Here is a really good rundown of the problem of under-treating pain patients and the persecution of the doctors that treat them. I have to remember to keep tabs of Pete over at Drug War Rant. There is some really good stuff over there.
If you are anything like me, you are sick to death of this Gates arrest BS. Just in case you were living under a rock and didn’t hear about this story, read this. In order to calm racial tensions caused by this arrest, the President is going to host a beer summit with the Harvard professor and the arresting officer. I know, I know, I am sick of reading about this crap too. I only revived my dead blog to point out, once again, that people can indulge in a dangerous, recreational substance that causes many overdose deaths every year and nobody bats an eyelash. But could you imagine what would happen if the President decided to go with a much Safer alternative? No pot for the president, the prof and the po-po, that’s for sure!
WARNING: Following post contains terrible grammar but I don’t care enough to re-write it for the umpteenth time.
Obama has already proven himself to be enough of a tool by attempting to hide the torture photos. For more on Obama’s intense stupidity and how he gets off the hook for being a misogynist asshat, I recommend reading Dr. Violet Socks. But he has really gone and stepped in it now! A very good friend of mine sent me an email linking to this article on Huff Po entitled “Something you’d like”.
As he is a fellow drug policy reformer, I figured that perhaps it was an article about Mr. President Obama handing out joints at a local medical marijuana dispensary. Or maybe he was releasing all of the drug war prisoners out of jail and immediately erasing all their criminal records. I would even settle for a youtube of Arnold Schwarzenegger on CNN demanding that his favorite plant be recognized as the medicine that it is.
A marijuana plant in every pot!
But alas, I clicked the link and all I got was the same old tepid lukewarm BS baby-steps towards drug policy reform that we have seen before and will see again. The Governator wants to talk about drug policy. Big deal. What is there to talk about? The drug war is a failure. We already know that.
One of the President’s Henchmen told the Wall Street Journal that he wants to get away from the idea that the U.S. is fighting a “war on drugs.” So what? Does he actually want to quit fighting the war on drugs or does he want to win the propaganda war? Should we call it a disagreement on drugs instead while Mexico gets torn up by more violence and more people rot in jail for smoking a plant?
Call me cranky and demanding all you want, but I want, expect and demand a lot more before I start strewing rose-petals in the path of all these big-talk, do-nothing politicians. Kerlikowske even states outright that he doesn’t support efforts to legalize drugs. He’s a fracking tool, I tell you! A tool of the patriarchy as well as a tool of the racist, classist war on some people who use some drugs. Obama found his number in the Big Book of Drug Warriors. Obama wants to spend even more money on drug enforcement than Bush, if Huff Po is to be believed. (Huff Po had Jim Carey write a science article, so their credibility is immediately suspect.) Norm Stamper says repeal drug prohibition so at least Huff Po got one thing right.
I won’t be happy until everyone can grow, sell or share whatever plant they want without the government’s interference. Anything less than that is bupkis.
I rather enjoyed this 420 ad campaign that was launched today.
Via Pete at Drugwarrant I found this delightful movie about marijuana that I will be watching tonight if I ever get any time! It’s only free today so I better get in gear.
Earlier this week Tammy Roberts, the woman who became famous for shaming women for having the audacity to breastfeed their children in a public venue, posted a picture essay displaying all the needles in local Saskatoon parks. There is no question in my mind that this is a public safety issue, as children becoming infected by diseases from used needles is undoubtedly a danger everybody wants to avoid. However, the conclusions drawn by the poo-flingers in the comment section denigrating “junkies” demanded a blog post from yours truly.
Many commenters are demanding that the health region stop handing out clean needles and feel that this would solve the drug problem. This is an absurd notion. Even if it put an end to needles in the parks, it would do nothing to help people that are suffering from addictions issues. But let’s be realistic here. None of these people screaming for the health region to quit handing out needles cares even the slightest bit about the people that are addicted to drugs. They don’t care at all, they just want the problem to disappear. They don’t mind reading an article in the newspaper about the escalating STI and AIDS rates because it doesn’t touch their lives at all. But the minute that they see evidence in their community of needles, concrete evidence that society has a huge drug problem, they get angry. They prefer the drug problems out of sight and out of mind.
What I would like to see are some real concrete practical solutions to these issues. How about a discussion of the root causes of drug addiction? How about a discussion about poverty in our inner city? It’s an indisputable fact that poverty is the root cause of a lot of issues facing people in the inner city.
