Filed under: Hemp&Law, hemp in general | Tags: Boston, cannabis, Dea, drug, ganja, hashish, hemp, marijuana, Massachusetts, pot, skunk, war on drug, weed
Boston, MA — Backers of a pro-marijuana ballot initiative charged yesterday that 11 district attorneys from Massachusetts violated campaign-finance laws and twisted the truth about the question.
Whitney Taylor, of the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy, said the DAs raised and spent money to oppose the question before forming their Coalition to Save Our Streets. Campaign-finance laws require groups to form a committee before raising and spending money.
Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone brushed aside the group’s criticism, calling it a “ploy” to distract attention from critics of the ballot question.
Leone attended a rally on the steps of the State House yesterday with other district attorneys, police, clergy and community organizers to call for the measure’s defeat.
“I’m not sure what the proponents of this question were smoking when they brought this to our state,” said the Rev. Jeffrey Brown. “We don’t need more weed.”
The question would make possession of an ounce or less of marijuana a civil rather than criminal offense, punishable by a $100 fine.
Opponents say such a change in law would essentially normalize the use of marijuana, while supporters say it would reduce a burden on the criminal-justice system by sparing those found with small amounts from facing a criminal record and jail.
Taylor’s group has filed complaints with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance and the attorney general’s office, and against the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association and the public-relations firm hired to handle opposition to the question.
“This was an attempt to keep their organization as covert as they could for as long a possible,” Taylor said. The group also named Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett and Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz individually.
Taylor said state records show the district attorneys began raising money as early as July 18, but didn’t file a statement of organization with the state until Sept. 5.
An official from the Office of Campaign and Political Finance said the Coalition to Save Our Streets was originally formed as a political action committee that the district attorneys used to oppose Question 2. They changed their status to a ballot question committee on Sept. 5, after being informed that they needed to make the switch.
Taylor’s group has raised far greater sums than the district attorneys’ group, according to campaign finance reports.
The district attorneys raised just $27,670, virtually all of it from their own campaign accounts, while Taylor’s group has raised nearly $650,000.
The vast majority of the money raised by Taylor’s group came from outside Massachusetts, including a $400,000 donation from billionaire financier and liberal activist George Soros and $180,000 from the Washington D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project.
Taylor also faulted the district attorneys for using their state Web site to urge voters to oppose the question, and for misrepresenting the initiative.
In a statement on the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association Web site, the district attorneys say if the question is approved “any person may carry and use marijuana at any time.”
Taylor said if the question passed, possession of marijuana would still be illegal and anyone carrying or using marijuana would face a $100 fine.
Leone called Taylor’s accusations “a weak ploy to try to derail the public’s attention” about the negative fallout if the question failed. He said district attorneys are free to use money from their campaign accounts to support or oppose ballot questions.
At the rally, speakers said easing penalties would threaten recent positive trends in marijuana use among teens. They also said there’s a link between marijuana use and crime, car accidents and workplace safety.
“The same people dealing drugs now will be dealing drugs in the future, except they will have fewer obstacles,” said Suffolk District Attorney Dan Conley. “Why would we put another monkey on society’s back?”
The district attorneys also said that existing law is fair.
Massachusetts law requires first-time drug offenders be placed on probation and that, at the successful conclusion of probation, “the case shall be dismissed and the record shall be sealed.”
If the question is approved, Massachusetts would become the 13th state to lift or ease criminal penalties on marijuana possession.
Source: Providence Journal
Filed under: Hemp&Law, HempTherapy, hemp in general | Tags: cannabis, Dea, drug, ganja, hashish, hemp, marijuana, NORML, pot, skunk, war on drug, weed
USA — If denial is the first sign of addiction, then Drug Czar John Walters is hooked to the gills. He’s addicted to targeting and arresting marijuana consumers, and he’ll do and say anything to keep this irrational and punitive policy in place.
Speaking earlier this month on C-Span, the reigning Czar stretched his usual deceit to outrageous new heights. Responding to a question from the Marijuana Policy Project’s Dan Bernath, Walters flatly denied the charge that over 800,000 Americans are arrested annually for violating pot laws.
“We didn’t arrest 800,000 marijuana users,” Walters proclaimed. “That’s [a] lie.”
If only it were.
According to data released yesterday in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, police in 2007 arrested over 872,000 US citizens – that’s nearly one out of every two Americans busted for illicit drugs — for weed.
(The raw data is available from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation here and here.)
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/arrests/index.html
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_29.html
That figure is a five percent increase over the total number of Americans busted in 2006. It’s more than three times the number of citizens charged with pot violations sixteen years ago.
Of those arrested in 2007, 89 percent – some 775,000 Americans — were charged with simple pot possession, not trafficking, cultivation, or sale. (By comparison, 27 percent of those arrested for heroin and cocaine offenses were charged with sales.) Three out of four were under age 30; one in four were 18-years-old or younger.
The FBI’s tally is the highest marijuana arrest total ever-reported in law enforcement history. If this pace continues, annual arrests for pot will surpass one million per year by 2010.
But to hear America’s top drug cop tell it few, if any, citizens are ever arrested for pot possession, and absolutely no one goes to jail for breaking marijuana laws.
“The fact is today, people don’t go to jail for the possession of marijuana,” Walters alleged on C-Span. “Finding somebody in jail or prison for possession of marijuana is like finding a unicorn. It doesn’t exist.”
Not true says the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, which reported last year in black and white — perhaps the Drug Czar is reading impaired – that 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug abuse violations are serving time for marijuana offenses. Combining these percentages with separate U.S. Department of Justice statistics on the total number of state and federal drug prisoners suggests that, at a minimum, there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for marijuana offenses.
