Before yesterday’s rally I had the opportunity to get some video footage of Linda’s grow room. She had a very nice set up going. I would write more but I just wanted to throw this up before I make the long drive to Milestone to get my boyfriend. Enjoy!
A small group of activists, including myself, will be meeting up with Linda Maddaford on Friday, August 14th, 2009. There will be a rally to support her rights taking place at 2 p.m. in the afternoon in front of city hall. Here is the link to the Facebook event. The address for city hall in Yorkton is 37 Third Ave North. Unfortunately, only a few people can go, due to the fact that it is summer and everybody is either at the lake or at work. The fact that this is last minute short notice doesn’t help either. It is quite discouraging but you have to do the best that you can do. Meeting up with Linda will be a very worthwhile thing to do.
Anything you can do to lend support will be greatly appreciated.
Yorkton resident Linda Maddaford had her home invaded by the Yorkton RCMP on August 5th, 2009. Approximately eight vehicles, including civilian vehicles, police cars and vans, raided her house when she wasn’t home. Ms. Maddaford had been a licensed medical marijuana patient for five years and she had been growing for her personal use for three years. When the police came they took her two mother plants. The strain was specific to her medical needs and is gone. The police killed her medical strain and she can not recover it. She was charged with production of two mother plants and possession of controlled substances. She was growing for her own personal medical use. She faces possible jail-time, house arrest and probation. She is no longer able to be bonded. Her court date is on September 14th, 2009. The arresting officer was Constable Kaare Bruce Christensen. The search warrant was signed by Judge G. Rathgeber #2950.
She had been licensed to grow since July 21, 2005 and was legally licensed until July 21, 2008. Her medical marijuana license expired July 21, 2008 after her doctor, a neurologist, Dr. Larry Wine retired due to sudden medical illness. Health Canada required that Ms. Maddaford have her papers signed by a specialist. She tried to find another specialist but none of them will sign her paperwork. She has seen numerous specialists and has talked to neurologist specialists all to no avail. She phoned AIDS specialists at St. Paul’s hospital in Vancouver. They could not assist her. She was told to find a specialist in Saskatchewan. This has proven impossible as many doctors are not accepting new patients and many others are unwilling or unable to sign the paperwork. Her family doctor, Dr. Andres Van Heerden, has been completely supportive of her application for medical marijuana. But the Canadian Medical Association general council policy recommends that physicians not participate in the dispensing of medical marijuana.
The Canadian Medical Association strongly opposes the use of marijuana for medical reasons because they say there is not enough scientific information proving that marijuana is safe and effective medicine. This despite years of scientific research attesting to the effectiveness of marijuana as a medicine. Some of Dr. Wine’s patients have had their forms honored and other patients have not. It appears to be a discriminatory action by Health Canada. She can not get her license renewed without a specialists’ signature and is in legal limbo. She is caught between the cracks of the government. Patients have no protection from persecution.
She is living on social assistance and has been attending school for the last five years. She has been struggling to better herself. She was studying to be a real estate agent. “I need to find a job that will allow me to work in spite of my disability. I really need to get off of government assistance so I can feel good about myself,” Ms. Maddaford said. Her charges mean that she is no longer bondable and will be unable to practice as a real estate agent. She will be unable to cross the US border. She has no money to pay for a lawyer. She goes for an appointment on August 17th to find out if she can qualify for Legal Aid.
Medical marijuana helps relieve her pain and muscle spasms caused by mechanical back pain myofascial pain syndrome onset spondylosis. She also has degenerative arthritis and a right rotary cuff disorder caused by a workplace accident. Her medicine helps her eat because she has issues with her stomach due to prescription drugs. She has restrictions in the flexibility of her arms and shoulders and stiffness in her neck as well as headaches. She has been without her medicine since August 5th, 2009 and has endured headaches, arm numbness, swelling and weakness. She is having difficulty using her fingers due to her symptoms. Her landlord has been supportive of her growing for her personal use and the landlord’s paperwork has been in order.. Her neighbors are devastated that she might be going to jail. There is no other medicine that gives her the quality of life that marijuana has allowed her to achieve. “I would be unable to make it in school without my medicine,” says Ms. Maddaford.