I would also like to point out that Tammy Roberts could have done an excellent photo essay on broken beer bottles in the parks. While these aren’t a vector for disease in the same way that broken needles are, they are dangerous to small children. When my kids were little I can’t count the number of times I walked around and picked up all the broken beer bottles to prevent the children from cutting themselves on them. So where is the moral panic about beer drinkers? This panic about condoms is even more pathetic. They are gross, just like the take-out food wrappers and old plastic bags I clean out of my yard every year after the snow melts, but they aren’t dangerous. Why the moral panic? Let me tell you. People see real evidence that people have sex and do drugs and they get all worked up. It’s much ado about nothing. Just an excuse to marginalize people that lead different lives than they do.
Thanks to Saskboy for bringing this to my attention.
I don’t post a lot of youtube videos because that is the laziest blogging that there is. Then again, I haven’t been the slightest bit interested in standing on my internet soap box lately at all. Real life is much more interesting than this lit-up screen. Even though Saskatoon is a really brown, drab and ugly place, I have been reveling in the warm weather and spending all my free time outside. The streets and sidewalks are coated in a layer of thick, dried up mud that was left behind after all the snow melted. There are enormous potholes everywhere. There is a crater on just about every street in my neighborhood. There isn’t a stitch of greenery anywhere. The grass is covered in old leaves, twigs, take-out food wrappers, broken toys, and plastic bags. I haven’t had a whole lot of free time either. Two kids, a full-time job, real-life activism, a horse, a house, piles of dirty laundry, unvacuumed floors, a yard that is beckoning to be raked and planted, and a trucker boyfriend that I miss. Jeez Louise! Nobody would have any business telling me to get a life. I get tired just reading that list.
Driving my little purple car throughout the city of Saskatoon is exactly like navigating an obstacle course. I live in fear of the tiny little tires falling into the bottom of one of those potholes of death, never to be seen again. In case you didn’t already know, I drive a puny little purple Geo Metro. It’s a beautiful, divine way of getting around. She is not a very thirsty little car, only drinking 1 gallon of gas for every 50 miles that she goes as opposed to my boyfriends’ far less efficient 1 gallon for every four point five miles. YIKES! Buggy pwns Fat Freddie’s Kat.
Blogging is such a mixed bag sometimes. I love to write and I love feedback on my writing, even if it’s just the occasional comment from the three or four people besides me that actually care about this blog. If you get a following on a blog that you update regularly, after a while you can feel like you have to produce something every single day, even if you would rather splash around in the mud puddles or clean the house or fret about a major life change. I recognize that I love it when people bug me to update the blog because it means that somebody actually cares about what I have to say. But when I don’t want to blog it feels like such a chore. A very strange combination of factors conspired to keep me from blogging for the past few weeks. The fact that I bought a new laptop and I have had the worst case of writers’ block because I am not used to it. I realize that this makes me a very strange cookie and that I should not admit to being this weird on a blog under my real name.
That’s another thing about blogging that sucks. I am continually reminded by the so-called “real world” that everything I put on this blog is accessible to the whole world FOREVER! And that is such a bad, horrible terrible thing. I can’t think of one good, sane reason to care about being held responsible for the things that I say. I stand by them, and if I am serious about that, I should post my thoughts under my real name, by gum. So that’s exactly what I do.
I say that and I mean that, but I can’t help fearing that I engage in a little bit of self-censorship on this blog. There are many times when I think “Can’t write about that, I don’t want everybody to know that!”
Anyway, what has finally spurred me to give up my lame writers’ block excuse is the absolutely ridiculous reefer madness being displayed by the dead tree media of late. First we have this lame dog pile dumped into the Star Phoenix. The dripping disdain for medical cannabis is apparent in the tone of the article and the fact that the editorialists couldn’t even bother to get their facts straight about this issue. They declare that if only that user of “doobies” had just respected the owners’ request to move, there would have been no problem. If only those pesky groups that are continually discriminated against would just go away and quit demanding their rights and to be treated with respect, everything would be peachy keen and smell of roses. As if! This line of thinking brings up a few questions that I think everybody should think very deeply about, before getting defensive and dismissing everything that I have to say.
