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Current Affairs 2006 - Activism (100 items)
| Dec 29, 2006 | Compassion Club Raided, Names Taken Mark Russell, the founder of the Coombs chapter of the Cannabis Buyers Club of Canada, who supplies marijuana to sick people who use it for pain relief, was raided by members of the Courtenay RCMP on Dec. 22 and now faces six counts of trafficking in a controlled substance
[ Anytime is a bad time for a club to be raided, but right before the holidays so that many people can suffer just a little bit more this Christmas, is beyond cruel. How do police sleep at night because 'just doing my job to enforce laws' doesn't cut it over moral and intellectual honesty.] |
| Dec 15, 2006 | Reverend Eddy Does Xmas In The Joint The man who ran as Nunavut's Marijuana Party candidate during the last federal election will spend Christmas inside a maximum-security prison.
Ed deVries is presently serving a six-month prison sentence for trafficking marijuana and laundering the proceeds of crime at the Central East Detention Centre in Lindsay, Ontario.
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| Dec 15, 2006 | Felger Pleads Guilty To Three Pot Charges Abbotsford's marijuana advocate Tim Felger says he's broke after he pleaded guilty Monday in Chilliwack Supreme Court to three counts of cultivating pot for the purpose of trafficking.
He was sentenced to six months in jail, a 10-year ban on firearms and a $210,000 fine.
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| Dec 7, 2006 | Holy Smoke Lawyer Argues 'Lesser Of Two Evils' The lawyer for Holy smoke co-owners Paul DeFelice and Alan Middlemiss, and associates Akka Annis and Kelsey Stratas, will use a defense employed by abortion activist Henry Morgentaler to acquit his clients of their drug trafficking and possession charges.
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| Dec 7, 2006 | Where There's Smoke There's Pot Buried amidst the hype and hoopla of their leadership race, but not entirely unnoticed in certain smoke-filled quarters, federal Liberals seem to have finally grasped that marijuana is a growth industry in Canada.
A contentious "pie-in-the-sky" resolution was presented to the convention's social and justice workshop calling for legalizing marijuana under eventual provincial administration. The resolution also suggested that existing "compassion centres" could be incorporated into Health Canada and there be a general amnesty and destruction of criminal records for the 1.5 million Canadians convicted of simple marijuana possession since 1923.
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| Dec 7, 2006 | Mouldy Myths Cops Warn of Rampant Mould at Pot Ops but Public Health Says There's No Fungus in Sight
Should a b-movie blob threaten the city, Toronto cops will have lots of experience battling make-believe enemies. Fact is, menacing claims last week by our finest that the grow ops busted at 2600 Jane were rampant with mould may be plain untrue.
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| Nov 30, 2006 | PUB LTE: Kudos For Vote To Scrap Pot Prohibition Members of Saskatchewan's NDP made political history at their convention becoming Canada's first governing party to support a resolution to eliminate the prohibition on marijuana. Although this is a great first step, there is a long way to go before state-sponsored discrimination against Saskatchewan cannabis users ends.
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| Nov 23, 2006 | Medical Pot Users Fume Over Tories' Drug-Driving Regular medical marijuana users are being unfairly targeted by the Conservative government's new drug-driving legislation, which will increase penalties and make it easier for police to crack down on people who do drugs before getting behind the wheel, a national advocacy group warned yesterday.
"This law, we feel, would unfairly target marijuana users," said Russell Barth, a medical marijuana user and member of the National Capital Reformers. "Discriminating against us based on our medication . is much like discriminating against us based on the colour of our skin."
[ The Casnadian Cannabis Coalition, an umbrella organization for the cannabis community, issued a press release on this subject as well. ] |
| Nov 20, 2006 | Delegates Want NDP to Become More Green Among other resolutions, delegates also passed a call for government support to facilitate the sale of the Maple Leaf plant in Saskatoon slated to be closed, a call for anti-scab legislation, a call for the government to take action to avoid an SGEU strike and a call for the provincial party to support the federal NDP's position in favour of "non-punitive" marijuana laws.
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| Nov 17, 2006 | Chief Constable Dan Maluta In Nelson As for the many questions about marijuana, the local economy, and how Nelson's community feels about this drug, Maluta will not be drawn too far....
The Chief is aware that 'marijuana advocates' talk about 'mom-and-pop operations' as being mostly harmless, or will say 'maybe some handicapped person might earn a little cash by growing-' He notes that when mom and pop grow ops are busted, it is usual to find the owners have an average of nine Criminal Code offences in their past records.
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| Nov 16, 2006 | Stoned By Jury ury nullification ( when a jury goes against the law or a judge's instructions ) is alive and well in Canada. With jury deliberations shrouded in secrecy, a jury always has the implied power and ability to ignore the law and decide a case in accordance with its moral intuition....
