Posts Tagged ‘California’
The Cannabis Campaign In 2011
I believe that we can make real progress this year towards ending the prohibition of cannabis.
What we have to do, each and every one of us, individually, is take responsibility.
We have to stop complaining and start campaigning.
However just our cause, however unjust our opposition, no one is going to give us the right to cannabis. We are going to have to take it. Take it back from those who took it away from us.
Many of us can point to years and years of fighting for the cause but it is never enough! We have to keep on. We have to welcome new campaigners and encourage them, not take the view that we’ve seen it all before, done it ourselves and why aren’t we getting the credit? We have to welcome our fellow citizens to the war against prohibition, support them, bolster their confidence, build them up, not knock them down.
If the millions of people in Britain who use cannabis were to join together and be counted, we could make change happen! I don’t know whether there are two million of us or ten million. That’s how widely the estimates vary. The Home Office used to say six millon use cannabis regularly. I don’t know. What I do know is that it is an outrage to democracy and justice that we are denied legal and properly regulated access to cannabis, whether we use it for medicine, relaxation or spiritual fulfilment.
We don’t all have to be campaigners but we do all have to be counted. If we want change, we have to be prepared, at least, to sign petitions, to write the occasional letter, to put our heads above the parapet. It’s so easy nowadays. It can all be done online in the blink of an eye but more of us need to do it and keep doing it until politicians understand that they can bully us into silence no longer.
One of the problems of the online world, of Facebook, the forums and blogs, is that we’re just preaching to the converted all the time. We may feel that we’re getting our message across but it’s to the same people over and over again. When you see the disgusting response that Bob Ainsworth had to his brave initiative just before Christmas, when you see James Brokenshire smugly trotting out his prohibitionist agenda, when you see Cameron and his poodle backtracking on all their enlightened and liberal ideas, then you realise that the forces of darkness are set against us. The war on drugs, which Brokenshire fights so enthusiastically, is another Vietnam. It can never be won because it is, in fact, a war on democracy but there will be many casualties along the way. Brokenshire counts the high level of adulteration of drugs on the street as a measure of success. This is the sort of thinking that we are up against. It is perverted. It is evil. It denies truth and science and justice.
It denies people in constant pain and suffering access to the medicine that they need. Even if a doctor has prescribed cannabis, ignorant, professional political oiks who have never done a day’s real work in in their lives, think they know best. Instead they force people towards expensive pharmaceutical products with horrendous side effects but huge profits for their co-conspirators in the corrupt world of Big Pharma and its self-important regulators. As was seen so clearly in America in the last century, prohibition is fundamentally immoral and self-defeating yet our cowardly politicians hide behind it, preferring inaction, oppression and lies to the truth.
So I have asked myself, what can we do to break this stranglehold that politicians have on the truth? How can we counter the crass and appalling propaganda that the Daily Mail puts out? Why does the media love the story of Debra Bell, the mother who blames cannabis for her delinquent and dishonest son? Why is the truth about cannabis so rarely told? Where is the voice of the millions who know the truth?
I return to the divisions there are within our cause. Just as in California, where the growers sabotaged Proposition 19, so we have our own subversive and destructive elements. We have a breakaway group here, an independent campaigner there. We have medicinal users who are eloquent and persuasive on their own account but will not work with others. We have hugely courageous individuals who have campaigned and put their freedom on the line but will not reconcile themselves to co-operation. We have to cut through this. We have to unite, to generate a momentum that means we cannot be ignored.
That is why, just before Christmas, I decided to join the Legalise Cannabis Alliance. I was a member of the original Legalise Cannabis Campaign and I saw how the LCA made strenuous efforts, particularly around the 2005 general election. I believe it was right and effective to put forward our views on the political stage. This is what we must do again.
The LCA is to re-register as a political party and, in due course, I hope to stand as a parliamentary candidate. Realistically, I don’t expect to be elected but I do expect to make our voice heard. I expect our opinions and our views to be respected and given proper consideration. When the Daily Mail or the BBC turns to Debra Bell for comment, I expect them to turn to us as well. When Mrs Bell is on the TV sofa, I want to be alongside her. I want the opportunity to speak the truth in the face of propaganda. If they want to put up eminent professors and doctors as well then I encourage it. Science and independent reason is on our side. The intellectual and scientific debate has been won many times over. Now we must win the political battle and the truth is our strongest weapon. All we have to do is shine the light on it so that the scare stories, the hysteria and the propaganda shrink back into the shadows.
