Weekend Update

Weekend Update for December 4-8, 2009

A couple of things to keep an eye on...first order of business is

Monserrate sentencing could bring jail time
By Jeremy Walsh

Last Updated: 11:25 AM, December 3, 2009

Posted: 11:25 AM, December 3, 2009

Friday is a day of reckoning for state Sen. Hiram Monserrate (D-East Elmhurst), who faces up to a year in jail when he is sentenced for misdemeanor assault. But jail time is just one possibility for Monserrate, a first-time offender, former Marine and ex-NYPD officer.

Monserrate was convicted in October of recklessly injuring his girlfriend, Karla Giraldo, after a December 2008 fight in his Jackson Heights apartment. Monserrate is depicted on security camera footage dragging Giraldo away from a neighbor’s door as she holds on to the staircase and then the doorway of the apartment building in an apparent attempt to resist him.

The misdemeanor conviction could carry a sentence of jail time, probation, a fine or anger management classes, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.

Monserrate was acquitted of felony assault charges for allegedly slashing Giraldo’s face with a broken glass after discovering another man’s police union card in her purse. Monserrate and Giraldo have both claimed her injuries were accidental, incurred when he stumbled in the dark and spilled water on her, causing her to shoot upright in bed and collide with the glass in his hand.

His attorney, Joseph Tacopina, has said he will appeal the misdemeanor conviction.

In the meantime, Monserrate faces an uphill battle to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses and to build a war chest for his 2010 re-election bid.

The Albany Times Union reported Monserrate has established a legal defense fund based on a legal opinion issued for former state Sen. Efrain Gonzalez that differentiated between what was an improper gift and what would be considered a legitimate contribution to the fund.

The Queens Democratic Party has already endorsed state Assemblyman Jose Peralta (D-Jackson Heights) in the 2010 Democratic primary for Monserrate’s seat.

But the senator may not be in office that long. The state Senate is in the process of deciding whether it has the authority to expel Monserrate based on the conviction. Had he been found guilty of a felony, the senator would have been forced to resign. With the lesser charge in place, the Senate’s recourse is unclear. Public hearings are expected soon.

Monserrate’s participation in a June coup in the Senate also jeopardizes his viability in the state Legislature. He followed state Sen. Pedro Espada (D-Bronx) over to the Republican fold briefly, overturning the two-vote Democratic majority and sparking a month-long stalemate that alienated many of his colleagues.


Reach reporter Jeremy Walsh by e-mail at jewalsh@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 154.

Oh, look - three years probation...no jail time.

In other news...looks like ClimateGate is out of the bag. Oh, Al...I hear that they're calling for your Academy Award and your Nobel Peace Prize to be rescinded.

Oops.

Tiger...should have given up the goods in the beginning.

Did anyone read Buddy Boys by Mike McAlary? Apparently, this tool LEO didn't.

The Drug Czar's High Math - How Phony Statistics About Cocaine Prices Hide The Truth About The War On Drugs - Reason Magazine

http://www.reason.com
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134481.html
Reason Magazine
The Drug Czar's High Math
How phony statistics about cocaine prices hide the truth about the war on drugs

Ryan Grim | August/September 2009 Print Edition

John Walters had some data he wanted to make public, but he also had a credibility problem. Just two years earlier, in 2005, Walters, the country’s drug czar, had cited a hike in the price of cocaine as a battlefield victory in the war on drugs—only to see the price fall just as he was touting the increase. He was ridiculed in some quarters of the press; others decided to stop listening to him.

This time around, in the summer of 2007, Walters went looking for the most receptive audience he could find. So he zipped down New York Avenue to the headquarters of The Washington Times, the conservative daily based in the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Walters, according to a staffer present at the briefing, came with a small staff and a stack of glossy pages making the case that the United States had turned a corner in the war on drugs. Prices for cocaine, he said, were rising fast. And that, he explained, can only mean a decline in supply.

The Times wouldn’t bite. The data were suspiciously thin. Walters’ numbers showing the increased price of cocaine began in 2007. The best comparison data, which he didn’t have with him but could be found online, dated back to the first half of 2003, when the RAND Corporation gathered information for a comprehensive report. The drug czar had sat on the RAND report for a full year after it was completed in 2004 because it showed prices trending downward. The RAND study was also transparent about its methodology, whereas the new numbers Walters was touting, covering the period afterward, came with no explanation of how they were concocted.

Walters finally found a platform one month later in USA Today. Soon the story The Washington Times wouldn’t touch was all over the news. Thanks to the drug czar’s cherry-picked statistics, newspapers were crowing that America was winning the war on cocaine, particularly the effort to suppress production in Latin America.