For the most part, Canadians do not respect laws that stand in the way of relieving pain and suffering. This is why the Krieger jury had difficulty convicting in the face of clear technical guilt. So when I am asked about the legal status of the centres, I usually mumble something like "probably illegal but non-prosecutable."
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| Nov 11, 2006 | Posters Accuse Miller Of Having Opponent Jailed David Miller has been accused of a lot of things in this election campaign, but, until recently, throwing people into jail wasn't on the list.
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Posters have appeared on newspaper boxes and hydro poles accusing the mayor of sweeping an opponent, Rev. Peter Okatar Styrsky, into a Northern Ontario jail to keep him out of the race.
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Specifically, the hand-drawn posters, which feature cartoon marijuana leaves and scrawled block-letter text, suggest the mayor had direct influence in the jailing of Mr. Styrsky, a member of the controversial, pro-marijuana Assembly of the Church of the Universe.
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| Nov 8, 2006 | Battle For Bud The government announced its decision to fund Prairie Plant Systems Inc. to grow cannabis inside an abandoned mine shaft mid-October.
"The frustration there is this is a company that really has not worked hard to meet the needs of the end users of this product," Lucas says in a recent interview.
While 1,400 Canadians are registered in the medical marijuana program, only 300 order marijuana through PPS.
According to Lucas, the government has spent more than $8 million on the PPS production facility.
"Now if we divide that over 300 people, we can see what we're growing in Flin Flon, Manitoba is the world's most expensive bud," he says.
But PPS president Brent Zettl says public outcry from medical marijuana advocates is a thin disguise for ulterior motives.
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| Oct 28, 2006 | Church Allegedly Dealt Pot
Members of the Assembly of the Church of the Universe in Toronto were pro-marijuana activists who were too lazy to agitate for the cause, a police source said yesterday.
"Basically these folks believe in the legalization of marijuana, but didn't wait for the laws to change or have not taken the appropriate steps to change the laws," the source said.
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| Oct 28, 2006 | Mayoral Candidate Charged With Pot Possession One of the candidates for mayor of Thunder Bay has been charged with possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking.
The Chronicle-Journal has learned that Douglas MacKay, 53, was charged Sept. 11 after police seized almost nine kilograms of marijuana.
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| Oct 26, 2006 | Top court overturns pot activist's conviction An Alberta medical marijuana activist was deprived of his constitutional right to a jury trial when his trial judge instructed two sympathetic jurors to nonetheless find him guilty, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled today.
READ RULING:
SUPREME COURT OF CANADA vs Grant W. Krieger
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| Oct 13, 2006 | Electoral-Law Edict Boosts Small Parties An Ontario judge has struck down an electoral law that permitted large federal political parties to fill their coffers with public money at the expense of smaller parties.
Superior Court Judge Ted Matlow ruled yesterday that the law is undemocratic, unequal and stunts the growth of small parties for no valid reason.
The money will be awarded retroactively to 2003 and, including interest charges, brings the total the parties will share to approximately $500,000...The coalition that challenged the law includes the Marijuana Party; the Christian Heritage Party; the Canadian Action Party; the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada; the Green Party; the Progressive Canadian Party; and the Communist Party of Canada.
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| Oct 13, 2006 | 'Poor' Pot From Only Legal Grow-Op Pot activists are blaming the federal Tories for wasting potential research dollars by extending a contract with Canada's only legal grow-op, just weeks after slashing funding for medicinal marijuana studies.
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| Oct 10, 2006 | Man Says Hemp Oil Cured His Cancer "The attention to this story is going across Canada and that means people will find out about this hemp oil and what it can do to save lives," Mr. Dwyer said Sunday.
He was referring to an essential oil a local man produces from the buds and leaves of the hemp plant.
Mr. Dwyer, a past president of the Maccan legion, and other executive members got into a spot of trouble with the Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command of the Royal Canadian Legion because of the oil.
"I did research for over a year and a half, I spoke to at least 30 people with diseases like cancer and diabetes wounds who were cured by this oil, and I felt we had a duty to make sure people knew of this," he said. ...."It cured my sister's cancer and my wife's arthritis - she was taking medicine and was still in horrible pain for 13 years - this oil is amazing," said Mr. Dwyer, 51.
"My father, who is 82 years old, was given 48 hours to live because of his cancer and that was in June - I took him off all his medicines and gave him this oil and he's cured."
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| Oct 7, 2006 | Heady Times With Tommy Chong Tommy, who found fame in the comedy duo Cheech and Chong and as the old hippie in That '70s Show, was in Victoria last weekend to promote his new book. The I Chong: Meditations from the Joint is a non-fiction recap of his nine months in the slammer after getting busted for shipping bongs to a Pennsylvania head shop.
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