Wes Unruh on Super High Me:

I was willing to give the documentary that doubt, because otherwise this film is little more than an unfunny schtick overshadowed by the importance of social upheaval the camera crew happens to connect with, seemingly unexpectedly.

[…]

In other words, this is not the time for a juvenile documentary, the stakes are too high (cough). Medical marijuana is shifting the debate around the tangled world director/writer/former Austinite Kevin Booth dives into with his documentary, American Drug War: The Last White Hope, a serious analysis of current drug enforcement. A long, thorough treatment of drug policy in how it formed and how it impacts today that was refreshing after the plodding and senseless Super High Me.

Full Story: Alterati

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Full Comic.

(Thanks Honky Tonk Dragon)

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Promo copy:

DEA agents put their lives in the hands of a drug and weapons trafficker turned informant as they mount an operation to burrow deep into Detroit’s drug underworld. Each undercover buy and daring raid brings them one step closer to a deadly showdown with a violent drug kingpin.

Radley Balko:

Or with an unarmed mother of six. Or a 92-year-old-woman. Or a meek amateur gardener. Or a middle-aged mother of two who led prayer groups on her lunch breaks. Maybe they’ll show a bunch of DEA agents handcuffing a post-polio medical marijuana patient to her bed while they shove assault weapons in her face. Or storming the home of a paraplegic with multiple sclerosis because he had the audacity to try to treat his own pain.

But hey. It’s all about protecting the kids from drugs, right?

Seriously, what’s the fallout for a show like this? It’s clearly a recruiting video for the DEA. But if the show focuses on door-smashing, head-bashing, and ass-kicking, exactly what kind recruits are they drawing?

Tellingly, the series is doing promo on sites like.…military.com. Remember that the next time someone argues that there’s nothing paramilitary about the drug war.

Full Story: The Agitator.

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On the word of one student, who said a girl had given her a prescription strength Ibuprofen, the vice principal of a school had a female student strip searched.

While the nurse watched, a female secretary had Redding strip to her underwear, pull her bra to the side and her panties out at the crotch and expose her breasts and pelvic area. After no pills appeared, Redding got dressed.

Redding says she didn’t return to class but sat in the vice principal’s office and called her mother to pick her up. She was afraid to tell her mom on the phone what had happened, she recalls, because “the secretary was listening” and “I was like really ashamed, like it was my fault.” A friend later spilled the beans about the search, and Redding says her mom “was more mad than I was. I felt really stupid.”

The incident was so humiliating that Redding says she couldn’t return to school for months. “Everyone knew what had happened, and they were talking about me,” she recalls. “I got really nervous, developed ulcers and started puking.”

What did the school district’s lawyer have to say?

Wright, the lawyer for the school district, says the school’s strict drug policy is still in effect. He is not aware of any specific rules on strip searches but stresses the duty of schools “to closely supervise students and provide a safe environment.” As for the strip search of Redding, he says it was based on “reasonable grounds.”

“Remember,” he says, “this was prescription strength Ibuprofen.”

Full Story: ABC News.

(via Lupa)

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Fox News. It’s hard to talk about greatest hits without mentioning their war coverage or their coverage of racial issues. As a political and cultural propaganda machine, there’s little outright funny about Fox News’s persistent distortion of reality. Or, if there is, the jokes on the people of the United States and the world.

But occasionally they have a real zinger. Some “hard hitting” piece of “journalism” where the joke really is on them. Here are Fox’s 5 journalistic masterpieces, after the fold.

(more…)

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Radley Balko writes:

Over at the blog of criminal defense attorney Mark Bennett, a Texas prosecutor has put up an astonishing guest post arguing that merely advocating for jury nullification is in itself a crime, and that the authors of the Time article have violated Texas law.

[…]

This is not only absurd, it’s reckless. It’s a direct attack on free expression by a government agent. He’s arguing that anyone in Texas who advocates for jury nullification is committing a crime—and by definition then risks prosecution. And this argument is coming from a man who has the power and the position to carry out just such a prosecution.

Full Story: The Agitator.

Previously: The Wire writers promote jury nullification in Time Magazine.

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Some students nearly have their diploma in hand before they learn of their newest, sometimes insurmountable hurdle.