Health Canada has two categories for medical marijuana patients. Category 1 contains patients with terminal cancer and severe degenerative arthritis. They are only required to get their family doctor to sign their paperwork. Category 2 patients covers all other patients and are required to get a specialist to sign their paperwork. Licensed medical marijuana patients are allowed to grow and possess for personal use.
Media can contact Linda Maddaford for an interview by emailing me at tanyaderbowka at gmail.com.
This blog post title may be the understatement of the week, considering what took place on a radio station in what turned out to be the worst idea ever. A concerned mother wanted to keep her child under control and be labeled a good parent by all the listeners of this ill-advised program. She decided it would be a good idea to hook up her young daughter to a lie detector machine and let total strangers (bantering radioheads) question her about her sexual history and drug use and broadcast this humiliating exchange to thousands of perfect strangers.
Yes, I know it’s the standard fare of Maury and Jerry Springer and Rikki Lake and Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil or whatever popular knob talking head to project bad parenting to the masses but this is my blog and I can hate all those idiots for abusing teenagers in public if I want to. So there!
Being a teenaged girl is bad enough as it is, what with the menstrual cycles, snapped bras, dirty jokes, public school and the perverted boys, without subjecting a girl to this kind of abuse. And this story is bad enough as it is, but hold onto your hats it’s about to get a lot worse.
You see, the teenaged girl had been through a rape a couple of months previous to the show and mom hadn’t felt this detail was important enough to pass on to the questioners. That’s right, the teenaged girl had to tell the world about her sexual assault on the air. At least the questioners had the decency to back off after that revelation but it’s still horrible.
I had a rather unpleasant thought about all this business. What if the teenaged girl had been through an assault and had decided to keep it a secret. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about it with her mom because she didn’t think she would understand or maybe the experience was just too painful. And bantering radioheads asked her about her sexual history and she said that she hadn’t had sex and failed the lie detector test. And then the bantering radioheads and the mom ganged up on the girl in public on the radio about her sex life. It’s a truly appalling thought. That’s the last thing that any girl recovering from a sexual assault would need.
You shouldn’t have to talk about your sex life to people without your consent. But who cares about the rights of teenaged girls! It’s apparently okay to be a mean-spirited bully instead of a parent. Selling ad space in our over-commercialized culture is more important than anything else. Garbage like this is the reason I don’t watch television or listen to the radio anymore. Talk radio is the worst.
Oh but I am not done yet. They tried desperately to make the standard offer of counseling to fix the poor, poor victim. It’s what is offered to sex assault survivors everywhere. “You need counseling.” That is none of your business. And it doesn’t change the fact that you have traumatized someone who already went through a terrible experience. What all survivors everywhere need is for people to quit being insensitive jerks. Counseling is far from being all you need to recover from rape. How about if we send all rape-enablers for some counseling and see how they like it?
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!
That is the question that popped into my head as I read yet another scandalous story about a celebrity that enjoys marijuana. This time it was one of the actors in the Harry Potter series, 19 year old Jamie Waylett who was growing it. Smart fellow, that Jamie Waylett. It is no secret to readers of this blog that I think the marijuana laws are useless and stupid and should be immediately repealed. However, I wrote this post because of the wording of the article. Just check this out:
Jamie Waylett pleaded guilty to growing the drug during a hearing Thursday at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
Excuse me, but how do you go about growing a drug? That’s like telling a barley farmer that they are growing beer. You grow plants, not drugs. But since the only processing that marijuana requires is that the buds get dried after they get harvested, it is understandable why some people would think that this is appropriate language. I know that it takes a lot to go from barley to beer bottle but marijuana is pretty much done once the buds are clipped and dried.
I suppose the real problem is that people think that marijuana is a drug. Sure it has psycho-active effects but is it a drug? I don’t think so.
This is the first part in what will probably be a one-part series that I am calling “Ask a Tween”. It just occurred to me that we adults love to make pronouncements on what is acceptable for kids. Should we let twelve year olds supervise other children at the mall? Are video games appropriate for kids? What do they like?
