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Current Affairs 2007 - Activism (121 items)
| Aug 27, 2007 | ON: 32 Drug Charges at Hempfest Ontario Provincial Police laid 32 drug charges and four weapons charges over the weekend during a RIDE stop set up during Hempfest 2007. OPP say most of the drug charges were for possession of marijuana.
[Crushing the culture] |
| Aug 25, 2007 | ON: Police Will Be Out in Force at Hempfes The Cannabis Festival Runs Through Sunday in Ophir
A police traffic checkpoint aims to smoke out any possible problems during Hempfest.
The ninth annual cannabis festival runs through Sunday in Ophir about 30 kilometres north of Bruce Mines.
Ontario Provincial Police started checking vehicles on Poplar Dale Road Thursday afternoon. Motorists will be stopped through the weekend.
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| Aug 24, 2007 | ON: Church Leaders Go To Court Over Confiscated Pot The spiritual leaders of a church that uses marijuana as its sacrament are seeking a court order for the return of several pounds of pot and other items seized from their Barton Street headquarters during an RCMP raid.
Church of the Universe ministers Walter Tucker, 74, and Michael Baldasaro, 58, were charged with possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking after the Mounties executed a search warrant on May 15, 2000.
The raid came after a sting operation in which undercover police officers pretended to join the church and began to buy the sacrament.
However, all charges against the pair were ultimately withdrawn by a federal drug prosecutor on Dec. 15, 2005.
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| Aug 11, 2007 | For a Pot Smoker in Pain, No Help Is on the Way Alison Myrden looks ready for battle. Two long braids are tucked under her black cargo cap, while sunshine hits her sparkling nose stud and glints off of her fierce amber eyes.
She's passionate, ready to fight for her fellow multiple sclerosis sufferers.
A few weeks ago, though, Ms. Myrden's lustre was lessened after she was denied a summer student - one of five hired to give companionship to MS sufferers - by the Burlington chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada. The reason they gave her? The university students could be harmed by the marijuana she continually uses to control the savage pain in her face and help her walk.
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| Aug 11, 2007 | Pot Grower: Cops' Crop Price Is Way Too High A local pot grower thinks the RCMP was high as a kite in assessing the value of some weed they seized in a recent drug bust in Stewiacke.
Comments made by police in a recent newspaper article indicating that 170 plants taken in a late-July operation had a value of $200,000 are "craziness," according to the grower, who contacted The Chronicle Herald to say there isn't that much money in marijuana.
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| Aug 10, 2007 | BC: Pot Not a Police Priority, Deputy Chief Testifies at Trial Deputy Chief Bill Naughton said the society's Cormorant Street office of the Vancouver Island Compassion Society has not generated any complaints, adding marijuana ranks behind drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin in terms of Victoria police priorities. ....Also testifying yesterday in Victoria was Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, who chaired the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, which called in 2002 for the legalization of marijuana in Canada.
Nolin told the court the regulations, as they currently exist, are an obstacle to Canadians who want access to medical marijuana.
He said the rules ask doctors to be "gatekeepers" for access to legal marijuana. It's a role doctors don't want, and so Canadians are being denied access to a medical product.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | Roach Burn (class action suit) The irony is too delicious. A lawyer named Roach, in this case Charles Roach, taking on the feds' reefer madness pot laws. Roach argues in a class action filed Tuesday ( August 7 ) in federal court that laws making possession of pot illegal have had no force or effect since July 2001. That's when the federal government was ordered to enact a constitutionally valid law. It still hasn't. Roach's suit asks for $25 million in compensation for persons prosecuted under pot laws. Maybe the threat of having to pay out millions in damages will finally light a fire under the feds' asses to stop with their anti-cannabis charade. We're happily holding our breath on this one.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | ON: Church Argues Marijuana A Sacrament CHURCH ARGUES MARIJUANA A SACRAMENT
Parishioners Plan Charter Challenge, Say Current Policy Infringes On Their Religious Rights
If some religions sip wine at the altar, others should be allowed to smoke pot. At least according to Rev. Edwin Pearson and Rev. Michel Ethier, two ordained ministers behind a proposed $25 million class action lawsuit challenging Canada's marijuana laws.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | Why Is This Canadian Pot Dealer Campaigning for Ron Paul? He's Looking for a Pardon.
Marc Emery agrees his campaign-organizing effort for some 2008 U.S. presidential candidates is a bit unorthodox. He's Canadian, his political base of operations is the B.C. Marijuana Party in Vancouver, and he can be arrested if he sets foot into America.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | BC: Trial to Hear Testimony From Senator Who Backed Marijuana Legalization A Canadian senator who has called for the legalization of marijuana took the stand yesterday in the trial arising from a raid on the Vancouver Island Compassion Society's grow operation.