Michele Convie can tell you how that feels. She did time for two smallish pot busts, but nearly two decades later–and after earning a degree from Pima Community College–she faced a bureaucratic jungle in getting security clearance as a social worker. When ex-felons apply for such clearance, processed through the Arizona Department of Public Safety, “they deny you immediately,” she says, “without telling you how to appeal.”

According to Convie, the student’s history is scrutinized for every infraction, right down to the last traffic ticket. Even then, they can be denied–laying waste to all their college tuition and hard work.

[…]

There’s now an estimated 10 percent shortage of nurses, and by the year 2020, that number is expected to jump to 30 percent.

But according to state licensing protocols, “the Board of Nursing shall not grant a license, or shall revoke a license if previously granted, or decline to renew the license of an applicant who has one or more felony convictions and who has not received an absolute discharge from the sentences for all felony convictions five or more years before the date of filing an application.”

Full Story: Tucson Weekly.

(via Hit and Run).

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On a different note, this is something else I came across today worth sharing:

It’s not a relic of the past; it’s here and now and ensnaring more people than ever.

By E. Benjamin Skinner
March 23, 2008

Many people are surprised to learn that there are still slaves. Many imagined that slavery died along with the 360,000 Union soldiers whose blood fertilized the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. Many thought that slavery was brought to an end around the world when most countries outlawed it in the 19th century.

But, in fact, there are more slaves today than at any point in history. Although a precise census is impossible, as most masters keep their slaves hidden, baseline estimates from United Nations and other international researchers range from 12 million to 27 million slaves worldwide. The U.S. State Department estimates that from 600,000 to 800,000 people — primarily women and children — are trafficked across national borders each year, and that doesn’t count the millions of slaves who are held in bondage within their own countries.

Read the whole article via the Los Angeles Times.

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In a small airport office, the agents asked about drugs and prostitutes. It’s all in my book, Horsley said, offering them a promotional flier that quotes English musician Bryan Ferry calling it “a masterpiece of filth.”

“If I had to live my life again,” he told them, “I would take the same drugs, only sooner and more often.”

They asked about his criminal record. Again, in the book: 25 years ago, when he was 20 and walking around London with his hair dyed bright orange, he was arrested and fined 100 British pounds for possession of a gram of amphetamines.

“Describe your relationship with Kate Moss,” they said. Not in the book this time. Horsley said he’d never met the supermodel, who was questioned by police last year over newspaper photographs that appeared to show her snorting cocaine. Silently, he wondered to himself where on earth that question had come from.

He said they made him raise his right hand and “swear on the Bible” that he was telling the truth.

Then Sebastian Alexander Horsley was handed a document telling him he was being refused entry to the United States of America under the provisions of “Section 212 (a) (2) (A) (i) (I) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended.”

He was being run out of America for “moral turpitude.”

Full Story: Washington Post.

(via Hit and Run).

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This past January that scenario played out at the Chesapeake, Va., home of 28-year-old Ryan Frederick, a slight man of little more than 100 pounds. According to interviews since the incident, Frederick says when he looked toward his front door, he saw an intruder trying to enter through one of the lower door panels. So Frederick fired his gun.

The intruders were from the Chesapeake Police Department. They had come to serve a drug warrant. Frederick’s bullet struck Detective Jarrod Shivers in the side, killing him. Frederick was arrested and has spent the last six weeks in a Chesapeake jail.

He has been charged with first degree murder. Paul Ebert, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, has indicated he may elevate the charge to capital murder, which would enable the state to seek the death penalty.

[…]

The raid in Chesapeake bears a striking resemblance to another that ended in a fatality. Last week, New Hanover County, N.C., agreed to pay $4.25 million to the parents of college student Peyton Stickland, who was killed when a deputy participating in a raid mistook the sound of a SWAT battering ram for a gunshot and fired through the door as Strickland came to answer it.

So in the raid where a citizen mistakenly shot a police officer, the citizen is facing a murder charge; in the raid where a police officer shot a citizen, prosecutors declined to press charges.

Full Story: Fox News.

See also Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America.

And: GoDaddy silences police watchdog site.

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From an article in Time penned by the writers of HBO’s The Wire:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren’t fictional.

Full Story: Time.

At Hit and Run, Radley Balko points out:

The one problem with jury nullification is that judges and prosecutors often set perjury traps that pick would-be nullifiers off during the voir dire process. Worse, judges sometimes even wrongly instruct jurors that their only option is to consider the defendant’s guilt or innocence, explicitly instructing that they aren’t to judge the justness or morality of the law itself.

