Thoughts from the void: Cannabis and Equity

"Hear me, people: We have now to deal with another race - small and feeble with our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules which the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule." - Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference in 1877.

'Even as people buy weed from legal retailers across the country, police arrest people for marijuana possession in larger numbers than they do those charged with a violent crime.

Numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime Report show that in 2019, the latest year available, police across the country made 545,602 arrests for marijuana-related offenses. Of those, 92 percent - or 500,395 arrests - were for possession offenses only.

In contrast, a total of 495,871 were arrested for violent crimes. In a news release about the FBI data, NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri noted that a marijuana possession arrest is made every 58 seconds in the U.S.'

- Green Entrepreneur

'There is a lot of wreckage in the fast lane these days. Not even the rich feel safe from it, and people are looking for reasons. The smart say they can't understand it, and the dumb snort cocaine in rich discos and stomp to a feverish beat. Which is heard all over the country, or at least felt. The stomping of the rich is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times. It usually feels they are feeling anxious or confused about something, and when the rich feel anxious and confused, they act like wild animals.

That is the situation in Palm Beach these days, and the natives are not happy with it. There is trouble on all fronts. Profits are down, the whole concept of personal privacy has gone up for grabs, and the president might be a fool. That is not the kind of news these people want to hear, or even think about. Municipal bonds and dividend checks are the lifeblood of this town, and the flow shall not be interrupted for any reason.

Nor shall privacy be breached. The rich have certain rules, and these are two of the big ones: maintain the privacy and the pipeline at all costs - although not necessarily in that order - it depends on the situation, they say;'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

While on the surface, it appears that cannabis prohibition is racial discrimination by White people against all other races, the truth is a little different. Yes, it is true that a significant amount of prohibition has been as a result of White discrimination against Blacks, Asiatics (including the Native Americans and indigenous tribes of Australia and New Zealand), as well as the Hispanics. But that does not explain the prohibition in countries with relatively homogeneous skin colors. So what explains this?

The essence of cannabis prohibition is discrimination by the ruling and upper classes - the so-called elites - against all the other classes in society. In many places, the Whites form these upper classes, but in even more places, there are no Whites, at least not in terms of skin color. Here, the Whites are those who possess the material wealth and power to impose their rules on the rest of society. They establish a class order through which they control all the other classes, enslaving them and making them to work for the elites, with the goal of making the rich richer. Opium, alcohol, tobacco, synthetic legal and illegal pharmaceutical drugs, the police and judiciary, orthodox religious rituals and scriptures, all these are tools used by the elites to control the rest. The prohibition of cannabis is a key part of this scheme of things. Cannabis was the intoxicant, medicine, entheogen, and means of income and subsistence for the working and laboring classes, the poor, the sick, the indigenous communities, and the religious mendicants who believed in a spirituality that shunned orthodox religious practices and organizations. With cannabis, one had no need for king, priest, soldier, policeman or businessman.

The foundations of cannabis prohibition are built on racial, social and economic discrimination. It started in the British colonies of Burma, or today's Myanmar, India, Trinidad, Greece and Egypt in the 19th century, scaled up in the US in the 1930s, and subsequently spread worldwide. Even though a pilot run was done in Burma by the British, it was in India, the land of ganja, that this strategy was fine tuned, and then launched all over the world. Ganja, until the 19th century, was intrinsic to India's social, religious, economic and medical practices, having been so for thousands of years. The Indian elites in the 19th century were, however, largely people who had moved into India much later than the earlier inhabitants of India. Even though these elites tried to impose their class and caste system on the majority of Indians, they failed simply because of the deep-rooted nature of India's culture and traditions, including the ganja culture and tradition, and the sheer majority of the non-elite classes. However, with the arrival of the British, all this changed. The British teamed up with the Indian elites, using their combination of potent weapons - material wealth and power, opium, alcohol, tobacco, synthetic legal and illegal pharmaceutical drugs, the police, army, judiciary, orthodox religious rituals and scriptures, and insatiable greed for further material wealth and power - to remove the biggest hurdle that stood between them and the achievement of their goals, cannabis, or to be more specific, ganja. When cannabis prohibition was imposed in India, the argument supporting it said that only the poorer classes, the working classes, minorities and religious mendicants used it. People from the elite classes preferred alcohol and opium. Therefore, imposing cannabis prohibition would not hurt anyone, anyone that mattered to the government at least, knowing fully well the fact that the majority of Indians belonged to at least one of the categories that did not matter. One of the powerful arguments that enabled the ruling classes to win over the support of India's elites was the myth that cannabis caused insanity. This myth was proven wrong in the 19th century itself, ironically by the very Commission set up to explore the feasibility of cannabis prohibition in India. But nobody was listening. The Commission wrote in its report in 1895 that -"Over and over again the statistics of Indian asylums have been referred to in official documents or scientific treatises not only in this country, but also in other countries where the use of these drugs has demanded attention. Other alleged effects of the drugs have attracted but little attention compared with their alleged connection with insanity."

The reasons cited for the initial steps to prohibit cannabis in the US and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s was that native American Indians, Black, Chinese and Hispanic people used cannabis, and were trying to get White people also to use it. White men would become insane, and White women would get seduced by the colored people. Of course, the real reasons for prohibition were purely commercial. British colonialists saw prohibition of cannabis in their colonies as a boost for their opium, tobacco and western alcohol businesses. In the US and Canada, powerful businessmen like William Randolph Hearst and their friends in the government, such as Harry J Anslinger, pushed through cannabis prohibition, to aid the newly emerging petrochemical, pharmaceutical, tobacco, paper and construction industry, and to aid the alcohol industry re-emerging from a decade of prohibition. The argument that cannabis was a drug used by the vilest and most dangerous sections of society, that it caused insanity, helped to more or less unanimously win over not just the White people in the USA and Europe, but also the elites all over the world with their inherent racial paranoia, guilt, insecurities and desire for wealth and domination over all other classes.

Since that fateful period, the prohibition of cannabis has inflicted vast injustices, not only on minorities, poorer classes and the working classes, but also on women, the youth, the sick and the elderly. Cannabis prohibition was suddenly seen as a way through which economically powerful ruling sections of society could control, coerce and punish members of all other groups everywhere, in every country through the use of law enforcement and drug enforcement, two of the arms of governments. Cannabis was a way in which patriarchal societies could punish liberal women. Cannabis was a way in which older members of society could keep the wild and exuberant youth, with their ideas of love, peace and freedom, on a tight leash. As the industries opposed to cannabis benefiting from cannabis prohibition grew and became immensely wealthy, they worked with law makers to ensure that cannabis stayed prohibited worldwide.

It is not that the ruling elites and the racial majorities shun the plant, their usage rates are much higher than that of the minorities and poor. They have the money to buy the plant from the black market, no matter what the cost, since the illicit cultivator and peddler essentially work for them, and they have the influence to escape legal action since the judiciary and law enforcement work for them. Of course, they also have the alcohol, tobacco, designer drugs heroin, cocaine, and recently, methamphetamine, novel psychotropic substances, non-medical use of prescription drugs and fentanyl, which they are able to afford and access, besides the plant that they disdainfully call "weed" showing their contempt for it and its users. It is only the minorities and poor that end up in prison, lose jobs, become homeless, face prolonged law enforcement and judicial action, etc., while the affluent continue as if everything is normal everywhere. Through prohibition, the elites have essentially wrested control of the magical cannabis plant, and thus control over the world.