While Walters was shopping his numbers around, I was in the middle of researching my book on the history of drug trends, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America. So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get whatever data Walters had left out of his presentation. I also asked for information on the methodology and analysis. My request was rejected, even though some of what I was asking for had already been given to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who had repeatedly asked for the data. The Department of Justice, where the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is located, explained in denying my request that there was no “public benefit” to disclosing what I had asked for.

Fortunately, the Obama administration disagreed. When Edward Jurith became acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in January, he quietly released the report that Walters had been keeping to himself, posting it on the ONDCP’s website. John Walsh of the left-leaning Washington Office on Latin America first wrote about the new numbers in April, nearly a year after the report was finished. It turns out there was indeed no “benefit” to releasing the information—for Walters, that is.

Rather than an “unprecedented” spike in cocaine prices, the underlying data that Walters had derived his claims from showed that 2007 featured the lowest cocaine prices on record, down 6.6 percent from 2006. Yes, the price bumped up in the middle of the year, but in his victory lap across the media the drug czar neglected to mention that the bump followed a quarter in which cocaine had reached its lowest price level since the government began keeping track in 1981. The “spike” still left cocaine costing $136.93 a gram in September 2007, 13 percent cheaper in constant dollars than the average price for 1999. This was hardly the resounding victory Walters had declared.

The numbers in Walters’ Washington Times handouts were just that: numbers. No explanation, no methodology, no context. In fact, the underlying data came from the System To Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence (STRIDE), derived from undercover buys, wiretaps, and other law enforcement sources of information about the drug trade. The Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit research firm that contracts with the U.S. government, analyzed the data using the same methodology as the RAND researchers and produced the report that the Obama administration released. The STRIDE evidence showed a 26 percent spike in cocaine prices in the middle of 2007. Walters, who never disclosed his own methodology, had claimed the spike was 44 percent.

The newly released numbers and Walters’ data overlapped for 10 quarters. For three of the quarters, the new analysis showed the price of cocaine going in the direction opposite from what Walters’ numbers claimed. It’s one thing to quarrel over the size of a spike. It’s quite another to be wrong on the direction of a trend.

The Dollar Effect

It’s far from clear what caused the brief price hike in 2007. Walters unsurprisingly credited enforcement and interdiction efforts. But it’s unlikely the ONDCP and DEA really had the cocaine cartels in retreat. The more plausible explanation is that cocaine producers were targeting more lucrative markets. The rise of the euro and the concomitant decline of the dollar have made it less profitable to sell cocaine to Americans.

“The euro has replaced the dollar in the Western Hemisphere as the currency of choice among these traffickers, which is an extraordinary shift,” Karen Tandy, head of the DEA, told an antinarcotics conference in Spain in April 2007. “As cocaine use has declined in the U.S. dramatically, in the European market it has risen.”

Officials at the Spain conference said a kilogram of coke that would fetch $30,000 in the United States was worth $50,000 in Europe—and the dollar has fallen further against the euro since then. On April 1, 2007, a dollar was worth about 0.74 euro; a year later, it was worth only 0.63 euro; it’s now at about 0.7. Because of this price differential, it is theoretically profitable to smuggle cocaine out of the United States. Buried in its 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment, the Department of Justice cited the currency exchange rate as one possible explanation for decreased imports. The “declining value of the U.S. dollar provides a financial incentive for drug traffickers to sell cocaine in foreign markets where the wholesale price of cocaine is already much higher than in the United States,” the report said.

Size matters too. The euro is denominated in notes of 200 and 500, making transportation of large sums of money much easier, given that the biggest American note is worth only about 70 euros. When you’re moving hundreds of millions of dollars, that represents a real convenience. Donald Semesky, the DEA’s chief of financial operations, has noted that 90 percent of the €1.7 billion that was registered as having entered the United States in 2005 came through Latin America, “where drug cartels launder their European proceeds.” As the cocaine market has shifted, use along its new
trade routes has grown. A 2008 United Nations report notes increases in use not only in South and Central America but also in Africa, where seizures jumped tenfold from 2003 to 2006 and then doubled again between 2006 and 2007.

West African nations, which make Colombia and Mexico look like models of transparent governance, have become important stopping-off points for coke traffickers on the way to Europe. Out-of-work African youth make cheap foot soldiers, and drug runners with expensive equipment and weaponry have little to fear from airports that are barely electrified and cop cars with empty gas tanks. “Africa is under attack,” warned Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, in a 2008 Washington Post op-ed piece. “States that we seldom hear about, such as Guinea-Bissau and neighboring Guinea, are at risk of being captured by drug cartels in collusion with corrupt forces in government and the military.” From West Africa, the cocaine heads to Spain and Portugal. In 2006, according to the U.N., Spain’s level of coke use was equivalent to America’s for the first time ever.