One of the most significant policies drug reformers could get enacted would be to work Congress and state legislatures to pass legislation protecting and preserving the rights of jurors to nullify—or better yet, to even force courts to notify them of that right before deliberation.

See also:

Fully Informed Jury Association.

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But no everyone is happy. Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, recently told National Public Radio she opposes the distribution programs because—and hold on to your hat for this one—she believes life-threatening overdoses are an important deterrent to drug use.

“Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care professional is enough to make a person snap into the reality of the situation and snap into having someone give them services,” Madras said.

Madras’ reaction offers a telling glimpse into the mind of a drug warrior.

Full Story: Reason.

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For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

Full Story: New York Times.

(via OVO).

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Marijuana has been smoked for its medicinal properties for centuries. Preclinical, clinical, and anecdotal reports suggest numerous potential medical uses for marijuana. Although the indications for some conditions have been well documented, less information is available about other potential medical uses.

Additional research is needed to further clarify the therapeutic value of cannabinoids and determine optimal routes of administration. Unfortunately, research expansion has been hindered by a complicated federal approval process, limited availability of research-grade marijuana, and the debate over legalization. ACP believes the science on medical marijuana should not be obscured or hindered by the debate surrounding the legalization of marijuana for general use. In this paper the College lays out a series of positions on research into, and the use of, marijuana as medicine.

Full position paper available at American College of Physicians web site.

(via Hit and Run).

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Ras Iyah Ben Makahna won a partial victory in the US’ 9th Circuit Court after he argued that he used cannabis as a sacrament. The potential implications are astounding: sacramental users, especially Rastafarians, may be able to light up on federal lands and be protected by Makahna’s precedent.

Ras Iyah Ben Makahna was arrested for possession and importation of marijuana seeds on January 2, 1991, at an international airport in his homeland of Guam, a US territory. He was on his way back from California when officials charged him with importation of a controlled substance. The American Civil Liberties Union soon became interested in his case, and offered legal assistance.

Makahna explained that Rastafarians are required by their religion to carry and use cannabis sacramentally: for him it was a choice between breaking the law, or sinning in the eyes of God.

Full Story: Cannabis Culture.

(See also: ACLU, Rick Steves launch marijuana campaign).

(Via Irreality Wire).

Why is religious exemption the most feasible means of making legal exceptions for marijuana use? If we accept that religious people can use the drug, why not cancer patients? Or artists and musicians? Or television program viewers?

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Given what Obama seems to mean by decriminalization, this position is not exactly radical. About a dozen states are said to have decriminalized marijuana, which generally means that possession of small amounts for personal use does not result in arrest and can be punished by a modest fine at worst. Possession is still illegal in almost all of those states, the conspicuous exception being Alaska, where possession of a few ounces in one’s home does not trigger any penalty at all. Possessing more than the limit (usually an ounce), growing marijuana, or selling it remain crimes even in so call decrim states.

Full Story: Hit and Run.

Update: Now he says he’s against it.

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Patients suffering from chronic pain, loss of appetite and other ailments that marijuana is said to alleviate can get their pot with a dose of convenience at the Herbal Nutrition Center, where a large machine will dole out the drug around the clock.

“Convenient access, lower prices, safety, anonymity,” inventor and owner Vincent Mehdizadeh said, extolling the benefits of the machine.

But federal drug agents say the invention may need unplugging.

“Somebody owns (it), it’s on a property and somebody fills it,” said DEA Special Agent Jose Martinez. “Once we find out where it’s at, we’ll look into it and see if they’re violating laws.”

At least three dispensaries in the city, including two belonging to Mehdizadeh, have installed vending machines to distribute the drug to people who carry cards authorizing marijuana use.

Full Story: Fox News).

(thanks Nick!)

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Radley Balko on the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy’s opposition to giving overdose rescue kits to drug users:

Digest that for a sec. Better to let a heroin user die than administer a product that, in some cases, may remove the threat of overdose death from people who use heroin to excess. This is the mentality of your modern drug warrior. We’re fighting drug use not because it’s dangerous or harmful, but because they believe drug use is, in and of itself, immoral.

Today’s drug war isn’t about saving lives, it’s about saving souls. it’s the same mentality that led some family values types to oppose the marketing of Gardasil. Remove the threat of cervical cancer from premarital sex and, golly, some girls might have more premarital sex. If a few have to learn an important lesson by dying of cervical cancer, so be it.