One of the biggest drivers of cannabis legalization is that, with it, there will be an end to the discrimination against poor, working class, minority or colored people worldwide by law enforcement implementing cannabis related laws in a biased manner based on racial, social and economic criteria. With legalization, the intent is that the millions who are living in prisons worldwide or under trial or in drug rehabilitation centers, can be released so that they can go back home to try and resume normalcy. With legalization, the intent is that prison records can be expunged so that these persons can be employed and can earn a living. With legalization, the intent is that no person is discriminated against while applying for a job, or at the workplace, on the basis of their cannabis usage. With legalization, the intent is that no person will suffer or die from an illness that can be cured by cannabis. With legalization, the intent is that no person will suffer or die from alcohol, tobacco, and legal and illegal synthetic drugs. With legalization, the intent is that no person who wishes to practice spirituality through it will be denied. Equity in cannabis talks about these poor and the minorities getting support, and preference, to start businesses in the legal cannabis industry. Equity in cannabis is about enabling and empowering the many, struggling to make ends meet by growing and selling cannabis in the black market, to be able to come out in the open, and do business in a legal environment free from coercion and exploitation.

The ground realities are however still very different from the objectives. To rub salt in the wounds of the world's majority, who have been discriminated against on the basis of cannabis, the very same people, who went about implementing the prohibition and the discrimination, are now reaping the benefits of the cannabis legalization that people fought for, over decades through grass roots level movements. We are seeing in many places that wealthy or well placed white folk or rich businessmen are the ones getting a lion's share of the cannabis industry pie, its licenses, regulatory support and its revenues through global cannabis companies and industry funding while colored people, poor farmers, minorities and indigenous people continue to struggle. Businesses with deep pockets, politicians, even the liquor, tobacco and pharma businesses are entering into the newly legalized cannabis space in the US and Canada. Multi-state and multi-national operators, working with governments, are building large scale companies that monopolize cannabis cultivation, including in many of the world's poorest countries, and exporting the produce for retail to the very same wealthy countries in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific that played the biggest hand in cannabis prohibition, while the local people remain without access or face the same harsh laws. We see the emergence of the medical cannabis industry, an industry essentially created for, and controlled by the elites, who consume cannabis as a pharmaceutical drug, a drug which only they can access and afford.

Release from prison, expungement of criminal records, and a cessation of harassment of poor and minority folk by law enforcement itself will go a long way in healing the wounds of those discriminated against, but legal recreational cannabis, with home growing for individuals, will be the best medicine. Many advocacy groups have worked to highlight the situation, and have pushed politicians to make the corrections in the US. Tragically, the rest of the world continues to wage the cannabis war on its peoples - especially the poor, the minorities and the indigenous people - while the perpetrators themselves work furiously to maintain the status quo. It is very interesting that the UN and its human rights body, UNHRC, remain completely silent on the subject of cannabis related violation of human rights. The racial, social and economic discrimination through cannabis prohibition is, by far, the largest violation of human rights in the world.

Listed below are articles taken from various media related to the above subject. Words in italics are the thoughts of your truly at the time of reading the article.

'Federal officials in 2022 charged fewer people with marijuana-related offenses than they had in previous years, according to data compiled by the US Sentencing Commission in its latest Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics.

Just over 800 people were charged with violating federal marijuana laws in 2022. Ninety-nine percent of those charged were indicted for drug trafficking. Overall, those charged for marijuana-related violations comprised just four percent of all federal drug offenders.

Those totals represent a significant decrease from a decade ago, when federal officials charged nearly 7,000 people for violating federal marijuana laws. At that time, more people were federally indicted for marijuana offenses than for any other drug-related offense. However, since 2012, the number of people federally prosecuted for marijuana-related violations has fallen steadily.

In total, 32 percent of all people federally prosecuted in 2022 were charged with drug law violations.'

https://norml.org/news/2023/03/30/fewer-federal-offenders-charged-with-marijuana-related-offenses-in-2022/

Data assessing the relationship between in utero cannabis exposure and various neonatal outcomes, such as birth weight, is inconsistent. However, longitudinal data indicates that cannabis exposure is rarely independently linked with adverse neurodevelopmental consequences, finding, “Although there is a theoretical potential for cannabis to interfere with neurodevelopment, human data drawn from four prospective cohorts have not identified any long-term or long lasting meaningful differences between children exposed in utero to cannabis and those not.”

Nonetheless, in some states, such as in Oklahoma and Alabama, mothers have been arrested and criminally prosecuted for the use of cannabis during their pregnancy. In total, 24 states and the District of Columbia consider substance use during pregnancy to be child abuse under civil child-welfare statutes, and three consider it grounds for civil commitment, according to data provided by the Guttmacher Policy Review.

https://norml.org/news/2023/03/09/analysis-black-and-hispanic-patients-disproportionately-screened-for-perinatal-cannabis-use/

'In March 1966, after Ali’s draft status was reclassified and he became eligible to serve in the military, the champ made headlines around the world when he refused his induction into the U.S. armed forces, invoking his constitutional right to decline service as a conscientious objector. The Vietnam War was still supported by a majority of Americans at the time; Ali’s decision to speak out against it was hugely controversial, and he was pilloried by politicians and the media as a coward and traitor. “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong,” explained Ali of his motivations. “How can I shoot those poor people? Just take me to jail.”'

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/muhammad-ali-4-ways-he-changed-america

' Bulletin

KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSEMENT: DR. THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN CALLING BUSH "THE SYPHILIS PRESIDENT"
""Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis," the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. "Only a fool or a sucker would vote for a dangerous loser like Bush," Dr. Thompson warned. "He hates everything we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November."

"I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next president of the United States.""

Which is true; I said all those things, and I will say them again. Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart - which is more than even the president's friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.

Bush is a natural born loser with a filthy rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oilmongers. He hates music, football, and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.'

- The Fun-Hogs in the Passing Lane, November 11, 2004, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Results
Two per cent had been charged for drug-related offences, and 37% reported drug offending. Use of cannabis was the primary infraction statistically related to a criminal charge. Having parents with 4+ years university education (14% of the sample) was associated with lower risk for being charged than having parents with no higher education (OR 4.87; 95% CI: 1.16–20.52) or with a short university education (OR 4.76; 1.05–21.48). The association between parental education and drug charges remained stable when controlling for self-reported drug law infractions and other potential covariates.

Conclusion
In Norway, adolescents who have parents with higher university education, may be protected from getting a drug charge, even though they report similar levels of drug law infractions as other adolescents.'

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955395921004047?via%3Dihub

'American Indian communities are increasingly collaborating to get a piece of the explosive growth of the cannabis industry by offering products based on tribal medicine from their ancestral origins.

The partnerships are helping break down longstanding barriers to Indigenous entrepreneurship in the marijuana and hemp industries.

“When we all are doing this together, we all win,” said Chenae Bullock, managing director of New York’s Little Beach Harvest and the Shinnecock Nation cannabis division, which has joined with Tilt Holdings, a Massachusetts-based multistate cannabis operator, to establish a vertically integrated marijuana business on Shinnecock tribal lands.

“I call them ancient trade routes,” she said. “We’ve been doing commerce with tribes since before colonialism.”

Tribes are also joining forces to share expertise.'

https://mjbizdaily.com/american-indian-tribes-building-marijuana-partnerships/

'“The absolute reduction in arrests among states with policy reform could have important implications for social equity. As noted, many argue that the severe consequences of possession convictions are more harmful than the health effects of cannabis use. Policy reform would not only reduce or eliminate monetary fines, but reduce court appearances, jail time, and probation, as well as the associated stigma. Further, with policy reform, steps could and should be taken to remedy cases in which individuals are currently serving time in jails or prisons because of possession arrests… Therefore, the short-term and long-term social equity effects of cannabis policy reform are widespread and multiplicative. Importantly, results suggest that these benefits will not be seen among states that do not implement any policy reform, as disparities in these states continue to increase.”'

https://www.marijuanamoment.net/legalizing-marijuana-reduces-race-based-arrests-american-medical-association-study-finds/

'I meet this American government, or its representative, the state government, directly and face to face once a year - no more - in the person of its taxgatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, "Recognize me"; and the simplest, most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. My civil neighbour, the taxgatherer, is the very man I have to deal with - for it is, after all, with men and not with the parchment that I quarrel - and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbour, for whom he has respect, as a neighbour and well-disciplined man or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighbourliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I can name - if ten honest men only - aye, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is once well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it; that we say is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbour, the State's ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the Council Chamber instead of being threatened with the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts, that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister - though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of her quarrel with her - the Legislature would not wholly waive the subject the following winter.' - Civil Disobedience, Henry D Thoreau, Selected Writings on Nature and Liberty.