From the drug cartels’ perspective, the beauty of shifting exports to Europe is that the resulting decline in shipments to the United States can indeed lead to higher prices here. While expanding their business elsewhere, the cartels are getting more money per unit of American product.

So when Walters claimed we were winning the war on cocaine, he was knowingly manipulating the truth. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Walters’ deceptions were just the latest in a long history of propaganda and misbegotten federal policies in which drug enforcement marginally affected the supply of a given substance, prompting drug warriors to declare victory as Americans kept consuming narcotics.

How the War on Pot Hooked the Country on Cocaine

“We’re making no excuses for drugs, hard, soft, or otherwise,” President Ronald Reagan declared on June 24, 1982. Reagan redoubled efforts at curbing drug imports, militarizing drug policy, and successfully pushing mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses. In 1980 the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report listed fewer than 100,000 arrests for heroin and cocaine, which were tabulated together. By 1989 that figure had jumped to more than 700,000.

But the first battle Reagan would fight in his war was against marijuana. That required laying siege to Northern California, a drug war battleground that until then had largely been ignored. The Campaign Against Marijuana Production began in the harvest season of 1983. U-2 spy planes and military helicopters flew over the Golden State looking for green crops. The DEA reported seizing 64,579 plants that year. Federal law enforcement officers marched in the streets chanting, “War on Drugs! War on Drugs!” The opposition printed bumper stickers: “U.S. Out of Humboldt County.”

The federal haul in Northern California was three times larger in 1984 than the year before. Nationally, pot plant seizures rose from about 2.5 million in 1982 to more than 7 million—an amount that rivals the government’s previous estimate of the entire domestic crop—in 1987. Reagan even began to go after “ditch weed,” a wild variety of cannabis, descended from hemp grown by American farmers for fiber, with so little THC (marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient) that it is useless for getting high. The first year the White House kept data for ditch weed eradication, it claimed to have uprooted about 9 million plants. That number was up to more than 120 million by 1989, and reached half a billion in 2001.

The 2004 RAND report reveals that these sustained efforts drove up the price of pot. The report also includes a startling, though often misunderstood, observation. “The marijuana price trends…are not highly correlated with trends in prices of other drugs over time,” it says. “While the price of powder, heroin, and, to a lesser extent, crack were falling during the 1980s, the average price of marijuana generally rose.” An eighth of an ounce of pot in 1981 was going for $25 in 2002 dollars. It stayed roughly the same in 1982. By 1986, the price in constant dollars was up to $53, and it hit a high of $62 in 1991, a 150 percent rise over 10 years.

Cocaine, meanwhile, become much more affordable. The drug cost nearly $600 a gram in 1982. As Reagan redirected resources toward battling pot, coke prices began to tumble. By 1989, it was down to $200 a gram, in 2002 dollars, cheaper in real terms than it had been during the last national coke binge a century earlier. At the same time, average purity levels nearly doubled.

Clearly, the price trends of marijuana and cocaine are highly correlated, but the correlation is a negative one. In the 1980s, marijuana price increases drove demand toward other drugs. The war on drugs, hard, soft, or otherwise, helped persuade pot smokers to put down the bong and pick up the crack pipe, the mirror, or the needle. Pot use plummeted under Reagan. In 1979 about half of America’s 12th graders told University of Michigan researchers they had smoked pot that year, the same proportion as five years before. This fraction fell throughout the ’80s, dwindling to one-fifth of the country’s high school seniors in 1992. But the use of other drugs either stayed the same or increased as people started looking for a different, cheaper high. Self-reported use of inhalants by 12th graders rose 75 percent, from 4 percent to 7 percent, between 1981 and 1987. Cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine use all went up during the decade.

The price of heroin dropped by one-third in real terms between 1981 and 1988. By 1996 it had dropped by two-thirds. The DEA didn’t start tracking crack prices until 1986, around the time the drug’s popularity took off; its price promptly fell by about half during the next five years. In rural areas, the price of meth fell by a quarter from the early ’80s to the middle of the decade.

The stated goal of U.S. drug policy is to lower demand by increasing price. Reagan’s drug war did precisely the opposite. The only exception was pot, the least harmful drug covered by the federal Controlled Substances Act.

When it comes to cleverness, the drug czar has nothing on the drug market, as the latest cocaine price data show. People like to get high, and they’ll find a way to do it. Chop down all the pot plants, and the dealer will still have blow. Push them both down, and some guy will cook up something crazy with gasoline and Sudafed.