(The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county or local jails for pot-related offenses, nor did it take into account the number of inmates serving time for violating the terms of their marijuana-related probation, such as those who submitted a ‘dirty’ urine to their parole officer.)
No matter how one slices it, that’s a lot of unicorns.
It also begs the question: Why does the Drug Czar feel the need to go to such absurd lengths to hide this overt outgrowth of American drug policy? After all, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy typically issue chest-thumping press releases when they achieve record busts for offenses involving cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine? Why then do they shy away from making similar proclamations for pot?
Perhaps it’s because, deep down, even the Drug Czar knows that the use of cannabis does not pose anywhere near the health and safety threat as does the use of other intoxicants, including alcohol, and that most Americans – rightly – would be outraged to learn that our nation’s so-called war on drugs is really just an assault on young adults caught with small bags of weed.
Paul Armentano is the Deputy Director of NORML and The NORML Foundation in Washington, DC.
Note: Cannabis arrests now comprise nearly 47.5 percent of all drug arrests in the United States, 89% of them for mere possession.
Source: AlterNet
Filed under: Hemp&Law, hemp in general | Tags: cannabis, cocaine, drug, executions, ganja, hashish, hemp, heroin, indonesia, law, marijuana, traffic, war on drug
JAKARTA, Indonesia — This country has resumed executions for serious drug crimes after a four-year hiatus, and Indonesia’s attorney general has warned drug offenders on death row that their executions may now be accelerated.
The resumption follows a decision last year by Indonesia’s Constitutional Court that upheld the death penalty for serious drug offenses.
Two Nigerians convicted of drug trafficking were the first to be executed for drug crimes after the long break. The two, Samuel Iwachekwu Okoye and Hansen Anthony Nwaliosa, were put to death on June 26.
All executions in Indonesia are by firing squad. Prisoners are taken to a field to stand in front of 12 men who each fire one shot aimed at the chest. If that barrage does not kill the prisoner, a commander stands ready to fire a point-blank shot to the head.
Although Indonesia is known for some of the world’s strictest penalties for drug offenses, Kathryn Duff, a representative of Amnesty International, said the country was “not typically an enthusiastic executioner.”
Indeed, Indonesia had suspended executions for drug offenders while the court was considering the constitutional case and had not put drug offenders to death for two years before that while prisoners pursued judicial reviews and clemency, said A. H. Ritonga, a deputy attorney general.
Mr. Ritonga said the statement last month by the attorney general, Hendarman Supandji, about speeding up executions did not necessarily mean all 58 prisoners on death row for drug-related crimes would be executed soon. “Death row inmates will only be executed according to the law, after their appeals are exhausted,” Mr. Ritonga said, adding that they can also apply for clemency.
The president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has publicly said, however, that he would not pardon drug offenders.
Using the death penalty for drug offenses had been challenged by three Australians sentenced to death for trying to smuggle heroin off the resort island of Bali, and by two Indonesians. Last October, the Constitutional Court ruled that a constitutional amendment upholding the right to life did not apply to capital punishment. The court added that the right to life had to be balanced against the rights of the victims of drug trafficking.
Indonesia executed the two Nigerians on the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, as a message to those trafficking drugs through the country.
Indonesia is fighting an epidemic of drug abuse. Its population of 238 million includes an estimated 18 million addicts, according to the Ministry of Health.
There are 112 felons on death row. Seven have exhausted appeals and may be executed soon; they include three prisoners convicted in the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, according to the attorney general’s office. Eighteen other prisoners have appealed for clemency.
Indonesia executed only three prisoners in 2006, the year before the death penalty challenge was filed. By comparison, according to Amnesty International, China is estimated to have executed at least 1,000 prisoners that year; Iran executed 177; and Pakistan, 82. In the United States, there were 53 executions.
Still, President Yudhoyono has been a staunch supporter of the death penalty since taking office in October 2004, rarely granting clemency.
He went ahead with the executions of three men who had been convicted in connection with attacks by a Christian militia on Muslims, despite concerns from international human rights groups that not all the evidence had been presented during their trial.
So far, Mr. Yudhoyono, a former general, also has not bowed to pressure from Australia to commute the death sentence of the three Australians imprisoned for trying to smuggle heroin.
The three are entitled to seek one more judicial review and, should that fail, to appeal for clemency.
By PETER GELLING
From “New York Times”
Link http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/world/asia/13indo.html?ref=world
Filed under: *Welcome | Tags: *Welcome, cannabis, ganja, hashish, hemp, jail, law, marijuana, presentation, prohibitionism, reform, skunk, war on drug
Many people get scared just when they heard the name:marijuana.
The same people,in a discussion about hemp,praise the different uses of hemp.
Is it possible that only a synonymous could change the opinion? We do not believe is possible.
The problem,for us,is the historical,political and cultural legacy we have inherited from 30’s and especially from the media that everyday give us an information everyday more biased and under the controll of lobbies that are trying to controll our mind and (just like in Bradubury’s book “Fahrenheit 451“) would like to see us,motionlesses looking tv.
We don’t want to “make information on 360 degrees”,but we only would like to give you a bit of truth in a sea of false allarmism and metropolitan legends against hemp.
We would like to show that another way (opposited prohibitionism) is today possible,and already exist places where this way is followed.
We will try to show the power of this plant,her medical,industrial,alymentary and cosmetic uses and everything we think is important to know about. We are doing this for an our common passion and because are trying to give awareness about an unfairly persecuted plant.
We don’t want to istigate the use,or worst the abuse,of a forbidden substance (in Italy),but diffuse true information that could reach much people as possible.We will be happy if only a person will inform himself about hemp after the reading of this blog.
We don’t want to change the world,make a revolution or that people believe us in a blind way.
We want only that people heard our voice,we want to inform.
Hempyreum Weblog Team