'But the real political issues of blocking homegrowing come to light when you follow the money. Goldstein said that many legislators and businesses are “carefully coveting their future marijuana taxes,” as a percentage of sales go back to the state and toward social programs. Additionally, the state has some powerful lobbyists from sectors that you wouldn’t think care about home gardening at all. “In New Jersey there’s a very powerful real estate and insurance sector and those guys have been cagey about homegrow because they would have to alter all their existing rules and regulations and insurance coverage to adapt,” Goldstein said. “They are a powerful lobby amongst legislators, and if they get a little bit cagey, all the sudden, things slow down.”

Large multi-state operators also share some of the blame. Some cannabis producers are already set up in neighboring states or medical markets, and officials at some companies believe keeping homegrow illegal could allow them to set up a near-monopoly on cannabis production in the Garden State.'

https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/states-allow-legal-weed-but-not-homegrowing

'Bloomquist writes like somebody who once bearded Tim Leary in a campus cocktail lounge and paid for all the drinks. And it was probably somebody like Leary who told him with a straight face that sunglasses are known in drug culture as "tea shades."

This is the kind of dangerous gibberish that used to be posted, in the form of mimeographed bulletins, in Police Dept. locker rooms.

Indeed:

Know your Dope Fiend. Your Life May Depend On It! You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from continuously jacking off when he can't find a rape victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Dope Fiend fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command - including yours. Beware. Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time (on him) will actually save nine on you. Good luck.

"The Chief."

- Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Part II...by Raoul Duke, November 25, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Gender equity across the cannabis industry is still lacking – especially in ownership and executive positions.

And it’s a problem that appears to be getting worse.

MJBizDaily recently completed its third annual survey of female and minority participation at all levels of employment in the marijuana and hemp industries and uncovered statistics that show the cannabis sector at all levels of the THC spectrum is falling short.'

https://mjbizdaily.com/female-cannabis-execs-discuss-how-to-achieve-gender-equity/

'The report found that Hispanics are underrepresented in every segment of the legal cannabis industry in the U.S., which is expected to top $30 billion by 2024. For example, Hispanics make up 18.7% of the population, but own only 5.7% of licensed cannabis businesses. The report details the range of barriers Hispanics face at every level of government, including high costs of entry and access to business licenses. '

https://mailchi.mp/nhccouncil/nhcc-report-state-of-the-hispanic-cannabis-industry-in-the-us

'Question Is the legalization of recreational cannabis in the US associated with changes in cannabis use outcomes and cannabis use disorder across racial and ethnic groups?

Findings In this cross-sectional study analyzing repeated yearly surveys of US adults conducted from 2008 to 2017, living in a state after enactment of recreational cannabis laws was associated with increases in the odds of cannabis use within the past year and past month among Hispanic and non-Hispanic White individuals (as well as individuals identifying as Native American, Pacific Islander, Asian, or more than 1 race) compared with the period before the passage of recreational use laws; there were no increases among non-Hispanic Black individuals.

Meaning Cannabis legalization is generally associated with increased use of cannabis and not associated with frequent use or use disorder among cannabis users, including among members of demographic subgroups most affected by criminalization.'

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2784528

'“As more states move toward the sensible policy of legalizing and regulating cannabis, we are seeing a decline in the arrest of non-violent marijuana consumers nationwide,” NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri told Marijuana Moment. “The fight for legalization is a fight for justice. While these numbers represent a historic decline in arrests, even one person being put into handcuffs for the simple possession of marijuana is too many.”

Despite the decline in cannabis busts, the new data shows that American law enforcement still carried out more arrests for marijuana alone last year than for murder, rape, robbery, burglary, fraud and embezzlement combined.'

- NORML

'The inquest ended with a split verdict. Smith's lead paragraph in the October 6 Times read like an obituary: "Monday the inquest into the death of newsman Ruben Salazar ended. The 16-day inquiry, by far the longest and costliest such affair in county history, concluded with a verdict that confuses many, satisfies few and means little. The coroner's jury came up with two verdicts: death was 'at the hands of another person' (four jurors) and death was by 'accident' (three jurors). Thus, inquests might appear to be a waste of time."

A week later, District Attorney Evelle Younger - a staunch Law & Order man - announced that he had reviewed the case and decided that "no criminal charge is justified," despite the unsettling fact two of the three jurors who had voted for the "death by accident" verdict were now saying they had made a mistake.

But by that time nobody really gave a damn. The Chicano community had lost faith in the inquest about midway through the second day, and all the rest of the testimony only reinforced their anger at what most considered an evil whitewash. When the DA announced that no charges would be filed against Wilson, several of the more moderate Chicano spokesmen called for a federal investigation. The militants called for an uprising. And the cops said nothing - at all.'

- Strange Rumblings in Aztlan: The Murder of Ruben Salazar, April 29, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'A small but growing number of states now permit eligible patients to be reimbursed for their medical cannabis-related costs through their workers’ compensation insurance (WCI) plans, according to an analysis of state policies conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Researchers affiliated with the federal agency assessed rules and regulations in 36 states permitting medical cannabis access. They identified six states – Connecticut, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York – that explicitly allow for employees to have their medical cannabis expenses reimbursed. In three of those states – New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York – reimbursements were ordered by the courts earlier this year.

By contrast, authors identified six states where workers’ compensation insurance is expressly prohibited from reimbursing medical marijuana-related costs: Maine, Massachusetts, Florida, North Dakota, Ohio, and Washington. '

https://norml.org/news/2021/09/23/analysis-growing-number-of-states-allow-medical-cannabis-costs-to-be-reimbursed-by-workers-compensation-insurance

'DJ: Have you traveled around the world to study drugs and drug usage in other cultures? How is it different from American culture?

CH: It’s an interesting thing because in the United States we have this racially diverse country, and for better and for worse, in many places, it’s not as racially diverse, but it’s certainly economically diverse and diverse by class. And so, what you see is that, you go to Northern Ireland and you get white people catching hell like brothers and sisters in the US; you go to the Philippines, you see Filipinos who look just like anybody in their society to us, but they’re catching hell because they’re poor; and you go to places like Brazil, they have more Africans outside of the continent of Africa than any place, and you see the brothers and sisters who are dying and catching hell and they’re blaming drugs for their misery, when in fact, it’s police violence, it’s state-sanctioned violence. It’s all those same things that is happening in the United States.

South Africa, same thing is going on in South Africa. You go to Ghana, in Ghana, the prisons there, they look like slave ships. And now they’re talking about legalizing at least cannabis in Ghana and Uganda and some of these other places because they see the potential for money. But again, it’s only the elites in those societies who are really benefiting. The elite are OK. It’s the same shit in our society.'

https://www.leafly.com/news/podcasts/dr-carl-hart-future-of-drugs-in-america

'The group said “the government is accountable for remediating all negative impacts of cannabis prohibition through every aspect of cannabis legalization and policy reform, specifically to ensure that communities disproportionately impacted by the prohibition of cannabis are able to benefit from this multi-billion dollar industry.”

To that end, the group is calling on Congress and President Joe Biden to “remove cannabis, specifically delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (delta-9 THC) and its derivatives, from the Drug Enforcement Agency’s list of controlled substances, to end criminal penalties for cannabis possession and use, and to automatically expunge all past cannabis convictions, including resentencing and restoring all rights particularly voting rights,”

It further implores the administration and lawmakers to “create and update all public policies to reflect that cannabis is medicine and an effective treatment for a variety of health conditions.” That includes “amending policies to specifically protect cannabis patients from THC-based drug screening for access to employment and public resources such as housing, financial assistance, health care and education.”'

https://www.marijuanamoment.net/mayors-across-the-u-s-push-biden-and-congress-to-legalize-marijuana-with-a-focus-on-racial-equity/

'It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I deviate myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say: " I should like to have them order me out to help put down any insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico - see if I would go"; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who did not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war, is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets as naught, as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral and not quite necessary to that life which we have made.' - Civil Disobedience, Henry D Thoreau, Selected Writings on Nature and Liberty.

