in Hill.com history.

Full text of Armentano’s editorial, Why condemn Phelps when we ought to condemn the laws that brand him a criminal,” is available online at: http://tinyurl.com/b2aqg3

Voter Power makes the News! Initiative 28 MMJ

Voter Power’s recent events have garnered good media attention for both Initiative 28, the Regulated Medical Marijuana Supply System Initiative and medical marijuana in general.  Voter Power’s efforts to help all patients have access to medicine and generate additional revenue for the state were featured in both the Oregonian and local Fox affiliates.

To see the Fox coverage of the symposium at Southern Oregon University regarding the conflict between state medical marijuana laws and the federal government, go to: http://kdrv.com/page/86075

The Oregonian covered the Ed Rosenthal Seminar in Portland and the entire story is reproduced below.  For more info, please visit www.votepower.org

‘YOU’RE ALIVE; YOU’RE NOT LIVING’

Marijuana Legalization Questions Top Obama’s ‘Citizen’s Briefing Book’

Washington, DC: Ending the federal prosecution of adults who use cannabis is the most popular public policy issue facing the Obama administration, according to the results of a new poll conducted by Change.gov – the official website of the President’s Transition Team.

More than 125,000 visitors to the site voted on 44,000 specific policy proposals. The leading vote getters are slated to appear in a ‘Citizen’s Briefing Book,’ which will be delivered to the new President imminently.

The public’s demand to “stop imprisoning responsible adult citizens” who use marijuana received more votes than any other issue in the online poll.

A related question calling on the new administration to “stop using federal resources to undermine states’ medicinal marijuana laws” finished in third place.

The Citizens’ Briefing Book poll marks the third time the Obama Transition Team has asked for the public’s input regarding what they perceive to be the most important public policy questions facing America. Questions pertaining to the legalization of marijuana have dominated online voting in each poll, and have twice finished in the #1 position.

A separate poll, conducted last week by Change.org and the Case Foundation, also reported that the legalization of cannabis for personal use is the most popular issue among online voters.

Commenting on the poll results, NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said: “This past August House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a live interview with CNN, called on the public to actively voice their support for marijuana law reform. Since then, Americans have expressed their desire to amend our nation’s antiquated and punitive cannabis laws in unprecedented numbers. In short, the people have spoken. Are Congress and the Barack Obama administration listening?”

For more information, please contact Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director, at: paul@norml.org, or Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director, at (202) 483-5500.

TORONTO LEADS WORLD ON SWITCH FROM BOTTLED WATER

Tony Clarke, Toronto Star – Toronto’s decision to ban the sale and distribution of bottled water on city premises was a watershed moment for water justice advocates the world over. What was truly significant about Toronto’s action was not that it banned an environmentally destructive product, but that it included a commitment to ensuring access to tap water in all city facilities.

Toronto is now the largest city in the world to pass such far-reaching regulations controlling the distribution of bottled water on municipal property and promoting the use of publicly delivered tap water. Other Canadian and American municipalities have enacted policies encouraging the consumption of tap water and limiting the distribution of bottled water using taxpayer money, but none as large as Toronto has taken such a comprehensive approach.

Toronto’s action is in many ways the result of a diverse North American public campaign that has successfully raised awareness about bottled water as an unnecessary and wasteful product when the majority of people in Canada and the United States have access to clean drinking water from the tap.

As is often the case, Toronto’s initiative had its own elected champions steering it forward. City Councillor Glen De Baeremaeker and Mayor David Miller had the progressive vision to include bottled water in their goal of keeping unnecessary packaging out of city landfills. Their efforts were coupled with a concerted grassroots push by Ontario- based activists, public interest organizations, community and student groups, labour unions and environmental networks.

In the days leading up to the Toronto vote, city councilors faced a barrage of lobbying from the bottled water industry. These frantic attempts to defeat the resolution continued over the two days of debates when the industry brought a battery of lobbyists, corporate executives and industry associations into the council chamber to influence the vote. . . However, their high-priced strategy ultimately failed to influence elected officials, who voted with a two-thirds majority to ban bottled water and reinvest in the public delivery of drinking water.

For many, Toronto has now become the champion of the “Back to the Tap” municipal movement in Canada. To date, this movement has already seen 17 municipalities from five provinces ban the bottle. With 45 others indicating an interest to follow suit, Toronto’s leadership will no doubt inspire more municipalities to stand up and speak out in support of public water. To further enable this municipal movement, Toronto City Council also passed a motion to circulate its resolutions and amended staff report to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Regional Public Works Commissioners of Ontario.

75 YEARS AGO AMERICANS WERE MUCH SMARTER; THEY REPEALED PROHIBITION

INDEPENDENT, UK – In selected watering holes across America, it’s party time tonight. In Washington, the festivities will centER on the venerable City Tavern in Georgetown; for $90, you can taste the cocktail offerings of the capital’s most expert bartenders (or “mixologists” as they like to term themselves), listen to a jazz band and, in the words of the invitation, “party like it’s 1933”.