If there’s one certainty about American drug use, it’s this: We’re always looking for a better way to feed our voracious appetite for getting stoned—for something cheaper, faster, or more powerful. Drug trends feed themselves as word spreads about the amazing new high that’s safe and nonaddictive, cheap and available. Then we discover otherwise—and go searching for the next great high. We often circle back to the original drug, forgetting why we quit it in the first place. Drug czars past and present can gin up whatever numbers they like, but they can never change that reality.

Ryan Grim (ryan@huffingtonpost.com) covers Congress for The Huffington Post. He is the author of This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley).

Craig Ferguson 7/8/9A Late Late Show WHITE LINES

Proof that cocaine does NOT rot the brain.

Actually, let's go one better - read this information from the Transnational Institute:

# In 1995 the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) announced in a press release the publication of the results of the largest global study on cocaine use ever undertaken. The most important recommendation holds that: "WHO/PSA should investigate the therapeutic benefits of coca leaf" and a broader statement on researching the impact on health at individual and population levels of different legislation and drug control measures. However, a decision in the World Health Assembly banned the publication of the study. The US representative threatened that "if WHO activities relating to drugs failed to reinforce proven drug control approaches, funds for the relevant programmes should be curtailed". This led to the decision to discontinue publication. In the short article WHO: 'Six Horsemen ride out' there is more information on this case.
A part of the study has been recuperated and is now available on the TNI's Drugs & Democracy website. We feel this information is valid, important and needs to be available in the public domain:
# The Cocaine Project Briefing Kit, March 3, 1995 [PDF]
# The Natural History of Cocaine Abuse: A case study endeavour Programe on Substance Abuse - World Health Organisation, September 1995 [PDF] (Press releases)
# Fragment from the minutes of World Health Assembly Committee B meeting where the formerly mentioned threats were made. [PDF]

The Vancouver Sun reported on the non-release of the report:

The report notes, for instance, that health problems from "the use of legal substances, particularly alcohol and tobacco, are greater than health problems from cocaine use."

If that weren't enough, it states that "few experts describe cocaine as invariably harmful to health," and that problems "are mainly limited to high-dosage users." Indeed, "occasional cocaine use does not typically lead to severe or even minor physical or social problems . . . a minority of people start using cocaine or related products, use casually for a short or long period, and suffer little or no negative consequences, even after years of use."

To top it off, the report states that the "use of coca leaves . . . has positive therapeutic, sacred and social functions for indigenous Andean populations" -- a reference to South American aboriginals who have used coca leaves for thousands of years.

There is NO LOGICAL EXPLANATION for the illegality of cocaine, other than to create a black market and jack up the price beyond any reasonable means, and making it against the law to demonize those that do indulge. Unless you're Tony Montana, you simply won't experience the detrimental effects of unlimited cocaine usage.

Now, if you want to see the effects of pharmaceuticals upon someone...unless you've been in a well for the last couple of weeks, Michael Jackson was a victim of pharmaceutical abuse...and it was prescribed by DOCTORS. Of course, if you read this posting at Xymphora, this may have been the design of the pharmaceuticals, to weaken, destabilize and eventually, kill, its mark.

Of course, thanks goes to Unknown News for the link that started this whole brouhaha.

The Marijuana Trick - Doug Yurchey (2005); Biden's Daughter Recorded Enjoying Cocaine

Here's the SICKEST part of what you will read below: we could have had all of what we have right now without poisoning the planet, our ecosystem and ourselves, BUT THE CORPORATIONS WOULDN'T HAVE MADE THE PROFITS THEY'VE STOLEN FROM US.

Read on...

The Marijuana Trick
Doug Yurchey (2005)
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=3774

And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land. [Ezekiel 34/29]

Where did the word 'marijuana' come from? In the mid 1930s, the M-word was created to tarnish the good image and phenomenal history of the hemp plant...as you will read. The facts cited here, with references, are generally verifiable in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which was printed on hemp paper for 150 years:

* All schoolbooks were made from hemp or flax paper until the 1880s; Hemp Paper Reconsidered, Jack Frazier, 1974.

* It was LEGAL TO PAY TAXES WITH HEMP in America from 1631 until the early 1800s; LA Times, Aug. 12, 1981.

* REFUSING TO GROW HEMP in America during the 17th and 18th Centuries WAS AGAINST THE LAW! You could be jailed in Virginia for refusing to grow hemp from 1763 to 1769; Hemp in Colonial Virginia, G. M. Herdon.

* George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers GREW HEMP; Washington and Jefferson Diaries. Jefferson smuggled hemp seeds from China to France then to America.

* Benjamin Franklin owned one of the first paper mills in America and it processed hemp. Also, the War of 1812 was fought over hemp. Napoleon wanted to cut off Moscow's export to England; Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Herer.

* For thousands of years, 90% of all ships' sails and rope were made from hemp. The word 'canvas' is Dutch for hemp; Webster's New World Dictionary.