'In the past 12 months, courts across Ontario have withdrawn or stayed 85 per cent of drug possession charges in the system before they ever reached trial, according to public data analyzed by CBC Toronto.

By comparison, 45 per cent of such charges were dropped in 2019, prior to the pandemic.'

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/drug-charges-dropped-unprecedented-rate-ontario-1.6162632

'While the provisions do represent solid first steps, other issues remain unaddressed by the legislation. As cannabis has been a central pillar of the War on Drugs, addressing the impact on poor and minority communities and undoing the outsized influence which it has had in shaping policing practices will require broad, resource-intensive efforts which are not proposed in the current version.

As New Frontier Data has previously reported, while both White and Black cannabis consumers demonstrate roughly equal rates of use, Black consumers nationwide are 3.6x more likely than are White consumers to be arrested for cannabis-related offenses. Furthermore, despite the legalization of cannabis leading to a reduction in the overall number of those arrests, racial disparities remain among arrests still taking place. New Frontier Data found that in Colorado between 2008 – 2017, Black consumers were still 1.5x more likely to be arrested than were White consumers. Further, despite the increasing liberalization of cannabis laws, there were nearly 362,000 arrests for cannabis possession in 2019, a rate of almost a thousand per day.'

https://newfrontierdata.com/cannabis-insights/social-equity-and-the-proposed-cannabis-administration-and-opportunity-act/

'When it comes to the war on drugs, there’s no need for further research to prove that such criminalization has disproportionately impacted communities of color, a top federal drug official said in a new interview.

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Director Nora Volkow has on several recent occasions discussed the harms of the drug war and the need to take an alternative approach, in part by decriminalizing substance misuse and promoting treatment through a public health-focused model.'

https://www.marijuanamoment.net/top-federal-drug-official-says-we-dont-need-more-research-to-show-criminalizations-racist-impact/

'The Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in Michigan joined the state’s recreational cannabis market.

According to the Record Eagle of Traverse City, a tribal ordinance approved in 2019 by members went into effect on Aug. 29 and will allow tribal-controlled businesses to develop vertically integrated company models.

Adult-use businesses will be allowed on Grand Traverse Band (GTB) lands in northern Michigan encompassing six counties.

According to the Record Eagle, the tribe’s entry into the adult-use industry follows many other Native American tribes across the U.S., including several others in Michigan'

https://mjbizdaily.com/another-tribe-entering-michigans-recreational-cannabis-market/

'Although Nixon declared the war on drugs on June 17, 1971, the U.S. already had lots of practice imposing drug prohibitions that had racially skewed impacts. The arrival of Chinese migrants in the 1800s saw the rise of criminalizing opium that migrants brought with them. Cannabis went from being called “reefer” to “marijuana,” as a way to associate the plant with Mexican migrants arriving in the U.S. in the 1930s.

By the time Nixon sought reelection amid the anti-Vietnam War and Black power movements, criminalizing heroin was a way to target activists and hippies. One of Nixon’s domestic policy aides, John Ehrlichman, admitted as much about the war on drugs in a 22-year-old interview published by Harper’s Magazine in 2016.

Experts say Nixon’s successors, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, leveraged drug war policies in the following decades to their own political advantage, cementing the drug war’s legacy. The explosion of the U.S. incarceration rate, the expansion of public and private prison systems and the militarization of local police forces are all outgrowths of the drug war.'

https://apnews.com/article/war-on-drugs-75e61c224de3a394235df80de7d70b70

'Economics and barriers to entry in the legal and illicit markets couldn’t be wider.

An illegal 1,000- to 2,000-square-foot grow can be set up in only a few weeks.

The Orange County grower said it costs him about $1,500 to $2,000 in rent, electricity, equipment, nutrients and labor to operate one grow in the coastal county.

By contrast, a similar setup in the legal market would take more than two years in the licensing process and cost about $1 million, according to the Orange County grower and other industry sources.

High capital, licensing and operational costs, coupled with higher prices for legal cannabis, have been devastating for licensed businesses.

“Regulations and tax rates need to change drastically for the legal market to surpass the illegal one,” industry consultant Joey Espinoza said. “It truly comes down to economics.”'

https://mjbizdaily.com/why-3-illicit-marijuana-operators-decline-to-go-legal-in-california/

'With millions of black ex-felons unable to vote because of their marijuana possession convictions, the status quo is rightly called "the New Jim Crow."

Thankfully, in the last few years states are recognizing the built-in racism in this prohibition. They are working to ensure that communities of color, having paid the dearest price for our war on marijuana, are the first to see the benefits of the newly legalized market, and that portions of the tax revenue raised from new cannabis sales are reinvested in the communities most ravaged by our War on Drugs. We also need to clear the records of people with marijuana convictions, something the governors of Illinois and Washington have made a priority. '

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/30/opinions/its-time-to-legalize-marijuana-rick-steves/index.html

'All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right, but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the actions of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.' - Civil Disobedience, Henry D Thoreau, Selected Writings on Nature and Liberty.

'As states continue to legalize cannabis, equity must be woven into the fabric of legalization laws and policies at the state and federal level.

While policymakers debate what’s right for their state, real people sit in prison, face unfair barriers to jobs and educational opportunities, and suffer thousands of potential negative consequences from laws and policies that may remain in place even after legalization.

Seeds of Change was created to spark a conversation and help the cannabis industry deliver transformative justice to those who need it most. '

https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/leafly-seeds-of-change-2021-report-rates-states-on-marijuana-equity

' “Equity in cannabis isn’t an elusive pipe dream: Seeds of Change lays out eight real strategies that any state can include within cannabis legalization to build an industry that is as accessible as it is profitable. We believe that the cannabis industry’s responsibility to reckon with the enduring damage of the War on Drugs is also our greatest opportunity. If we craft legalization that centralizes social and economic justice, we can create thriving and robust cannabis markets that will fuel real change in our country,” said Yoko Miyashita, CEO of Leafly.

The 2021 Leafly Seeds of Change report includes additional details and data on the eight social equity strategies for cannabis legalization and concludes with an examination of systemic racial discrimination policies in the United States that have prevented the cannabis industry from becoming equitable, namely the failed War on Drugs, generational economic barriers, and the over-policing of communities of color. In addition to the policy areas it outlines, Seeds of Change also provides academic resources for policymakers and engagement opportunities for readers.'

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210624005110/en/Leafly-Launches-New-Report-to-Score-Legalized-Cannabis-Markets-on-Social-Justice/

'Today, the majority of Americans support both the rights of queer people and comprehensive cannabis legalization. 76% of Americans say they are pro-LGBTQ+, while 68% of Americans support cannabis legalization.

We’ve got a long way to go, but it’s important to celebrate the little victories and appreciate activists in both cannabis legalization and LGBTQIA+ rights. They are the people that have helped us get to where we are today.

The future is brighter, safer, and more just for cannabis users and for queer people, as long as we never stop fighting for what’s right and never stop confronting the work we still need to do as a community and as a country.'

https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/is-weed-gay-cultural-history

'The international policy process does not fare any better, with existing conventions built on a view of illegal drugs that is “increasingly at odds with current knowledge” (p. 218), and to a large extent reflecting a US desire to globalise their own policies. The international war on drugs has “often served as a flexible instrument for forwarding general American policy interests” (p.214); cannabis was included in the 1961 convention under “heavy international pressure” so as to “globalize the [American] Marijuana Tax Act” (p.205); the 1971 convention was established “as a reaction to the rise of youth counterculture of the late 1960s” (p.214); and poor nations are regularly threatened with “serious fiscal and reputational consequences” (p.215) if they fail to comply with US policy requests.'