In San Francisco, after a parade through the streets, celebrants will make their way to the 21st Amendment Brewery, gaining entrance to the revelries within by use of a special password. Similar events are being held in New York, Chicago, New Orleans and other US cities associated with an understanding acceptance of human frailty and having a good time.

By now the reason for these goings-on will be plain. Tonight is the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition – of 5 December 1933 when Utah became the deciding 36th state to ratify the 21st amendment to the constitution, and restore to the country’s citizens the basic human right to go out and have a drink.

Rarely in the annals of human experience has so well intentioned an idea been such a monument to failure as America’s 13-year attempt to eradicate the evil of alcohol. The National Prohibition (or Volstead) Act was passed by Congress in October 1919, overriding the veto of President Woodrow Wilson. The following January, the Act was ratified as the 18th amendment of the constitution after it had been approved by the required three-quarters majority of US states.

The “noble experiment”, as its supporters termed it, did indeed lead to a modest decline in alcohol consumption and an overall improvement in public health. But those meager and transient advantages were nothing compared to the unintended side-effects of Prohibition: a drastic decline in federal and state revenues, a surge in clandestine binge drinking and of course speak-easies, bootlegging, moonlighting and mobsters, not to mention the criminalization of millions of US citizens, including some its most eminent politicians, who were technically flouting the law of the land.

Ethan A. Nadelmann, Wall Street Journal – We should consider why our forebears rejoiced at the relegalization of a powerful drug long associated with bountiful pleasure and pain, and consider too the lessons for our time.

The Americans who voted in 1933 to repeal prohibition differed greatly in their reasons for overturning the system. But almost all agreed that the evils of failed suppression far outweighed the evils of alcohol consumption.

The change from just 15 years earlier, when most Americans saw alcohol as the root of the problem and voted to ban it, was dramatic. Prohibition’s failure to create an Alcohol Free Society sank in quickly. Booze flowed as readily as before, but now it was illicit, filling criminal coffers at taxpayer expense. . .

When repeal came, it was not just with the support of those with a taste for alcohol, but also those who disliked and even hated it but could no longer ignore the dreadful consequences of a failed prohibition. They saw what most Americans still fail to see today: That a failed drug prohibition can cause greater harm than the drug it was intended to banish.

Consider the consequences of drug prohibition today: 500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations; 1.8 million drug arrests last year; tens of billions of taxpayer dollars expended annually to fund a drug war that 76% of Americans say has failed; millions now marked for life as former drug felons; many thousands dying each year from drug overdoses that have more to do with prohibitionist policies than the drugs themselves, and tens of thousands more needlessly infected with AIDS and Hepatitis C because those same policies undermine and block responsible public-health policies.

And look abroad. At Afghanistan, where a third or more of the national economy is both beneficiary and victim of the failed global drug prohibition regime. At Mexico, which makes Chicago under Al Capone look like a day in the park. And elsewhere in Latin America, where prohibition-related crime, violence and corruption undermine civil authority and public safety, and mindless drug eradication campaigns wreak environmental havoc.

All this, and much more, are the consequences not of drugs per se but of prohibitionist policies that have failed for too long and that can never succeed in an open society, given the lessons of history. Perhaps a totalitarian American could do better, but at what cost to our most fundamental values?

Why did our forebears wise up so quickly while Americans today still struggle with sorting out the consequences of drug misuse from those of drug prohibition?

It’s not because alcohol is any less dangerous than the drugs that are banned today. Marijuana, by comparison, is relatively harmless: little association with violent behavior, no chance of dying from an overdose, and not nearly as dangerous as alcohol if one misuses it or becomes addicted. Most of heroin’s dangers are more a consequence of its prohibition than the drug’s distinctive properties. That’s why 70% of Swiss voters approved a referendum this past weekend endorsing the government’s provision of pharmaceutical heroin to addicts who could not quit their addictions by other means. It is also why a growing number of other countries, including Canada, are doing likewise.

The Truth about Marijuana

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This information about MARIJUANA and HUMANS will astound you!

Hypothesis on the symbiosis of humans and the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis.

This paper is dedicated to two of the greatest farmers I know-

My Father Stephen G. Saunders and my Grandfather, James Levi Evans.

This paper points to several key physiological correlations between the chemical components found in the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis, and the chemical components required for the biological functioning of the mammalian species, Homo Sapiens.

The first correllary which bears scrutiny is the correllation between the nutritional requirement for Essential Fatty Acids (EFA) for proper maintenance of brain tissue, skin, and hair, and the chemical composition of the fruit produced by the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis. The essential fatty acid profile of the fruit of the Cannabis Sativa plant contains the full spectrum of essential fatty acids required by humans on a daily basis, perfectly balanced nutritionally down to the tenth of a percent, with nothing added, and nothing left out. This corrollary, when combined with the historical and cultural fact that the fruit of the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis has been consumed for food for thousands of years by humans suggests that the consumption of this fruit has played a major role in the formation of the current chemical and physiological structure of the brain, skin and other physiology of humans.