* 80% of all textiles, fabrics, clothes, linen, drapes, bed sheets, etc. were made from hemp until the 1820s with the introduction of the cotton gin.

* The first Bibles, maps, charts, Betsy Ross's flag, the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were made from hemp; U.S. Government Archives.

* The first crop grown in many states was hemp. 1850 was a peak year for Kentucky producing 40,000 tons. Hemp was the largest cash crop until the 20th Century; State Archives.

* Oldest known records of hemp farming go back 5000 years in China, although hemp industrialization probably goes back to ancient Egypt.

* Rembrandts, Gainsborough뭩, Van Gogh뭩 as well as most early canvas paintings were principally painted on hemp linen.

* In 1916, the U.S. Government predicted that by the 1940s all paper would come from hemp and that no more trees need to be cut down. Government studies report that 1 acre of hemp equals 4.1 acres of trees. Plans were in the works to implement such programs; Department of Agriculture

* Quality paints and varnishes were made from hemp seed oil until 1937. 58,000 tons of hemp seeds were used in America for paint products in 1935; Sherman Williams Paint Co. testimony before Congress against the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act.

* Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, 'grown from the soil,' had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel; Popular Mechanics, 1941.

* Hemp called 'Billion Dollar Crop.' It was the first time a cash crop had a business potential to exceed a billion dollars; Popular Mechanics, Feb., 1938.

* Mechanical Engineering Magazine (Feb. 1938) published an article entitled 'The Most Profitable and Desirable Crop that Can be Grown.' It stated that if hemp was cultivated using 20th Century technology, it would be the single largest agricultural crop in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

The following information comes directly from the United States Department of Agriculture's 1942 14-minute film encouraging and instructing 'patriotic American farmers' to grow 350,000 acres of hemp each year for the war effort:

'...(When) Grecian temples were new, hemp was already old in the service of mankind. For thousands of years, even then, this plant had been grown for cordage and cloth in China and elsewhere in the East. For centuries prior to about 1850, all the ships that sailed the western seas were rigged with hempen rope and sails. For the sailor, no less than the hangman, hemp was indispensable...

...Now with Philippine and East Indian sources of hemp in the hands of the Japanese...American hemp must meet the needs of our Army and Navy as well as of our industries...

...the Navy's rapidly dwindling reserves. When that is gone, American hemp will go on duty again; hemp for mooring ships; hemp for tow lines; hemp for tackle and gear; hemp for countless naval uses both on ship and shore. Just as in the days when Old Ironsides sailed the seas victorious with her hempen shrouds and hempen sails. Hemp for victory!'

Certified proof from the Library of Congress; found by the research of Jack Herer, refuting claims of other government agencies that the 1942 USDA film 'Hemp for Victory' did not exist.

Hemp cultivation and production do not harm the environment. The USDA Bulletin #404 concluded that hemp produces 4 times as much pulp as wood with at least 4 to 7 times less pollution.

From Popular Mechanics, Feb. 1938:
'It has a short growing season...It can be grown in any state...The long roots penetrate and break the soil to leave it in perfect condition for the next year's crop. The dense shock of leaves, 8 to 12 feet above the ground, chokes out weeds.

...hemp, this new crop can add immeasurably to American agriculture and industry.'

In the 1930s, innovations in farm machinery would have caused an industrial revolution when applied to hemp. This single resource could have created millions of new jobs generating thousands of quality products. Hemp, if not made illegal, would have brought America out of the Great Depression.

William Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane) and the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division of Kimberly Clark owned vast acreage of timberlands. The Hearst Company supplied most paper products. Patty Hearst's grandfather, a destroyer of nature for his own personal profit, stood to lose billions because of hemp.

In 1937, Dupont patented the processes to make plastics from oil and coal. Dupont's Annual Report urged stockholders to invest in its new petrochemical division. Synthetics such as plastics, cellophane, celluloid, methanol, nylon, rayon, Dacron, etc., could now be made from oil. Natural hemp industrialization would have ruined over 80% of Dupont's business.


THE TRICKS

Andrew Mellon became Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury and Dupont's primary investor. He appointed his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

Secret meetings were held by these financial tycoons. Hemp was declared dangerous and a threat to their billion dollar enterprises. For their dynasties to remain intact, hemp had to go. These men took an obscure Mexican slang word: 'marihuana' and pushed it into the consciousness of America.


MEDIA MANIPULATION

A media blitz of 'yellow journalism' raged in the late 1920s and 1930s. Hearst's newspapers ran stories emphasizing the horrors of marihuana. The menace of marihuana made headlines. Readers learned that it was responsible for everything from car accidents to loose morality.