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1515/nsad-2015-0034

'Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the "Duty of Submission to Civil Government" resolves all civil obligations into expediency; and he proceeds to say "that so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconvenience, it is the will of God that the established government be obeyed, and no longer... This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other." Of this, he says, every man shall judge of himself. But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves and make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.

In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does anyone think that Massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis?

A drab of state, a cloth-o'-silver slut,
To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt'

- Civil Disobedience, Henry D Thoreau, Selected Writings on Nature and Liberty.

'The Misuse of Drugs Act (1971) is not fit for purpose. For 50 years, it has failed to reduce drug consumption. Instead it has increased harm, damaged public health and exacerbated social inequalities.

Change cannot be delayed any longer. We need reform and new legislation to ensure that future drug policy protects human rights, promotes public health and ensures social justice.'

https://transformdrugs.org/mda-at-50/parliamentary-support

'Black people are 12 times more likely to be prosecuted for cannabis possession than white people, according to new analysis by the Liberal Democrats who are calling for an end to the use of Stop and Search for small amounts.

Brian Paddick, the former police chief who is the party’s home affairs spokesperson in the House of Lords, warned that the focus on canabis possession for personal use is “a waste of police and court time” and “undermines trust and confidence in the police among Black communities”.'

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/black-people-cannabis-prosecutions-b1853669.html

Legalize ganja aka marijuana aka cannabis aka bhang aka hashish. Make it legal for 21 years and above if you're really concerned about the youth who will probably be better off with ganja than with tobacco or alcohol or pharmaceutical drugs. For you money hungry businessmen make it your business and earn beyond your wildest dreams. Researchers and pharma companies, please research the topic, it may make you jobless however as you are probably well aware. The number of people in India facing persecution because of ganja especially young people and poor farmers is terrible. Police and law makers please educate yourself on the subject first and foremost rather than harassing the young and economically weak while the real criminals in their cars, coats and ties are glorified. I suspect that at least half the prisoners and court cases in this country are linked to the useless misdirected expenditure of legal energy towards controlling the herb. Society will be much better off if this energy is directed towards removing and banning all kinds of arms and weaponry from the country. The links below to articles in the media archives shows our general attitude at a time when there is increasing awareness and maturity in the rest of the world. This is ironic considering it is one of our most ancient indigenous herbs and medications. If you think Indians love sex but act in public like its the worst sin then check out the attitude towards ganja... Indian hypocrisy and ignorance at its best..

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Cannabis-Marijuana-Ganja;

http://www.deccanherald.com/search.php?cx=partner-pub-6098511427863223%3A4rvf9i-8j92&cof=FORID%3A10&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=cannabis&sa=Search&siteurl=www.deccanherald.com%2F&ref=www.google.co.in%2F&ss=3387j2895471j8;

http://www.deccanherald.com/search.php?cx=partner-pub-6098511427863223%3A4rvf9i-8j92&cof=FORID%3A10&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=ganja&sa=Search&siteurl=www.deccanherald.com%2F&ref=www.google.co.in%2F&ss=1312j583578j5;

http://www.deccanherald.com/search.php?cx=partner-pub-6098511427863223%3A4rvf9i-8j92&cof=FORID%3A10&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=marijuana&sa=Search&siteurl=www.deccanherald.com%2F&ref=www.google.co.in%2F&ss=1812j673664j9

http://indianexpress.com/?s=ganja; http://indianexpress.com/?s=cannabis; http://indianexpress.com/?s=marijuana

Every country denies the human rights of its cannabis users by keeping cannabis illegal..cannabis prohibition is one of the foremost weapons used by states to discriminate against and suppress minority groups - religious, ethnic and economic.

May 18, 2021 4:53:46pm

'Council members decided 15 to 1 in favor of the measure, Bill No. 200625, which “prohibits employers from requiring prospective employees to undergo testing for the presence of marijuana as a condition of employment, under certain terms and conditions.” Employees in certain safety sensitive positions, such as police officers and/or those who supervise children or medical patients, will be exempt from the policy, as will those mandated to be drug tested under federal drug testing guidelines. City Mayor Jim Kenney is expected to sign the bill into law. It would take effect on January 1, 2022.'

https://norml.org/blog/2021/04/23/philadelphia-city-council-votes-to-prohibit-pre-employment-drug-screening-for-cannabis/

'Scott, a 26-year-old Black man, was arrested on March 14 on a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge in Allen, Texas. Authorities say he had less than 2 ounces of marijuana on him at the time of the arrest. Following his arrest, he was taken to the hospital for acting erratically, police said, and transported to a county jail. He died later that day.

Seven detention officers have now been fired for their alleged involvement in Scott's death. Scott’s family says he had schizophrenia and was experiencing a mental health crisis while in custody. Officers said he began behaving strangely at the jail and they strapped him to a bed, used pepper spray and covered his face with a spit mask. The Collin County medical examiner has yet to release an official cause of death.'

https://abcnews.go.com/US/death-marvin-scott-texas-jail-advocates-point-disparities/story?id=76833227

'For several years, legal-weed jurisdictions have tried to support equity businesses by prioritizing them for licenses, various forms of financial support, and other benefits. The approach, which New York and New Jersey are generally following, hasn’t worked, and as the MSOs [multi-state operators] expand, the odds grow slimmer that they will. (New Jersey’s market could open in a few months, while New Yorkers probably have to wait until 2022. In the meantime, recreational marijuana use has now been decriminalized in both states.)'

https://slate.com/business/2021/04/marijuana-cannabis-legaization-new-york-new-jersey-equity-businesses.html

The poor and labouring classes, who have been forced back to the villages by the changes in the world, must try and redefine their way of life. They must look at agriculture once again as an option for livelihood. Whoever has the means to practice agriculture, must do so. They must endeavor to become sustainable through the most important occupation in the world. The lure of the big cities, with their dreams of big money made fast, must be resisted as much as possible. If each displaced family or individual can try and become self sustainable through agriculture at the rural level, the chances of the world becoming sustainable greatly increase. Working on the land brings far greater riches in terms of the fruits of labour, health and contentment, than any other form of toil does. The push to force the migration of rural people to cities and the promise of a better life in the city, must be reduced. Sustainability must grow from the grassroots once again. Agriculture is the grassroots.

Updated Apr 19, 2021 11:41:55am

'Black and Native women suffer disproportionately from inflated arrest rates due to the war on drugs. Women in prison often lose sovereignty over their bodies and many struggle to receive all their rights back when they emerge. Help end the racist drug war that affects people of color more than white people.'

https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/how-to-show-up-for-women-and-minorities-in-cannabis

'Black and Brown New Yorkers were the most impacted by marijuana-related arrests in 2020, NYPD data shows, something the Legal Aid Society is using as a springboard to call for the enactment of the Marijuana Regulation And Taxation Act.

With the data showing that 94% of all arrests relating to weed impacted people of color in the five boroughs, the organization representing the poorest New Yorkers pro bono says the state bill is an opportunity to end what they believe is a racist practice in law enforcement, and give back to these communities.'

https://www.amny.com/news/people-of-color-made-up-94-of-marijuana-arrests-by-nypd-in-2020-data-and-legal-aid-says/

'The Oakland and L.A. social equity programs were two of the first in the nation to launch.

But while Oakland’s program has been largely a success to date, L.A. has struggled to satisfy stakeholders, many of whom are worse off now financially than when they began the social equity qualification process.