Full Story: the Agitator.

Balko also sends word about a kid arrested for smelling hand sanitizer.

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Geneva France walked out of federal prison with $68 and a bus ticket home. That’s all the government had to offer a woman who had served 16 months of a decade-long prison sentence for a crime she didn’t commit.

The mother of three returned to her family, but her youngest child — who was 18 months old when France was sent to prison — didn’t recognize her.

And France, 25, had no home to return to.

Her landlord had evicted her from the rental during her incarceration, and everything she owned had been tossed on the street.

France’s case is the nightmare scenario for a system that critics say sometimes dispenses justice differently for rich and poor.

It shows how easy it is for the government to get convictions in cases built on shaky investigations.

Full Story: Hit and Run.

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“That, at least, is the consensus of a new paper in Neuropharmacology:

There is a general consensus that the effects of cannabinoid agonists on anxiety seem to be biphasic, with low doses being anxiolytic and high doses ineffective or possibly anxiogenic. Besides the behavioural effects of cannabinoids on anxiety, very few papers have dealt with the neuroanatomical sites of these effects. We investigated the effect on rat anxiety behavior of local administration of THC in the prefrontal cortex, basolateral amygdala and ventral hippocampus, brain regions belonging to the emotional circuit and containing high levels of CB1 receptors. THC microinjected at low doses in the prefrontal cortex (10 μg) and ventral hippocampus (5 μg) induced in rats an anxiolytic-like response tested in the elevated plus-maze, whilst higher doses lost the anxiolytic effect and even seemed to switch into an anxiogenic profile. Low THC doses (1 μg) in the basolateral amygdala produced an anxiogenic-like response whereas higher doses were ineffective.

In other words, a good high works in the prefrontal cortex and ventral hippocampus while a bad high turns on the amygdala. As most pot smokers eventually discover, there is a fine pharmacological line between comic relaxation and vague paranoia.”

(via The Frontal Cortex)

(see also “Is Weed The New Prozac?”)

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“Recreational drugs, including cocaine and heroin, are responsible for an estimated 10,000-20,000 American deaths per year [1,2]. While this represents a serious public health problem, it is a “smokescreen” for America’s real drug problem. America’s “war on drugs” is directed at the wrong enemy. It is obvious that interdiction, stiff mandatory sentences, and more vigorous enforcement of drug laws have failed. The reason is simple. Cause and effect have been reversed.

[…] While approximately 10,000 per year die from the effects of illegal drugs, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that an estimated 106,000 hospitalized patients die each year from drugs which, by medical standards, are properly prescribed and properly administered. More than two million suffer serious side effects. [3]

An article in Newsweek [4] put this into perspective. Adverse drug reactions, from “properly” prescribed drugs, are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. According to this article, only heart disease, cancer, and stroke kill more Americans than drugs prescribed by medical doctors. Reactions to prescription drugs kill more than twice as many Americans as HIV/AIDS or suicide. Fewer die from accidents or diabetes than adverse drug reactions. It is important to point out the limitations of this study. It did not include outpatients, cases of malpractice, or instances where the drugs were not taken as directed.”

(via Mercola)

(Thanks Kaos829!)

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Scientific American is running a broad overview of past and present research with hallucinogens:

Before 1972, close to 700 studies with psychedelic drugs took place. The research suggested that psychedelics offered significant benefits: they helped recovering alcoholics abstain, soothed the anxieties of terminal cancer patients, and eased the symptoms of many difficult-to-treat psychiatric illnesses, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

For example, between 1967 and 1972 studies in terminal cancer patients by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his colleagues at Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore showed that LSD combined with psychotherapy could alleviate symptoms of depression, tension, anxiety, sleep disturbances, psychological withdrawal and even severe physical pain. Other investigators during this era found that LSD may have some interesting potential as a means to facilitate creative problem solving.

Between 1972 and 1990 there were no human studies with psychedelic drugs. Their disappearance was the result of a political backlash that followed the promotion of these drugs by the 1960s counterculture. This reaction not only made these substances illegal for personal use but also made it extremely difficult for researchers to get government approval to study them.