We will be a single issue party with a commitment to de-register once we have achieved our aims. I urge you all to join the LCA. I’m going to do everything I can to make it easier to join. Possibly we need to make it cheaper. Certainly we need to do everything we can to encourage as many people as possible to stand up and be counted. We need to be able to accept card payments, operate direct debits. We need as many as possible to join whether or not they use cannabis. We need to reform the law, regulate supply and distribution and realise the huge benefits as a medicine, as a gentle pleasure and as a new source of billions in tax revenue. That’s the way forward. Reform, regulate and realise.
One of the most repulsive images I saw last year was the fat, conceited Simon Heffer chortling into his glass of wine and saying that we need to “get nasty” in the war on drugs. Well I’ve got news for the pompous, hypocritical boozer and for James Brokenshire and his cronies, nobody’s going to be getting nasty from this side. We’re just going to tell the truth. And we’re going to keep on telling the truth until it drowns out their lies. We’re going to tell the truth again and again and again until we get the right to our drug of choice, to the plant that creates peace not violence, to the plant that heals that doesn’t kill, to the plant that we have a right to use and enjoy as we please.
BBC Blanks Proposition 19
According to the Home Office there are six million regular users of cannabis in the UK. I have seen just one report on the BBC news about the Proposition 19 vote in California on 2nd November which promises legalisation.
Compare this with the recent wall to wall coverage of the Pope’s visit. How many regular supporters of the Catholic Church are there in Britain? Just 887,000.
This is an appalling failure by the BBC and a dereliction of its duty to provide fair and balanced coverage. Please make a complaint. It will take you less than five minutes and it will make a difference if enough of you take the time.
Here is a direct link to the BBC complaints website. Please do it now!
Nineteen Nervous Breakdown
I am worried about the neck and neck race in California. The polls are getting tighter and tighter. If Proposition 19 fails it will be a disaster for the cannabis campaign. Certainly in Britain, no politician will want to know. They will say if you can’t get California to vote for it, there are no votes in it at all.
It could knock us back at least five years.
That’s why it’s essential that we win. Whatever it takes. The polls say it depends on turnout by young voters so please, get the lazy stoners off their backsides and down to the polling booth.
Now is the time to get serious and take responsibility. Don’t let us down now!
GO CALIFORNIA! We’re depending on you!
The Truth About Sativex
Sativex is super strong, concentrated cannabis. Nothing more, nothing less.
GW Pharmaceuticals would have you believe that it’s a “pharmaceutical” product because according to its research that’s what patients prefer. As the GW spokesman puts it, “It’s a pharmaceutical solution, formulated with the ability to deliver a precise dose and with stringent standards of quality, safety and efficacy”.
In fact, what GW does is grow high quality cannabis under pretty much the same conditions as most illegal growers. It uses clonal propagation to ensure consistent levels of cannabinoids. Lighting and hydroponic nutrition is computer controlled with automatic ventilation. It really is no different from the most sophisticated and efficent illegal cannabis farms. It’s a recognised and proven technology now also used by Bedrocan in Holland, the Dutch government’s exclusive medicinal cannabis grower and Gropech in California which is building a new 60,000 sq ft facility in Oakland for a crop worth $50 million per year.
The difference between these crops from legal and illegal growers is insignificant. It’s similar to buying your tomatoes from the supermarket or the farm shop.
GW takes its high quality cannabis, chops it up and makes a tincture by heating it under pressure with CO2 and then adding ethanol to precipitate an oil. Then, with the addition of a little peppermint oil to mask the taste and some preservative, the filtered liquid is packaged into tiny little aerosol bottles. Each spray delivers 2.7mg of THC and 2.5mg of CBD. What GW doesn’t tell you that it also contains all the other 100+ cannabinoids found in the plant, each of which has its own mechanism of action and effect. It also contains flavonoids, terpines and other compounds. Everything that is found in the plant.