The biggest differences, according to stakeholders, are:

- L.A.’s mandate that license applicants have real estate lined up before filing paperwork – a major financial burden as applicants have had to wait more than a year for the permitting process to be completed.
- The wide range of financial and logistical support offered to participants in Oakland.'

https://mjbizdaily.com/los-angeles-and-oakland-took-disparate-approaches-to-cannabis-social-equity/

'“Today, the long-term harm of cannabis prohibition in communities of color throughout the country is profound,” the document continues. “As we look to solutions to provide healing, the dangerous policing tactics that were developed to execute the war on marijuana, including no-knock warrants and other aggressive tactics, shock the nation and have led us to historic levels of mistrust. When a large majority of Americans no longer believe cannabis should be illegal, aggressive enforcement tactics quickly lose support. A general pardon of all former and current federal non-violent cannabis offenders would be the kind of grand, ambitious, and impactful action that would effectively signal to marginalized communities that their suffering is seen and that the government seeks to remedy their harms.”'

https://lawandcrime.com/drug-policy/marijuana-and-racial-justice-advocates-call-on-biden-to-issue-categorical-pardon-grants-to-non-violent-cannabis-offenders/

'"States and localities should be doing all they can to implement cannabis reform in an equitable manner, but, ultimately, we need national leadership. The federal government started the war on marijuana, and it must be the one to end it,” they wrote.

“It is the only entity that can remove cannabis from the list of Schedule I controlled substances, allow more scientific research and give banks legal cover to provide cannabis-related business loans,” they continued. “When the federal government eventually enacts marijuana reform, we hope it will do so with social justice and racial equity as primary goals and that this victory will mark the beginning of an end to the war on drugs.”'

https://news.rice.edu/2021/02/12/marijuana-policy-will-remain-racially-inequitable-without-federal-intervention-experts-say/

'Harry J. Anslinger retired from the now-defunct Federal Bureau of Narcotics 60 years ago, but he remains the ultimate boogey man of every pot smoker in the world—a kind of atavistic “human paraquat” whose overt racism and institutional cruelty remains at the heart of the ongoing global War on Drugs.

Anslinger returned to public consciousness last week with the release (on Hulu) of The United States vs. Billie Holiday, a new film from Lee Daniels (Push, Empire) telling the true story of how America’s first “drug czar” used the full power of federal law enforcement to target the legendary jazz singer for multiple arrests, ultimately hounding her into an early grave.'

https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/why-marijuana-greatest-villain-hounded-billie-holiday-to-death

In the US, persons of color are more than 3.5 times likely to face legal action for cannabis related offenses. This is one of the key factors driving legalization which is seen as a means to restore racial justice and correct the wrongs of the past. Indians, smug in their thinking that they do not have such issues and living in alternate realities, should examine the proportion of minorities, especially Muslims, Dalits and indigenous communities that are in prison or under trial for cannabis related offenses. I am sure that there will be a much higher proportion of these demographics facing legal action than there are in the general population...

Mar 08, 2021 4:39:55pm

'Ann Fordham, executive director of the International Drug Policy Consortium, welcomed the “long overdue recognition that cannabis is a medicine” from the international body.

“However, this reform alone is far from adequate given that cannabis remains incorrectly scheduled at the international level,” she said. “The original decision to prohibit cannabis lacked scientific basis and was rooted in colonial prejudice and racism. It disregarded the rights and traditions of communities that have been growing and using cannabis for medicinal, therapeutic, religious and cultural purposes for centuries and has led to millions being criminalized and incarcerated across the globe. The review process has been a missed opportunity to correct that historical error.”'

https://www.marijuanamoment.net/united-nations-removes-marijuana-from-most-strict-global-drug-category-with-u-s-support/

'The cooperative farming model is another factor fueling optimism that more farmers will get their own brands.

Under this approach, small farms band together and share the costs of packaging, labeling, manufacturing and other functions needed to get their crops and products to market.

“I strongly believe the co-op model is going to grow in importance and value in coming years, especially for small growers,” said Scott Watkins, a consultant and principal at Buildaberg in Trinity County.

Watkins reckons that co-ops, combined with the appellations program, will provide a great foundation for more farmers to work together to overcome the financial obstacles in California’s current market landscape, such as securing commercial space to package flower or manufacture pre-rolls.'

https://mjbizdaily.com/appellation-program-and-cooperatives-might-boost-small-california-cannabis-farmers/

'Since the Reagan-era escalation of the war on drugs, severe criminal penalties for drug possession have fueled a huge growth in the prison population, with particularly devastating consequences for many Black communities, where both penalties and policing have been harsher than for Whites. Using the criminal justice system as the primary tool to curb the sale and use of illicit substances has had astronomical costs without the desired effects.'

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-beyond-time-to-end-the-war-on-drugs-voters-agree/2020/11/12/84588e06-245a-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html

'This research aims to enhance our understanding of the relationship between racial prejudice and White Americans’ views on cannabis legalization. The recent legalization of recreational cannabis in a handful of states, along with many other states legalizing medical cannabis in recent years, has catapulted the flowering plant back into the spotlight and nightly news cycles. Given the historically racist propaganda used to criminalize the plant, it follows that Whites’ support for legalization may be associated with racial prejudice. Using data from the General Social Survey data from 1972–2018, we find that different forms of racial prejudice have a negative effect on Whites’ support for cannabis legalization generally. Additionally, as the negative effect of overt, old-fashioned racism diminishes over time and across birth cohorts it is supplanted by the more subtle laissez-faire racism. In conclusion, we discuss the implication of the relationship between racial prejudice and views on marijuana for the increasingly complicated racial dynamics surrounding cannabis legalization'

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/article/puff-puff-pass/86466190D242C140E19971F17D8110FD

'Results
With just one exception, we find that both Black and Indigenous people are over-represented amongst those arrested for cannabis possession across the five cities examined.

Conclusions
Canadian cannabis legalization lacks measures to redress the racialized harms caused by the war on drugs because the full extent of these harms remains largely unknown. Broader collection and dissemination of disaggregated criminal justice data is needed in the Canadian context in order to inform criminal justice and social policy.'

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0955395920302760

'Overview. The legalization of medical and adult-use marijuana has become widespread in the United States and has stimulated an urgent discussion about creating social equity programs to benefit individuals and communities damaged by the long-running War on Drugs. The National Association of Cannabis Businesses (NACB) has examined current state and municipal social equity plans to understand their diverse approaches and identify their keys to success. We believe our work is timely and will give policymakers a roadmap to leveraging the legal marijuana industry to create new minority-owned businesses, thousands of jobs, and substantial tax revenues to strengthen their own communities.

The goal of social equity laws is to ensure that people from communities disproportionately harmed by marijuana prohibition and discriminatory law enforcement are included in the new legal marijuana industry. Policymakers are working to address criticisms that outsiders are setting up legal cannabis businesses and profiting by doing the same things their less fortunate neighbors were arrested and given jailtime for just a few years ago.'

https://www.nacb.com/social-equity

'As states across the country decriminalize and legalize the use of cannabis, the rapid growth of the cannabis industry is largely enjoyed solely by white Americans. Though cannabis use is similar across race, Black Americans are 3.7 times more likely than white people to be arrested for possession. It is crucial that people who have previously been convicted of a cannabis-related offense also enjoy the benefits afforded by decriminalization.

This toolkit provides three plausible legal routes — expungement, sealing, and vacating — one can take to begin repairing the consequences of marijuana-related records on vulnerable communities.

Varying state laws, immigration consequences, and the expense of record expungement are all things that must be considered when determining the best strategy for either expunging, sealing, or vacating records.

Over the past few years, significant progress has been made to address the expungement of certain cannabis-related convictions. States like Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, and Washington, among others, have voted to authorize record relief for cannabis offenses. New Jersey, Illinois, and New York have authorized automatic processes. We encourage everyone to explore creative options within your own jurisdictions. We also encourage advocates to help uplift the importance of automatic expungement within states. The Expungement Now: A Post-Conviction Toolkit for Attorneys and Advocates, provides messaging tools, facts, sample tweets, and tips for writing and placing an op-ed in a local newspaper to assist local advocates who seek reform.'

https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Expungement-Now-Toolkit-FINAL.pdf

'According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, police made 545,602 arrests for marijuana-related violations in 2019. That total is nine percent higher than the total number of persons arrested for the commission of violent crimes (495,871). Of those arrested for cannabis-related activities, some 92 percent (500,395) were arrested for marijuana possession offenses only.