Pierre Claude Nolin chaired the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, which unanimously called five years ago for legalization of the drug in Canada. The committee recommended the government license production and sale of marijuana, which would be available to any Canadian citizen over the age of 16.
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| Aug 4, 2007 | BC: Medicinal Pot Grower Sees Huge Demand VICTORIA - A Vancouver Island grower of organic marijuana is being inundated with pleas for pot from disease sufferers, but Health Canada says he can supply only one person, a provincial court trial has been told.
Eric Nash said he wrote to Canadian Health Minister Tony Clement with a list of 121 people, all approved by Health Canada to use marijuana as medicine and asking him to grow it for them. One of them was a former RCMP officer diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
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| Aug 3, 2007 | Activist Spreads His Message The journey for justice, which began in Victoria, has Magnuson rollerblading 12,000 miles to Ottawa, where his journey culminates on Remembrance Day.
Many commuters may spot the activist rolling along highways and downtown streets, sporting a Canadian cannabis flag on the end of a hockey stick.
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| Jul 31, 2007 | Drugs And The Police In 1967, John Conroy was a clean-cut University of B.C. student and a member of the varsity swim team. It wasn't until after he graduated that he formed the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws ( NORML ) in Canada, becoming its first president....Today, an estimated 600,000 Canadians have been busted for pot possession. A recent United Nations drug report said five million Canadians smoked pot in 2004, the fifth-highest percentage of usage in the world.
[ The 600,000 Canadians with criminal records was true in the early 1990's, but more than 1.5 million are now estimated to have criminal records.] |
| Jul 18, 2007 | Marijuana Maverick Says It's About Rights Two weeks ago a civil suit, launched by Reimer, was thrown out of court with Ottawa Justice C. McKinnon saying that Reimer "was the author of his own misfortune."...
"It's not publicity," says Reimer, who's been lighting up joints on a daily basis since he was 13. "What I want to do is to make sure people stand up for their right."
With tears filling his eyes, he adds, "I love my county; it's getting less and less free all the time and it's very scary."
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| Jul 13, 2007 | Judge rules Canada's pot possession laws unconstitutional A Toronto judge has ruled that Canada's pot possession laws are unconstitutional after a man argued the country's medicinal marijuana regulations are flawed. The man has no medical issues and doesn't want a medical exemption to smoke marijuana....In court, the man argued that the federal government only made it policy to provide marijuana to those who need it, but never made it an actual law. Because of that, he argued, all possession laws, whether medicinal or not, should be quashed....The judge agreed and dismissed the charges.Borenstein has given prosecutors two weeks before he makes his ruling official.
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| Jul 12, 2007 | Walking Backwards Into A Wall If politics is supposed to lead the nation in debate, we're being taken for quite a ride when it comes to pot and the law.
Discovering that, in 2006, Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Halifax experienced up to 50-per-cent increases in cannabis-related arrests, is like walking backwards into a wall.... It's about time that we get over the stigma associated with many of the false assumptions that dominate this debate, and pragmatically move forward on eliminating pot prohibition.
As someone who has both walked the streets as a member of the RCMP's drug squad and examined legislation for passage into law as a Senator, I have a sharp understanding of what constitutes a criminal.
Those that use pot just don't fit the profile.
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| Jul 8, 2007 | Your Fate If Arrested For Pot Smoking? Marc-Boris St-Maurice has been arrested so many times for marijuana possession that he serves as a one-man clinical study in the fate reserved for those caught with small amounts of pot.
The study's theme would be inconsistency.
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| Jul 6, 2007 | Reimer Loses Court Battle
Marijuana Activist Rick Reimer Has Lost His Day In Court.
In a written decision released Thursday, Ottawa Justice C. McKinnon threw out the $3 million civil suit launched by the former Pembroke lawyer, who possesses a medical exemption to smoke, grow and cultivate marijuana to treat his Multiple Sclerosis.
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| Jul 6, 2007 | Pot Documentary Has Local Filmmaker On A Roll A Kelowna man's documentary film about the marijuana industry is making waves on the film festival circuit.
The Union: the business of getting high, won outstanding feature documentary honours at the Winnipeg International Film Festival last month. Next month, it is slated to appear at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.
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| Jun 30, 2007 | SN: Student To Keep Good Grades Wawota's Kieran King may be able to hang onto his honour role status, despite being suspended from Wawota Parkland School for violating a lockdown.
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