I applaud GW Pharmaceuticals for bringing the enormous benefits of cannabinoid therapy into the 21st century. It’s nothing new though. The medicinal value of the plant has been known and widely used for thousands of years. Only in the last century has it been demonised by lies and propaganda. It would be a mistake though to think that Sativex is anything different from the plant itself. It’s just been wrapped up in a marketing and physical package which has enabled stupid and cowardly politicians to accept it.
In fact, Sativex remains just as illegal in Britain as herbal cannabis. Even though it has received MHRA approval for use in the treatment of MS spasticity and may be prescribed by a doctor, it remains a schedule 1 drug under the Misuse Of Drugs Act. The Home Office has indicated that it intends to amend the law but has not yet done so. This means that any pharmacist who dispenses Sativex at present is guilty of exactly the same criminal offence as any street dealer in weed or hash.
The Home Office will, of course, turn a blind eye to this but not to medicinal herbal cannabis even though, in every sense, it is identical to Sativex (except that Sativex also contains alcohol and peppermint oil). The stark idiocy of British law is revealed.
Never before has there been a better example of the how the law is an ass and so are the spineless politicians who support it.
“Cannabis Should Be Sold In Shops Alongside Beer And Cigarettes, Doctors’ Journal Says” – The Daily Telegraph, 11th October 2010
Yes, this is The Daily Telegraph here. Yes, this concerns an article published in the BMJ here.
There are distinct signs of sanity on the horizon. Is it money driving this new reality because we waste £19 billion per annum on the “war on drugs”? Or is it that Proposition 19 in California and the clash between UK and European law over medicinal cannabis is revealing the absurdity of prohibition?
Cannabis should be sold in shops alongside beer and cigarettes, doctors’ journal says
An editorial in the British Medical Journal suggested that the sale of cannabis should be licensed like alcohol because banning it had not worked.
Banning cannabis had increased drug-related violence because enforcement made “the illicit market a richer prize for criminal groups to fight over”.
An 18-fold increase in the anti-drugs budget in the US to $18billion between 1981 and 2002 had failed to stem the market for the drug.
In fact cannabis related drugs arrests in the US increased from 350,000 in 1990 to more than 800,000 a year by 2006, with seizures quintupling to 1.1million kilogrammes.
The editorial, written by Professor Robin Room of Melbourne University, said: “In some places, state controlled instruments – such as licensing regimes, inspectors, and sales outlets run by the Government – are still in place for alcohol and these could be extended to cover cannabis.”
Prof Room suggested that state-run off licences from Canada and some Nordic countries could provide “workable and well controlled retail outlets for cannabis”.
Prof Room suggested the current ban on cannabis could come to alcohol prohibition, which was adopted by 11 countries between 1914 and 1920.
Eventually it was replaced with “restrictive regulatory regimes, which restrained alcohol consumption and problems related to alcohol until these constraints were eroded by the neo-liberal free market ideologies of recent decades”.
The editorial concluded: “The challenge for researchers and policy analysts now is to flesh out the details of effective regulatory regimes, as was done at the brink of repeal of US alcohol prohibition.”
Campaigners criticised the editorial. Mary Brett, a retired biology teacher, said: “The whole truth about the damaging effects of cannabis, especially to our children with their still-developing brains, has never been properly publicised.
“The message received by children were it to be legalised would be, ‘It can’t be too bad or the Government wouldn’t have done this’.
“I know – I taught biology to teenage boys for 30 years. So usage will inevitably go up – it always does when laws are relaxed.
“Why add to the misery caused by our existing two legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco?”
Earlier this year, Fiona Godlee, an editor of the Journal, which is run by the British Medical Association, endorsed an article by Steve Rolles, head of research at Transform, the drugs foundation, which called for an end to the war on drugs and its replacement by a legal system of regulation.
Dr Godlee said: “Rolles calls on us to envisage an alternative to the hopelessly failed war on drugs. He says, and I agree, that we must regulate drug use, not criminalise it.”
Cannabis Is Medicine
It seems to be coming of age. This is the first ever TV commercial for medicinal cannabis. This ad first ran on FOX 40 in Sacramento, California in August. Times are changing. The truth will out!