“Police across America make a marijuana-related arrest every 58 seconds,” NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri said. “At a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans want cannabis to be legal and regulated, it is an outrage that many police departments across the country continue to waste tax dollars and limited law enforcement resources on arresting otherwise law-abiding citizens for simple marijuana possession.”'

https://norml.org/news/2020/10/01/fbi-marijuana-arrests-decline-year-over-year-but-still-outpace-arrests-for-all-violent-crimes/

'"Why are Maori supporting it? Because they are the ones that end up in jail," he said.

He cited Drug Foundation data showing that 51 per cent of prisoners have been kicked out of their schools, and that 55 per cent of students kicked out because of drugs were Maori.

"It's wrong, of course, because it's illegal, but many of those kids come from families where this is just the norm," he said.

"At the moment, because it's illegal, we don't have a systematic approach to educating and allowing children to have that rich conversation about the pros and cons."'

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?objectid=12367038

'Key aspects of recent tragic events feature prominently in reform efforts. Breonna Taylor was killed in her own home by officers executing a no-knock warrant, and George Floyd died with an officer’s knee on his neck while nearby officers looked on. Bills on track to pass both chambers in Richmond would ban no-knock warrants (which allow police to enter a home without announcing themselves) and neck restraints. They would also require police to intervene when another officer uses excessive force.

These are appropriate, if narrow, responses. Fortunately, lawmakers are also making progress on larger criminal justice reforms. We applaud efforts from both chambers to eliminate searches on the basis of the odor of marijuana alone and to prevent police from using minor traffic violations as a pretext for stops — a practice that often targets motorists of color. We encourage the House of Delegates to embrace a measure, likely to pass the Senate, that would reduce jail time for some incarcerated Virginians who are elderly, permanently disabled or terminally ill'

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/virginia-has-made-good-progress-on-police-reform-it-should-finish-strong/2020/09/13/49f05080-f392-11ea-999c-67ff7bf6a9d2_story.html

'Men accounted for 89 percent of all marijuana arrests during the eight-year period. Of those males, 90 percent were Black. Nearly 65 percent of those arrested were between ages 18 and 30.

Before and after legalization, just over 40 percent of the arrests occurred in Wards 7 and 8, which include the District’s poorest and most heavily African American neighborhoods. By contrast, less than 1 percent of all arrests occurred in Ward 3, which encompasses neighborhoods such as Cleveland Park and Friendship Heights, which are predominantly White and among the city’s most prosperous.'

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/dc-marijuana-arrest-legal/2020/09/15/65c20348-d01b-11ea-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html

'For decades, the relationship between cannabis and sports was non-existent. Every major league except Major League Baseball has a ban on cannabis use. And the “character” issues associated with Black athletes and drug use has always been volatile.

Luckily, the ‘20s are shaping up to be a new era for cannabis and the Black athlete. From investments to deals with TV networks, Black athletes are quickly becoming champions of both sports and cannabis. Check out these athletes making history in the cannabis industry.'

https://www.leafly.com/news/industry/black-athletes-trailblazing-cannabis-industry

'Furthermore, manners in which cannabis is regulated have made it particularly challenging for those communities most impacted by the war on cannabis to get a seat at the newly legal industry’s table. Most notably, lack of access to national financial markets (due to cannabis’ Schedule 1 classification) has left aspiring entrepreneurs unable to readily access funding capital from banks or other financial institutions. By limiting the industry’s funding to private capital, the national legalization approach has dramatically raised the bar for Black participation in the industry.

According to the Brookings Institute, the average White household’s net worth was nearly 10x that of respective Black households in 2016 ($171,000 vs. $17,150), with disparities widening as income scales increased, the net effect leaving Black entrepreneurs not only less likely to accrue the required capital to start a cannabis business, but also less likely to have access to the capital required within their own communities.'

https://newfrontierdata.com/cannabis-insights/as-social-disruptions-roil-an-election-year-policymakers-consider-cannabis-and-racial-inequality/

' - Despite a dramatic nationwide increase in the use and acceptance of cannabis, both federal and state policies have been slow to address long-standing inequities in cannabis regulation.
- Despite 26 million regular cannabis consumers in the U.S. (and 70% of adults reporting cannabis use as morally acceptable), prohibition enforcement continues apace, with over 600,000 annual arrests for cannabis-related offenses.
- Nationally, Blacks are nearly 4x more likely to be arrested as suspects than are Whites.
- Even as total arrests fall drastically in states legalizing adult use (e.g., more than 90% in Colorado) disparities in cannabis-related arrests persist.
- Post-legalization, challenges remain in ensuring equitable participation in the industry.
- Critical lack of access to bank loans means that Black households (which average a net worth 10x lower than that of respective White households) are far less likely to fund business opportunities in the industry.'

https://newfrontierdata.com/cannabis-insights/weeding-out-injustice/

'Results
Bisexual men had higher medical (6.4% versus 4.1%; aROR=1.93[1.29–2.88]) and non-medical stimulant use 6.6% versus 2.4%; aROR=2.23[1.44–3.44]) than heterosexual men. Bisexual women had higher non-medical stimulant use (6.8% versus 1.6%; aROR=1.54[1.23–2.93] than heterosexual women. Female (aROR=0.70[0.62–0.78]) and male (aROR=0.74[0.66–0.82]) heterosexuals in MML states had lower odds of medical stimulant use than in non-MML states. Bisexual men in MML states had lower odds of medical (aROR=0.36[0.21–0.61]) and non-medical stimulant use (aROR=0.48[0.29–0.81]) than bisexual men in non-MML states. Similar patterns emerged for bisexual women's non-medical use (aROR=0.57[0.40–0.81]).

Conclusion
Prescription stimulant use was higher in non-MML states for most LGB subgroups. MMLs may differentially impact stimulant use, primarily for bisexual men and women. States enacting MMLs should consider potential impacts on drugs other than marijuana, especially among LGB populations.'

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0955395920302012?dgcid=author

'One in five of those found guilty of cannabis possession in England and Wales last year was black, official figures show, prompting accusations of racial injustice at the heart of the UK’s drug laws.

Campaigners said the rate was grossly disproportionate when only an estimated 3 per cent of the population is black.

They also warned of a link between the convictions and the police stop and search policy, a central concern during the Black Lives Matter protests.'

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cannabis-possession-black-stop-search-police-racism-a9648846.html

'Racial disparities in legal prosecutions and through inequity in wealth serve as barriers to many Black and Brown entrepreneurs.
Between 2010-2018, despite comparable usage rates Black people were 3.64 times more likely than White people to be arrested for marijuana possession. (ACLU)
In 2015, more than 643,000 people were arrested for cannabis violations; 89% were charged only with possession (Cage-Free Cannabis).
Over the past decade, 15.7 million people have been arrested for marijuana offenses.
In some states, cannabis arrests preclude participation in the legal industry.
In 2016, the average wealth of White families was more than $700,000 higher than that of Black or Hispanic families. (Urban Institute).
In 2017, 81% of business owners/founders in the cannabis industry were White; approximately 4% were Black, and fewer than 6% were Hispanic/Latino. (MJBiz Daily)'

https://newfrontierdata.com/cannabis-insights/how-systemic-racism-and-wealth-inequality-limit-diversity-in-the-cannabis-industry/

'The data tracks arrests, not individuals, so there’s no mechanism for winnowing out repeat offenders. Nor does it include arrests for the sale or production of marijuana. But the numbers still illustrate how marijuana enforcement continues to make up a big part of many police agencies’ caseloads.