Films like 'Reefer Madness' (1936), 'Marihuana: Assassin of Youth' (1935) and 'Marihuana: The Devil's Weed' (1936) were propaganda designed by these industrialists to create an enemy. Their purpose was to gain public support so that anti-marihuana laws could be passed.

Examine the following quotes from 'The Burning Question' aka REEFER
MADNESS:
*a violent narcotic.
*acts of shocking violence.
*incurable insanity.
*soul-destroying effects.
*under the influence of the drug he killed his entire family with an axe.
*more vicious, more deadly even than these soul-destroying drugs (heroin, cocaine) is the menace of marihuana!

Reefer Madness did not end with the usual 'the end.' The film concluded with these words plastered on the screen: TELL YOUR CHILDREN.

In the 1930s, people were very naive; even to the point of ignorance. The masses were like sheep waiting to be led by the few in power. They did not challenge authority. If the news was in print or on the radio, they believed it had to be true. They told their children and their children grew up to be the parents of the baby-boomers.

On April 14, 1937, the Prohibitive Marihuana Tax Law or the bill that outlawed hemp was directly brought to the House Ways and Means Committee. This committee is the only one that can introduce a bill to the House floor without it being debated by other committees. The Chairman of the Ways and Means, Robert Doughton, was a Dupont supporter. He insured that the bill would pass Congress.

Dr. James Woodward, a physician and attorney, testified too late on behalf of the American Medical Association. He told the committee that the reason the AMA had not denounced the Marihuana Tax Law sooner was that the Association had just discovered that marihuana was/is hemp.

Few people, at the time, realized that the deadly menace they had been reading about on Hearst's front pages was in fact passive hemp. The AMA understood hemp to be a MEDICINE found in numerous healing products sold over the last hundred years.

In September of 1937, hemp became illegal. The most useful crop known became a drug and our planet has been suffering ever since.

Congress banned hemp because it was said to be the most violence-causing drug known. Anslinger, head of the Drug Commission for 31 years, promoted the idea that marihuana made users act extremely violent. In the 1950s, under the Communist threat of McCarthyism, Anslinger now said the exact opposite. Marijuana will pacify you so much that soldiers would not want to fight.

Today, our planet is in desperate trouble. Earth is suffocating as large tracts of rain forests disappear. Pollution, poisons and chemicals are killing people. These great problems could be reversed if we industrialized hemp. Natural biomass could provide all of the planet's energy needs that are currently supplied by fossil fuels. We have consumed 80% of our oil and gas reserves. We need a renewable resource. Hemp could be the solution to soaring gas prices.


THE WONDER PLANT

Hemp has a higher quality fiber than wood fiber. Far fewer caustic chemicals are required to make paper from hemp than from trees. Hemp paper does not turn yellow and is very durable. The plant grows quickly to maturity in a season where trees take a lifetime.

ALL PLASTIC PRODUCTS SHOULD BE MADE FROM HEMP SEED OIL. Hempen plastics are biodegradable! Over time, they would break down and not harm the environment. Oil-based plastics, the ones we are very familiar with, help ruin nature; they do not break down and will do great harm in the future. The process to produce the vast array of natural (hempen) plastics will not ruin the rivers as Dupont and other petrochemical companies have done. Ecology does not fit in with the plans of the Oil Industry and the political machine. Hemp products are safe and natural.

MEDICINES SHOULD BE MADE FROM HEMP. We should go back to the days when the AMA supported hemp cures. 'Medical Marijuana' is given out legally to only a handful of people while the rest of us are forced into a system that relies on chemicals. Hemp is only healthy for the human body.

WORLD HUNGER COULD END. A large variety of food products can be generated from hemp. The seeds contain one of the highest sources of protein in nature. ALSO: They have two essential fatty acids that clean your body of cholesterol. These essential fatty acids are not found anywhere else in nature! Consuming hemp seeds is the best thing you could do for your body. Eat uncooked hemp seeds.

CLOTHES SHOULD BE MADE FROM HEMP. Hemp clothing is extremely strong and durable over time. You could hand clothing, made from hemp, down to your grandchildren. Today, there are American companies that make hemp clothing; usually 50% hemp. Hemp fabrics should be everywhere. Instead, they are almost underground. Superior hemp products are not allowed to advertise on fascist television. Kentucky, once the top hemp producing state, made it ILLEGAL TO WEAR hemp clothing! Can you imagine being thrown into jail for wearing quality jeans?

The world is crazy...but that does not mean you have to join the insanity. Get together. Spread the news. Tell people, and that includes your children, the truth. Use hemp products. Eliminate the word 'marijuana.' Realize the history that created it. Make it politically incorrect to say or print the M-word. Fight against the propaganda (designed to favor the agenda of the super rich) and the bullshit. Hemp must be utilized in the future. We need a clean energy source to save our planet. INDUSTRIALIZE HEMP!

