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Current Affairs 2005 - Top Rated (29 items)
| Dec 16, 2005 | One Thing Is Missing In The Agonizing Over Gang Jeffrey Miron, an economist at Boston University, has studied the links between violence and prohibition -- of both alcohol and other drugs -- over the past century. His research found a strong correlation not only between violence and a drug's legal status -- the moment it's banned, violence goes up -- but also between violence and the amount of money spent trying to enforce the ban.
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| Dec 15, 2005 | Pharma's Frankenweed By wrongly classifying marijuana as an illicit drug, the government has effectively provided itself with a monopoly over the production of cannabis. Health Canada operates one of the largest grow ops in the world in Flin Flon. Perhaps it should take the initiative to bring this valuable plant into the conventional pharmacopeia. This is unlikely to happen, and even if it did we would likely see the same profit-driven recklessness that corrupts private sector drug development.
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| Dec 11, 2005 | The Phony War On Drugs A Quick Reading of History Should Convince Stephen Harper That Get-Tough Attitudes to Drugs in Canada Just Makes the Problem Worse
Another suberb oped by Dan Gardener |
| Nov 3, 2005 | Marijuana Vs Alcohol - The Straight-Up Dope The California Research Advisory Panel has stated that "[pot] is responsible for less damage to society and the individual than are alcohol and cigarettes." So what's the deal? ... The Canadian Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that more violent crimes are committed under the influence of alcohol than any other drug.... It finds that when it comes to crime, most pot smokers cause no other misdeed than the possession of the pot itself. ... The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse states that nearly half of all car crash deaths involve alcohol. In the United States it's the number one contributing factor in young deaths, and accounts for a quarter of all youth hospital visits.
Pot on the other hand, was involved in less than two per cent of drug-related visits to the hospital in 1994.
[Common sense tells us alcohol is more dangerous than pot... but then there's politics...] |
| Nov 1, 2005 | The Cannabis Connoisseur Where wine is concerned, there is much to know...Legions of drinkers pore over the subject as if fact-gathering itself were the addiction. And so it is with another of the world's most popular intoxicants: marijuana. The average pot smoker may not know or care what type of weed is in the dime bag, so long as it gets him lit. But others can't stop obsessing over every detail of the subject from, say, how to produce kick-ass bubble hash from plant debris ( don't throw away those sticks! ) to questions about the Linnaean nomenclature of the subspecies cannabis indica.
[The Supreme Court sold out a huge culture of Canadians from every class, race, location to uphold the status quo... then sleep every night...] |
| Nov 1, 2005 | Pass the Weed, Dad Parents Are Smoking Dope With Their Kids. What Are They Thinking?
[Probably the same thing that parents who allow their kids to drink a little wine with dinner or special occasions is - how to responsibly use the substances they will encounter in life. The hypocrasy surrounding pot politics is another sympton of our mainstream alcohol culture. Besides, prohbition has been around so long, many parents smoked with their parents, (even grandparents), so critical mass keeps building. ] |
| Oct 28, 2005 | Rolling Stone Article Irks Local Leaders In his article entitled "The Tale of Kid Cannabis", Rolling Stone contributing editor Mark Binelli writes: "Rumour had it that the town of Nelson had become a sort of hippie Shangri-La, a place where if you took more than ten minutes to find someone to sell you a dime bag, there was a good chance you were already high." Binelli described Baker Street's Holy Smoke Culture Shop, with its outdoor portrait of reggae legend Peter Tosh " large enough to rival Soviet-era portraits of Lenin," as "a second City Hall."
[ Many enterprising kids realize they can make far more money selling pot than be expoited at McJobs. Eventually the pot sellers buy the business and hire the pot buyers to work for them... it's all spelled it in Narco-Dollars
for Beginners A MUST READ ] |
| Oct 27, 2005 | Smoking A J May Brighten The Day Supporters of marijuana may finally have an excuse to smoke weed every day. A recent study in the Journal Of Clinical Investigation suggests that smoking pot can make the brain grow...Many drugs -- heroin, cocaine, and the more common alcohol and nicotine -- inhibit the growth of these new cells. It was thought that marijuana did the same thing, but this new research suggests otherwise.
[In the peak oil world, the benefits of cannabis and hemp will be too crucial to keep prohibited.] |
| Oct 18, 2005 | Pot Less of a Cancer Risk Than Tobacco, Study Suggests Marijuana smokers are less likely to contract cancer than cigarette smokers, new research suggests.
While cannabis and tobacco smoke are chemically similar, the key difference is that cigarettes contain nicotine, which appears to bolster the cancer-causing properties of tobacco, while cannabis contains tetrahydrocannabinol ( THC, the active ingredient in pot ), which may actually reduce the carcinogenic properties of some chemicals.
[Thousands and thousands of dollars are spent to confirm what thousands and thousands of years of anedoctal evidence tells us - politics is the only reason this plant was ever illegal] |
| Oct 18, 2005 | Health Officers Want Drug Law Changes B.C. public health officers are demanding the government decriminalize drug offences because the war on illicit substances is an abysmal failure. ...They say the laws are based on racism and cultural biases, not evidence of harm, and that the prohibition causes far more damage to health and to society.