Things began to change in 1990, when “open-minded regulators at the FDA decided to put science before politics when it came to psychedelic and medical marijuana research,” says Rick Doblin, a public policy expert and head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). “FDA openness to research is really the key factor. Also, senior researchers who were influenced by psychedelics in the sixties now are speaking up before they retire and have earned credibility.” Chemist and neuropharmacologist David E. Nichols of Purdue University adds, “Baby boomers who experienced the psychedelic sixties are now mature scientists and clinicians who have retained their curiosity but only recently had the opportunity to reexplore these substances.”

Full Story: Scientific American.

(via Nerdshit).

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This Florida based Gulfstream II jet aircraft # N987SA crash landed on September 24, 2007 after it ran out of fuel over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula it had a cargo of several tons of Cocaine on board now documents have turned up on both sides of the Atlantic that link this Cocaine Smuggling Gulfstream II jet aircraft # N987SA that crashed in Mexico to the CIA who used it on at least 3 rendition flights from Europe and the USA to Guantanamo’s infamous torture chambers between 2003 to 2005.

Full Story: redstatehatemonitor.

Via OVO, where many more links are provided.

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OK I swear I’m going to lay off RP after this one last post:

Yes, Ron Paul is very popular among the quack-friendly set, particularly those tending to see a conspiracy between the FDA, FTC, and big pharma to keep them from selling their favorite nostrums. There’s good reason for that, given how staunch a supporter of “health freedom” he’s been over the years. What a wonderfully Orwellian term! After all, who could be against “health freedom”? If you are, you’re against freedom! It’s like being against free speech, mom, the flag, and apple pie. In actuality, “health freedom” is nothing more than a clever catch phrase that in effect describes measures that allow quacks the freedom to hawk their wares unfettered by pesky interference from the FDA or FTC.

[…]

The distribution of scientific articles is not prohibited. What is prohibited is cherry picking the literature for articles to use in advertisements to support unfounded claims that supplements can cure or prevent disease. But, his apparently dull facade notwithstanding, Dr. Paul is a master of spin, if nothing else. He’s quick to wrap his support for quackery in the mantle of the First Amendmen.

[…]

Right. Because the FTC and FDA are so effective in prosecuting manufacturers and supplement sellers for making exaggerated claims. That must be why Kevin Trudeau, after having been convicted of just such behavior, is now out there, happy as a pig in mud, hauling in money hand over fist selling books that make all sorts of exaggerated or false claims for dietary supplements and various “alternative” therapies. It’s probably why woo-meisters like Dr. Mercola and Mike Adams run popular and profitable websites hawking supplements and various other unscientific remedies with apparently no interference from the FDA.

Now, I support any adults freedom to eat whatever herbs, chemicals, or whatever they choose. And I support their right to sell whatever supplements, drugs, etc. they want. But I don’t think they should be able to make untrue claims - this isn’t “free speech” issue any more than telling someone you’ll sell them a working car and then selling them a car that won’t start is a “free speech” issue. That doesn’t mean there can’t be a fine print “gotcha” (”these claims not supported by the FDA”), which is the status quo.

Full Story: Respectful Insolence.

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So just how dangerous is police work? Generally, police are about three times as likely to be killed on the job as the average American. It isn’t among the top ten most dangerous professions, falling well behind logging, fishing, driving a cab, trash collecting, farming, and truck driving. Moreover, about half of police killed on the job are killed in traffic accidents, and most of those are not while in pursuit of a criminal or rushing to the scene of a crime. I don’t point this out to diminish the tragedy of those cops killed in routine traffic accidents. My point is that the number of annual on-the-job police fatalities doesn’t justify giving cops bigger guns, military equipment, and allowing them to use more aggressive and increasingly militaristic tactics. A military-issue weapon isn’t going to prevent traffic accidents. In this context, then, it makes sense to remove from consideration deaths not directly attributable to the bad guys.

So take out traffic accidents and other non-violent deaths, and you’re left with 69 officers killed on the job by criminals last year. That’s out of about 850,000 officers nationwide. That breaks down to about 8 deaths per 100,000 officers, or less than twice the national average of on-the-job fatalities.

[…]

Twice the national average means police work certainly carries added risk. But is it the kind of risk that justifies, for example, a more than 1,000 percent increase in the use of SWAT teams over the last 25 years? […] Of course, if policymakers were really serious about protecting police officers, there’s one thing they could do that would have a dramatic, immediate impact on officer safety: They could end the drug war.

Full Story: Hit and Run.

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