The liquor, tobacco and oil companies fund more than a million dollars a day to Partnership for a Drug-Free America and other similar agencies. We have all seen their commercials. Now, their motto is: 'It's more dangerous than we thought.' Lies from the powerful corporations, that began with Hearst, are still alive and well today.

The brainwashing continues. Now, the commercials say: If you buy a joint, you contribute to murders and gang wars. The latest anti-hemp commercials say: If you buy a joint...you are promoting TERRORISM! The new enemy (terrorism) has paved the road to brainwash you any way THEY see fit.

There is only one enemy; the friendly people you pay your taxes to; the war-makers and nature destroyers. With your funding, they are killing the world right in front of your eyes. HALF A MILLION DEATHS EACH YEAR ARE CAUSED BY TOBACCO. HALF A MILLION DEATHS EACH YEAR ARE CAUSED BY ALCOHOL.

Ingesting THC, hemp's active agent, has a positive effect; relieving asthma and glaucoma. A joint tends to alleviate the nausea caused by chemotherapy. You are able to eat on hemp. This is a healthy state of being.

The hemp plant is an ALIEN plant. There is physical evidence that hemp is not like any other plant on this planet. One could conclude that it was brought here for the benefit of humanity. Hemp is the ONLY plant where the males appear one way and the females appear very different, physically! No one ever speaks of males and females in regard to the plant kingdom because plants do not show their sexes; except for hemp. To determine what sex a certain, normal, Earthly plant is: You have to look internally, at its DNA. A male blade of grass (physically) looks exactly like a female blade of grass. The hemp plant has an intense sexuality.


HEMP IS ILLEGAL BECAUSE BILLIONAIRES WANT TO REMAIN BILLIONAIRES!

Update: Vice President Joseph Biden's daughter Ashley was recorded by hidden camera cutting up and then snorting a line of cocaine (video was removed from YouTube under the guise of a TOS violation - will post when available). Here is a link to a news story.

The New York Post is running with the story.

RadarOnline has the full scoop.

I am not posting this for its sensationalist value; rather, this should be a wake-up call to all Americans that the so-called War On Drugs is in truth, a War On Americans' Right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. You mean, Joe Biden's been on the anti-drug kick for THIRTY YEARS, and he couldn't convince his own daughter?

Get out of our lives, and instead, let's worry about the things that matter - bringing the United States of America back to the top!

Vice President Joseph Biden...this is decision time for you and our President - end the erosion of America...end the Drug War, and cease the profits of those who would turn America into a war zone; instead, let's fill the jails with the people who do NOT belong in society...the violent; the the scumbags; in other words, the evil among us.

Now...some will say, "Do you really think that people doing drugs is okay?"

Here's my answer: that is contingent on two things:

1. You can afford them;
2. You can handle them.

Answer 1 is straightforward; as long as you don't have to steal to obtain funds for them...I don't have a problem.

Answer 2 is also pretty straightforward...you all remember the idiot who went on a crack binge, and then took a #4 train straight from Woodlawn to 14th Street, almost killing everyone on it? You, sir, don't get to do anything that could possibly endanger others. Air traffic controllers? Nope. Taxi drivers? Not.

I'd even hazard a guess that the guys on Wall Street should give it up, as well...hasn't done you guys so good in the last couple of decades, has it?

In short...think about the future (even if you are of the belief that the world is ending on or about December 21, 2012!); if your occupation requires that you are responsible for the lives of others, then you should really think twice about it - be RESPONSIBLE.

Let's make America #1 again.

Obama smear campaign moves to press club

Anne Davies in Washington
June 18, 2008

THE Washington media are about to be consumed by a new debate: how much attention they should give scandalous claims about Barack Obama when the man making them appears at the National Press Club today.

Larry Sinclair, from Minnesota, became famous - or infamous - when he posted a YouTube video last year alleging he and Senator Obama used cocaine together and participated in homosexual acts in 1999.

According to Mr Sinclair, the liaison occurred in the back of a limo while the presumptive Democratic nominee was in the Illinois Senate, but beyond that, Mr Sinclair has been vague about dates and locations.

There is no proof of the allegations and when Mr Sinclair offered to take a polygraph test last year, he failed it. It's also instructive that none of Senator Obama's opponents has embraced his claims.

But now Mr Sinclair has booked a conference room at the National Press Club, the premier venue for press conferences in Washington, and he plans to air the allegations again.

