THE MEDIA
DEBATE 2004
THE ISSUE: CANNABIS IN CANADA
THE CANNABIS DEBATE: BOTH SIDES
One Man Show:
- Different
Take On Marijuana "I'm from the Kootenays and I
never saw someone tear up a bar who was high on dope. As
an individual I'd say if you want to smoke dope, go get a bong as big
as a melon and smoke your
brains out. "But guess what? I am not Don Sperry, the individual, I am
Don Sperry, the judge. If
you don't have a medical exemption, you don't get to smoke dope and
break the law."
YOUTH
- Schools
May Feed Students' Info To
Police School trustees met last night to discuss supplying police
with Personal Digital
Assistants programmed with names, addresses, birth dates, phone
numbers, photographs and timetables
of every student in the board's 18 high schools.
- School
Drug Free Zones Not
Working Kelowna - The Adolescent Intervention for Marijuana
Suspension (AIMS) program allows
kids caught smoking marijuana for the first time to fill out a
self-report questionnaire and go
through one hour of counselling, instead of being suspended.
HEALTH
- Health
Risks Outnumber Benefits Of
Marijuana Use
- Pot
May Make Epileptic Seizures
Worse, Study Says
- Mental
Disorders, Marijuana Don't
Mix, Society Warns The letter said the
Schizophrenia Society of Canada and its
provincial counterparts put forward a very emphatic protest against the
legalization of marijuana
for medical purposes. "This strong opposition was based on both
supportive research findings and
first-hand experience of care-giving families that marijuana ( and
other street drug usage ) has
been found to trigger symptoms of schizophrenia if one is genetically
or otherwise predisposed to
it," [Funding comes from pharmaceutical
firm AstraZeneca Canada Inc.
($700,000)]
- Schizophrenia
Society of Sask. Warns
Doctors of Marijuana Risk Doctors
should be wary when asked to
prescribe medical marijuana, says the Schizophrenia Society of
Saskatchewan. [Funding comes from
pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca Canada Inc. ($700,000)]
- You
Can't Trust Most Illicit-drug
Research The U.S. government is dominated by a
drug-war ideology in which
drugs are not simply another health risk. Drugs are criminal, immoral,
even evil. When most people
think of alcohol, we draw a line between "use" and "abuse." Because the
drug-war ideology sees
drugs as inherently wicked, it erases the line between use and abuse of
illicit drugs. Any use is
abuse. Any use is destructive. And the job of science is to prove it.
- Few
Health Risks In Marijuana,
Psychologist Says
GROW OPS
- Realtors
Combat Grow Ops
- 100
Grow-Op Houses Unearthed in
Mortgage-Scam Probe Mortgage Broker, Realtors Alleged to Have
Fabricated Records to
Obtain Homes Up to 100 large-scale marijuana growing operations
have been found in Lower
Mainland houses identified by government regulators as part of an
elaborate scheme to get mortgages
by using false employment records and banking documents
MISCELLANEOUS
Note: Bill Smith lost his bid for re-election.
- Judge
Blames Pot In Fatal
Stabbing Marijuana,
a drug
viewed as so harmless that Canada is moving to decriminalize possessing
it, is
being blamed for driving a Quebec man to stab his roommate to death in
a paranoid
rage.
- The
Trouble With Interesting
Headlines Note: Jerry Paradis is a retired judge
of the Provincial Court of
British Columbia. The blame lies properly on the
prohibition, not on the drug,
whatever it may have been.
- Blame
Mary Jane "I've followed it very closely for 30
years and I don't know any other such
case where mental disassociation is considered caused by cannabis
consumption. From what I
know such cases must be extremely rare," says Marie-Andree Bertrand.
- Greetings
From Resisterville
Source: New York Times (NY) NELSON, British Columbia
- Holy
Smoke 'Shocked' By NY Times
Article Story Indicates Downtown Store Openly Selling Pot; Not So
Say Owners - Holy Smoke
Culture Shop is debunking statements published in the New York Times
last Sunday that alleged the
store sold marijuana out of its "produce section."
CONCLUSION
Question: Are the police obsessed with cannabis
because it offers them such an
easy way to do their jobs and guarantees there will be even more work
available?
Question: If God could not impose prohibition on two people, why does the government and law enforcement think they can achieve such a lofty goal of imposing it on an entire society?
It will always be beyond my comprehension why some people believe they have the right to restrict a non-toxic plant, of all things.
People have been peacefully growing cannabis outdoors forever, and hydroponically since it became popular in the
1970's, but now all of a sudden we are bombarded in the media with the dangers prohibition created - some unsafe commercial grow ops and the emerging violence. They are fairly isolated incidents now, but are bound to spread as the laws become more repressive, so now it is a huge threat to public safety if there are cannabis plants in with the tomatoes and onions.
The war on cannabis consumers can never be won,
yet the war gets ramped up
more each year without any rational basis, and every year we are
supposed to remain in denial and
enable this dysfunctional status quo. What we really need is an
intervention.
I can only conclude that our society is obsessed with drugs. How
else can you explain the huge amount of time, money and resources devoted to banning our choice to use some drugs and herbs, while at the same time devoting huge amounts of time, money and resources to making us aware of what our choices should be - alcohol, Ritalin, Prozac, Valium, Viagra and any other pharmaceutical they have managed to dream up. The headlines neatly sum up how much
time, money and energy are diverted away from social responsibility and
poured into social engineering.
How bad do things have to get before potsmokers say enough is enough and do something? Critical mass is probably the prohibitionists worst fear.
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