LINK: A Public Health Approach to Drug Control in Canada
(PDF, 38 pgs - 238K) |
| Oct 13, 2005 | Marijuana Compound Spurs Brain Cell Growth According to the study in rats, a super-potent synthetic version of the cannabinoid compound found in marijuana can reduce depression and anxiety when taken over an extended period of time. ...."I think most people with clinical expertise in the area of palliative medicine know that if patients had access to all the tools we currently have, we could certainly do a whole lot better to help people live with multiple chronic diseases," he added. "The social policies are way behind our technology, and that's where we need some catching up."
[For every beneficial study such as this, 5 more junk science claiming psychosis are trotted out, but our collective experience of cannabis precedes the scientific knowledge ] |
| Oct 6, 2005 | Kid Cannabis How a Chubby Pizza-Delivery Boy From Idaho Became a Drug Kingpin:
Nate Norman was hanging out with his buddy Topher Clark when he came up with The Idea. The two friends were sitting around Nate's house, a dumpy little place near the cemetery, and both of them were extremely stoned. And yet The Idea had more legs than your typical pot-inspired idea. It did not involve a second Twinkie inside the first one. It did not involve genetically modifying the bugs so their blood would not be blood but windshield-wiper fluid. It was, in fact, based on a practical application of global economic theory. That, and cheap weed in Canada.
[ Many enterprising kids realize they can make far more money selling pot than be expoited at McJobs. Eventually the pot sellers buy the business and hire the pot buyers to work for them... it's all spelled it in Narco-Dollars
for Beginners A MUST READ ] |
| Sep 19, 2005 | Police Losing Battle Over Pot, Says Prof Police are losing the war against pot and it's time to make it legal and regulate the cultivation and use of it, says Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa University criminology teacher who co-founded the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy.
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| Aug 18, 2005 | Irrationality In Canada's Drug Policy Eugene Oscapella is an Ottawa Lawyer who teaches drug policy in the department of criminology at the University of Ottawa. He is also founding member of an independent, not for profit research group and think tank called the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy. He was able to share his thoughts on Canada's cannabis laws.
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| Jul 29, 2005 | BCMP Headquarters Raided ordered by U.S. - Emery & others arrested Police raided a marijuana seed store run by the B.C. Marijuana Party leader in Vancouver Friday, apparently at the request of U.S. authorities in Seattle.
At a news conference in Seattle, U.S. authorities announced they've asked for Emery to be extradited to the U.S. to face drug charges.
[ Any illusion that Canada is a sovereign nation is now dead and gone] |
| Jun 9, 2005 | CN BC: Editorial: Vancouver Mayor Backs Legal Pot Federal government needs to take a hard look at the best way to manage marijuana
A City of Vancouver report, with the backing of Mayor Larry Campbell, is calling for the legalization of marijuana -- not just "decriminalization" as proposed by legislation stalled in Parliament.
[Larry Campbell is on the Board of Advisors of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)] |
| May 1, 2005 | Interview With Dr Andrew Weil There are many reasons to recommend it as a medicine. It's got extremely low toxicity and it's useful for conditions that it manages well like muscle spasms, chronic pain and also lack of appetite that occurs in HIV infections and cancers. The downside of marijuana is that you know most doctors are not very comfortable recommending that patients smoke and the affects are variable from individual to individual. It just seems to me silly to deny ourselves the benefits of marijuana. It doesn't work for everyone but it works for some people. The real problem you are up against is that this is not a rational area of discussion. Marijuana becomes a powerful symbol of a lifestyle and it represents a lot of things that most cultures are afraid of and I think the resistance to legitimizing marijuana as a medicine, really stems from this irrational fear that if we do that we are chipping away at this whole superstructure of myths that has been built up of cannabis as a devil drug that has no redeeming qualities.
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| Apr 25, 2005 | Gone To Pot More than 500 people gathered there -- at the seat of government and lawful authority in Manitoba -- to listen to music, play a bit of Frisbee, giggle perhaps more than usual and get high on dope. ... And yet the police did nothing except mark time. Enforcement of the Criminal Code should not be arbitrary. Arbitrary enforcement brings the justice system into disrepute...The law should be made to reflect the current reality. It was not illegal on Wednesday. It cannot be illegal today and should not be illegal tomorrow.
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| Apr 7, 2005 | And Marijuana For All By Alan Young. I am becoming embarrassed by the endless pot debate in Canada. Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan recently stated that marijuana smokers are stupid ( Was this her way of saying she smokes the herb? ), but the true imbecility lies in the irresolute and confused response of our governemt to a no-brainer issue of public policy.
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| Apr 1, 2005 | CN ON: Pot Activists Sound Off At Meeting A town hall meeting about illegal marijuana grow ops in Scarborough grew heated last night when activists supporting the legalization of cannabis challenged the information being presented by a parade of local politicians and police.
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