The mainstream media are unsure about how to treat his claims and the move to host him at the National Press Club has outraged liberal websites, which have moved well beyond reportage to activism. Firedoglake.com, edited by Jane Hamsher, has assembled an online petition signed by nearly 11,500 people and has delivered it to the club, urging it to check the facts of Mr Sinclair's story before giving him the stage.

- Former vice-president Al Gore offered a vigorous endorsement of Senator Obama on Monday and urged Democrats to keep in mind the consequences of not taking the general election with grave seriousness.

The two strode onto the stage arm in arm to thundering applause from a crowd of nearly 20,000 people in Detroit. As Mr Gore ticked through a long list of challenges facing the nation, he hailed Obama as "clearly the candidate best able to solve these problems and bring change to America".

with The New York Times

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/06/17/1213468422063.html

First of all...who CARES what Albert "Global Warming will make me RICH!" Gore says about ANYTHING? He not even a good environmentalist! The Monkey King has a greener house than Gore! Speaks to his real motives, you might say...

As to Larry Sinclair's claims...SO GODDAMN WHAT?!?

"Whoa...wait a minute...you mean that you don't care about a Presidential candidate doing DRUGS?!?"

Apparently, it didn't make any bloody difference when GEORGE WALKER BUSH was accused of doing COCAINE...at least, not to the lapdog press.

Jim Hatfield wrote a book called Fortunate Son, detailing the many indiscretions and illicit activities of the Monkey King. Taken from Wikipedia: "When the media stumbled upon a story regarding George W. Bush's 1972 cocaine possession arrest, Rove had to find a way to kill the story. He did so by destroying the messenger."

Link to Horns and Halos - Rove Revelation (WiMP) (QuickTime)

Wow...I just happened to find this old pic:



This was to become my subject for a book on George Walker Bush's admitting to foreknowledge of the events of September 11th, 2001. It was to be called Body Language: George Walker Bush Reveals Complicity in 9/11 or something like that...I'm sure by now that someone has beaten me to it, but at any rate...HE'S STANDING ON THE BLOODY DEDICATION RUG?!?

Where did this idiot grow up? In a toilet?!?

But...look at his feet.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell - Don't B*llsh!t Me!

Anyone ever hear of the term Cherry Marines?

If not, have you knowledge of Kay Griggs?

Well, let me be the one to enlighten you, dear readers...

This posting was prompted by a story I heard on Bloomberg News Radio this morning (I'm weaning myself from 1010WINS), in regards to scumbaggery befalling a decorated officer - Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy Before Appeals Court - an Air Force nurse named Margaret Witt - let me present to you an excerpt from the article:

"Margaret Witt's ACLU lawyer told a federal appeals court panel in Seattle that child molesters in the armed forces are treated more leniently than homosexuals because molesters don't face mandatory discharge.

Witt contends the policy-driven discharge violated her right to be free from governmental intrusion in her private life, and that her lawsuit against the Air Force should be reinstated.

"Don't ask, don't tell" prohibits the military from asking about the sexual orientation of service members but requires discharge of those who acknowledge being gay or engage in homosexual activity.

Witt, 42, spent more than 18 years building a stellar reputation as a McChord Air Force Base nurse who saved the lives of soldiers on medical-evacuation missions.

Twice decorated by President Bush, her career was on the rise until an anonymous tipster told the Air Force in 2004 that Witt, a major, was in a long-term relationship with a civilian woman.

Witt sued to block to discharge but lost the first round in July 2006 when U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton of Tacoma sided with the government.

Leighton rejected the argument that a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating anti-sodomy laws in Texas meant "don't ask, don't tell" is unconstitutional, too.

Final notice of Witt's honorable discharge came three weeks ago, said her pro bono lawyer, Jim Lobsenz. But the fate of "don't ask, don't tell" is hanging in the balance."

What a crapfest, eh? All of those commendations, and apparently, they mean bupkis when it comes for one to have their pension, after dedicating nearly twenty years of service to people I wouldn't trust to lead me out of the open end of a paper bag.

So...I mentioned two things at the beginning - let's get back to them:

Cherry Marines & Kay Griggs:


There are 13 parts to this video...I believe that you can also see it at her website.

Here's another: Kay Griggs Talks

Oh...and speaking of crap...


But the biggest crapfest of all...is that Governer Jeb Bush supposedly packed up all records pertaining to Huffman Aviation and flew them out of Florida shortly after all flights were ordered cancelled by the TSA? Yes...I mean RIGHT AFTER SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001.

Or was there more on those planes than records? There have been reports that the planes were also used to ferry in COCAINE.

This is what you call "Appeasing the Enemy"!


McCain...how about America's interests? Where are you running for office, anyway?

Let's end this posting with this quote: "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information." -- US official quoted in Carl Cameron's Fox News report on the Israeli spy ring and its connections to the events of September 11th, 2001.