Why do people get so upset about the idea of cigarette smokers sharing their spaces with cannabis users? I simply do no understand why it is justifiable to punish medical cannabis users in this way. It makes no sense. Cannabis smoke is far less dangerous than tobacco smoke. There is more pollution and second hand smoke being spewed out the back-end of cars than by even the largest group of cannabis smokers. Why the double standard? I can already hear the response from the reefer madness indoctrinated crowd. “But Tanya, marijuana is illegal!” It is very true that people have fought a constant uphill battle to have the well-documented and extensive medical use of cannabis recognized and respected. There was never an excuse for the government to punish people for growing plants. It’s absolute bullocks and inexcusable. There should never have even been a need to prove the medical use of cannabis for it to be allowed to be used legally by people that need it.
This is my long-winded rambling way of saying that there is no excuse for the ridiculous drug laws. Nothing good has come of imprisoning millions of harmless drug offenders, the majority of whom are in prison related to cannabis offenses. Just put that in your pipe and smoke it. The government spends all this time and money punishing people for using the wrong drugs and we have literally nothing to show for it. Unless you consider escalating rates of drug use and HIV infections an accomplishment.
If I get around to writing a proper response to this sewage published in the Star Phoenix, I will be sure to publish it here. I think it’s time for a letter to the editor.
But wait! The reefer madness propaganda machine is just getting started. We get to hear my main man Obama mocking the people who responded to his request for feedback on his site and demanded that cannabis be taxed and regulated. Apparently, putting a stop to jailing people for their personal drug habits is beyond the pale for the Grope and Flail * and simply must be mocked and disdained with witty remarks about wondering why anybody would think that President Obama would want to legalize the demon weed. But they made a grave mistake by dismissing the 53% of Canadians that think cannabis should be legalized. What gives Globe and Mail the right to do that? The politicians and the media are both out of touch with what the people really want.
It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that the government is imposing legislation to crack down on crime by going after marijuana growers. Click here for reefer madness propaganda. Let me tell you what will happen if we allow the knobs in charge to get away with it.
1. The price of marijuana will increase.
2. There will be even more marijuana bust pr0n all over the news. We will be treated to more grow-op photo-ops, complete with wads of cash and garbage bags over-flowing with weed. Maybe there will be a couple grams of meth to really make the media salivate. The RCs will have fun parading their ill-gotten gains before the camera and assure the public that their jobs are actually faithful.
3. The crime rate will increase as the drug trade becomes even more profitable.
Cracking down on crime this way is a recipe for failure.
Now it is no secret to the four people that read this blog that I am not optimistic about an Obama presidency. I hope to be proven wrong, but it seems to me that “Change” is just a slogan. Case in point, this is the man that Obama is thinking of appointing as the United States next drug czar. Of course Jim Ramstad is opposed to ending the federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries as well as funding needle exchanges. These things actually help people! Being a recovering alcoholic does not insure that you will be compassionate towards drug users.
The Drug Czar that we need is none other than Dr. Ethan Nadelmann. He is an extremely smart and outspoken drug policy reform activist that wishes to abolish most drug laws. This would make the job of Drug Czar completely unnecessary. That would be so great.
Now that that is out of the way, how about if I make fun of the name Drug Czar? That is such an absurd title for a government post. It makes me think of a fat, little, pompous dictator sitting on a throne and oppressing the minions. I suppose that is a pretty accurate job description, as all the Drug Czar does is find ways to punish people for using the wrong drugs.
Salon has an excellent piece on an issue that rarely gets discussed, except by pot smokers and conspiracy theorists. I say that with a bit of bitterness, as I find my pro-drug views sometimes get me in trouble with some people. But luckily I have never concerned myself with what other people think, or at least that’s what I try to tell myself.
I really liked reading about the personal experiences of Obama and Cindy McCain and how their lives were impacted by America’s horrific drug policy, which has been exported all over the world. American imperialism at its’ finest. When Cindy McCain was a drug addict and stole to support her habit, she managed to stay out of jail thanks to her money and connections. If she were young, poor and/or black, that would have been a highly unlikely outcome. It’s so damned unfair that there are different rules applied to your life depending on your social class. What a bunch of bullocks! In spite of that though, I am glad that Cindy McCain stayed out of jail and recovered from her addiction because I don’t believe anybody should go to jail for using or selling the wrong drugs. She clearly needed help, not to spend time in jail.
Now I just wonder when we will hear either of these presidential candidates say anything about drug policy. I’ll be waiting.