Take this review of games marketed to girls aged eight to twelve years old on Wired. The author ponders whether kids are sent the right messages by video games. Will girls become flaky, silly, stupid, shallow and vacuous if they play a video game about high school cliques? Is this as bad as letting young boys play Grand Theft Auto? Is marketing video games especially to girls a good idea? Let’s ask a tween!
Katy says, after reading the Wired review, “They all look pretty stupid and what the site said was pretty funny. They were all about makeup and high school cliques and crap like that. I’d never buy any of them. The video games I like to play are !!!!!MARIO!!!!!!! 
”
So there you have it. All those games are stupid and Katy won’t beg me to buy them any time ever. Meanwhile, we will play Paper Mario. We borrowed a copy of Mario Galaxy from Katy’s friend and we have also played Mario Cart. It seems that collecting coins, jumping on shrooms, throwing rocks, solving puzzles and flying through the air having adventures are fun for everybody. Making Peach, the frilly Pink Princess, a character in Mario that is playable doesn’t hurt either. Katy always chooses the Princess Peach character when we play Mariocart.
Are you listening video game manufacturers? My advice won’t cost you a thing and it’s foolproof. Boys and girls aren’t all that different when it comes to video games.
Not only is it sexist but it’s mind-rotting trash. But this clip made me lol.
I happened across another story about a parent being shamed and judged for giving their kids just the slightest little bit of freedom. Bridget Kevane got a mighty smackdown from the law when she decided to allow her twelve year old child to supervise some other kids while at the law. I encourage you to go to the link and read the entire thing as told by Bridget. But long story short, it came to the attention of the mall cop that the children were not being properly supervised by a parental unit. He decided to make an issue out of it, and pressed charges against her for endangering the welfare of her children.
Just think! Twelve year olds babysitting younger kids! Would you like to know what I was doing when I was twelve years old, besides baby-sitting? On occasion my mother would leave in charge of a small town restaurant for a few hours. I had to serve customers food and run a till all by myself. Do I feel like I endured child abuse? Of course not. Being given responsibility as a child is a sure way to know that your parents trust you. After all, that is what self-esteem is based upon, being able to be trusted with responsibility.
What really kills me about this story is the response of the so-called progressive bloggers that wrote about this story. I saw it on Pandagon, a blog I am usually very fond of. Unfortunately, Jesse fell for the same kind of parental shaming that is so abundant in our STRANGE NEW WORLD! He calls her an asshole and proceeds to go on and on about how bad what she did was. But I am still wondering if he thinks that mall cop over-reacted or not. Is this mother really someone that needs to be charged and waste a lot of the courts’ time? I think not. The mall cop could have satisfied himself with a pompous lecture about what a bad parent she is (people love to disparage your parenting talents, especially if they are non-parents) and went on his merry way. That would have been the reasonable thing to do, rather than put this poor woman through the legal ringer.
I have always given my children plenty of leash and plenty of responsibility to go along with it. When my oldest child was about seven or eight years old, I allowed her to walk herself home from school and let herself into the house and wait for me to come home. She would be home alone for almost a whole hour sometimes! Amazing, I know. This took place after she begged me for months and her baby-sitter told me I should let her stay home alone. I finally relented and worried (for nothing). The child was fine and I would be greeted with a hearty “Why are you home so early?”. Apparently, being home without parental supervision is kind of exciting when you are eight years old. Who would have thunk it, eh?
At least Pandagon isn’t the only perspective on this mess. I just love what the Free Range Kid blog had to say about this outrageous story. Thank you so much for existing, Free Range Kid blog! Here is another take on our collective epidemic of over-parenting.
Of course, I come from rural Saskatchewan. I have family members that live an hour away from Saskatoon on the farm that would never dream of locking their doors. I remember when some cousins from the city would visit and the “Why are you locking the door?” debates would begin. We country kids would be annoyed by the city kids locking the doors because none of us have house keys. There is no need for them when you live out of town. People feel safe. But the city kids just could not comprehend leaving the house without locking it. That idea would blow their little minds. Unfortunately, I am a city kid now and I could never sleep without a locked door again, despite the fact that a locked door is a pretty false sense of security. I guess there are some advantages to rural Saskatchewan after all.
It’s pretty hard to watch this video without going “AWWWWW!”.