The second correllary can be found by examining the structure and composition of neuro-receptor sites which exist on the surface of the brain of the species Homo Sapiens. The surface of the human brain contains minute areas which are called “neuro-receptor sites” which function to allow chemical compounds to interact with and have an influence in creating and maintaining all of the various chemical “states” of the brain. These receptor sites vary in size and shape, and thus allow various compounds to “lock in” to them, causing various changes in the chemical composition of the brain. Some of these receptor sites are “substance-specific”, which means that they will only allow specific compounds to “lock in” to them. Some receptor sites are susceptible to a phenomenon called “blocking”, which is created by compounds which, when “locked in” to certain receptor sites, create changes in the chemical composition of the human brain by preventing other compounds from “locking in”.

The chemical compound manufactured by the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis that sometimes has a psychoactive effect on the brain chemistry of humans called TetraHydraCannabinol (THC) consists of a particular formation of a compound called Cannabinol which is also manufactured naturally by the body to aid in the proper functioning of the cornea of the human eye, and support the ability of the human eye to discern the difference between lines and shapes. This compound has a neuro-receptor site in the network of neuro-receptor sites found on the surface of the brain of humans which is “substance specific” which is to say that no other chemical compounds are able to “lock in” to these receptor sites.

The surface of the brain of humans contains more of these “substance specific” neuro-receptor sites THAN RECEPTORS FOR ALL OTHER CHEMICAL COMPUNDS PUT TOGETHER.

The arrangement of these “substance specific” neuro-receptor sites for Cannibinoids across the surface of the human brain has been scientifically described as “ubiquitous”. Ubiquitous is defined scientifically as “the state of being everywhere at the same time”.

A symbiosis between the two species which would influence this level of chemical integration would require many tens of thousands of years of consumption of the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis by humans to create such an enormous influence on the physiological structure of the brain of the species.

While virtually every creature on the planet has “substance specific” neuro-receptor sites for TetraHydraCannabinol (THC) and other Cannibinoids, the mammalian species Homo Sapiens has the unique condition of being capable of ingesting and utilizing TetraHydraCannabinol (THC) in such enormous capacities over all other chemical substances which influence the functioning of the brain of the species.

The Cannabinoids are found on the leaves and flowers of the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis, as well as inside the fruit or “seeds”. The Cannabinoids are ingested by humans and delivered to the brain by consumption of the seeds/fruit as food. The Cannabinoids are also delivered to the brain by consumption of the leaves and flowers of the plant by burning and breathing the resultant smoke, or eating the leaves and flowers. The latter methods, which use the leaves and flowers create a psychotropic/psychoactive effect on the brain.

In examining the use for the Cannibinoids in the physiology of the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis, we find that the plant manufactures the compound for use as a filter that blocks the upper end of the spectrum of light of the sun known as “ultraviolet” or UV light.

The TetraHydraCannabinol (THC) is a protective shield for the plant against UV radiation. In light of these empirical facts, this paper demonstrates proof of species symbiosis between humans and the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis, predicated upon scientific proof which answers the following questions:

  1. a) Does the deprivation of the full and balanced spectrum of Essential Fatty Acids delivered by the fruit/seeds of the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis from the nutritional diet of humans create adverse effects on the health of the species?

Correllations between the historical date of the political prohibition of the fruit/seeds for use as a food source in the United States, and the ensuing decline in the use of the fruit/seeds as a food source throughout the rest of the world due to martial enforcement, AND the rise of aberrative forms of disease and illness cannot be overlooked.

  1. b) Does the effect of filling the “ubiquitous” numbers of “substance specific” neuro-receptor sites for TetraHydraCannabinol (THC) and other Cannibinoids located on the surface of the brain of humans create for this brain, as it does for the leaves and flowers of the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis the effect of blocking or screening the brain and it’s brainwave activity from the effects of the radiation of Ultraviolet (UV) light?

Current commercial research and development into the use of THC as an effective ingredient in the manufacture of sunscreen for human skin suggests that it’s function in the substance specific neuro-receptor sites on the surface of the human brain, acts for the brainwave activity of the human brain in a similar capacity.

  1. c) While the consumption of the leaves and flowers of the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis by humans through oral ingestion and smoking has been a part of human culture as far back as recorded history, is the sudden and sharp rise in the chronic smoking of the leaves and flowers of the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis by humans a symptom of malnutrition due to insufficient consumption of the seeds/fruit of the same plant, which would, as a staple in the diet of humans provide enough quantities of non-psychoactive/ psychotropic cannabinoids to the brain, in addition to the vital, balanced profile of Essential Fatty Acids delivered by the seeds/fruit of the plant?

Closing Comments:

While there are many, many additional corollaries which support the hypothesis of symbiosis between humans and the plant species’ Cannabis Sativa, Indica, and other hybrid strains of Cannabis, this paper focuses on physiological and biological data and ensuing questions and call for research outlined above.

Stephen H. Saunders is a researcher and media developer who can be contacted at majik@majik.org ©2002 Stephen H. Saunders

 

 

Stephen H. Saunders is a researcher and media developer who can be contacted at majik@majik.org

2002 Stephen H. Saunders