The findings reflect, in part, a few simple realities: The federal government incentivizes aggressive drug enforcement via funding for drug task forces and generous forfeiture rules that allow agencies to keep cash and other valuables they find in the course of a drug bust. And because marijuana is bulky and pungent relative to other drugs, it’s often easy for police to root out.'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/04/15/where-war-weed-still-rages/

Abusive governments seem to display behavioral traits similar to abusive individuals, possibly because the head(s) or leader(s) of such governments are such individuals. We observe a pattern of alternating abuse and the application of what seems like a balm to soothe the pain. This balm is often an eyewash (handwash?) and to a certain extent also serves to hypnotize the victim into thinking that the abuser means well. Mostly applied in alternating fashion, the balm is also sometimes applied as a distraction to one part of the victim while the abuse happens on another part. The mind of the victim, increasingly confused and submissive, focuses on the region where the balm is applied and shuts out the region where the abuse is taking place as a defense mechanism. With abuse and balm, applied over long periods of time in increasing fashion and in alternating turns, where the abuse is always much, much greater than the balm applied, the body and the mind of the victim, whether it be an individual or a nation, gradually weakens, becoming increasingly submissive and obedient to the will of the abuser till a point is reached where the abuser has complete control and the victim will do anything thinking that it is what is good...Apr 6, 2020, 5:16 PM

'The Bay Mills Indian Community in the Upper Peninsula is the first tribal community in Michigan to legalize marijuana for adult use.

“Our tribal government does not necessarily promote the use of marijuana, but we believe that criminalizing it is bad policy,” said Tribal Chairman Bryan Newland in a statement. “Our new tribal law ensures that people on our lands are no longer at risk of prosecution for actions that are lawful everywhere else in Michigan.”

There are 12 federally recognized tribes in Michigan. As sovereign governments, Native American tribes have the right to set their own laws on marijuana, according to the National Congress of American Indians.'
https://www.mlive.com/news/2019/04/first-native-american-community-in-michigan-legalizes-marijuana.html

But my ideal is not a cultural uniformity in which national characteristics are blurred. By no means, I am all in favour of diversity, differentiation, and gradation on our beloved earth! It is a wonderful thing that there should be so many races and nations, many languages, many variations in mentality and outlook. If I hate and am irreconcilably opposed to war, conquests, and annexations, it is in part because they destroy so much of the historically determined individuality and differentiation of human culture. I am an enemy of the 'grans simplificateurs' and a lover of equality, of organic form, of the inimitable.

- Message to the Nobel Prize Banquet, 1946, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse

In India, even though religion went by various names, for those who assumed the roles of the ruling classes and upper castes in the last 3000 years or so it was essentially the exploitation of everybody and everything for money and power, while establishing their own superiority.

Today's Hindutva brigade still attempts to convert all to this stunted and corrupt idea of religion. The one religion that the Hindutva brigade propagates is essentially the class and caste system, in which it forms the upper castes and classes, and rules over all others; where ganja, toddy and the consumption of cattle meat is illegal. In that sense it is identical with orthodox Islam and Christianity world wide, only the type of banned meat varies. It is not the true Hinduism of India, which is essentially so diverse that it covers all possible religious and philosophical ways of thought imaginable, and goes by all names. One of the main reasons why the Hindutva brigade is such a staunch opponent of ganja is because it is the herb of spirituality, the path to God realization no matter which direction you come from...the herb that makes one realize that all beings are essentially god in various manifestations...the herb that destroys the delusional world of money and power...

Nov 07, 2022 3:07:44pm

'The desk clerk was friendly. "Don't worry about a thing, sir. Just enjoy your stay here - and if there's anything you need, just call the desk."

I nodded and smiled, half watching the stunned reaction of the cop crowd right next to me. They were stupid with shock. Here they were arguing with every piece of leverage they could command, for a room they'd already paid for - and suddenly their whole act gets sideswiped by some crusty drifter who looks like something out of an upper-Michigan hobo jungle. And he checks in with a handful of credit cards! Jesus! What's happening to the world?

What indeed? The bag boy grinned. The desk clerk grinned. And the cop crowd eyed me nervously. They had just been blown off the track by a style of freak they'd never seen before. I left them there to ponder it, fuming & bitching at the gates of some castle they would never enter.'

- Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Part II...by Raoul Duke, November 25, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'By whatever names we dignify ourselves, in whatever apparel we attire ourselves, by whatever and before whatever priest we may be smeared with oil, however many millions we possess, however many special guards are stationed along our route, however many policemen guard our wealth, however many so-called miscreant-revolutionaries and anarchists we may execute, whatever exploits we may ourselves perform, whatever States we may found, whatever fortresses and towers we may erect - from the Tower of Babel to that of Eiffel - we are always all of us confronted by two inevitable conditions of life which destroy its whole meaning. There is first of all death, which may at any moment overtake any of us, and there is the transitoriness of all that we do and that is so quickly destroyed leaving no trace. Whatever we may do - found kingdoms, build palaces and monuments, compose poems and romances - everything is transitory, and soon passes leaving no trace. And therefore, however we may conceal it from ourselves, we cannot help seeing that the meaning of our life can be neither in our personal physical existence, subject to unavoidable sufferings and inevitable death, nor in any worldly institution or organization.

Whoever you may be who read these lines, consider your position and your duties - not the position of landowner, merchant, judge, emperor, president, minister, priest, or soldiers, temporarily attributed to you by men, nor those imaginary duties imposed on you by that position - but your real position in eternity as a creature who by Someone's will has been called out of unconsciousness after an eternity of nonexistence, to which by the same will you may at any moment be recalled. Think of your duties - not your imaginary duties as a landowner to your estate, as a merchant to your capital, as an emperor, minister, official to the State - but those real duties which follow from your real position as a being called to life and endowed with reason and love.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'"Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind
Clothes him in front, but leaves him bare behind"

But actually it is we, the rich and highly educated whites, who have left ourselves bare behind. We cover our anterior nakedness with some philosophy - Christian, Marxian, Freudo-Physicalist - but abaft we remain uncovered, at the mercy of all the winds of circumstance. The poor Indian, on the other hand, has had the wit to protect his rear by supplementing the fig-leaf of a theology with the breech-clout of transcendental experience.' - The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley, 1954.

'Foxx said her office plans to work with Code for America to identify misdemeanor pot cases in Cook County. While she could not yet provide an exact figure, she estimated that thousands of convictions could be wiped out.

“The question is, how far back can we go? How far back does the data go — which will give us what our universe looks like? But we’re in the process of figuring that out,” added Foxx, who said she also intends to work with state officials to determine whether her office can file petitions for expungement on behalf of people with minor pot convictions.'

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/legal-marijuana-kim-foxx-expungement-sales/

'I watch three or four frantic network-news bulletins about Iraq every day, and it is all just fraudulent Pentagon propaganda, the absolute opposite of what it says: "U.S. Transfers Sovereignty to Iraqi Interim 'Government.'" Hot damn! Iraq is finally Free, and just in time for the election. It is a deliberately cowardly lie. We are no more giving power back to the Iraqi people than we are about to stop killing them.

Your neighbor's grandchildren will be fighting this stupid, greed-crazed Bush family "war' against the whole Islamic world for the rest of their lives, if John Kerry is not elected to be the new president of the United States in November.

The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government, but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to nut-cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime Change.

Some people say that George Bush should be run down and sacrificed to the Rat gods. But not me. No, I say it would be a lot easier to just vote the bastard out of office on November 2.'

- The Fun-Hogs in the Passing Lane, November 11, 2004, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

The American upper class hypocrites, who think that Christianity means get rich at all costs, would do well to understand that ganja is Jehovah's herb and in its complete legalization - with free and total access to the Blacks, Hispanics and Native Indians - lies at least some redemption for the Native Indian genocide and Black slavery, among a lot of other things...All those who claim to be the religious orthodoxy world wide, but who are in fact nothing more than the calcified modern forms of the Pharisees oppressing the poor, the sick and the minorities using religion to chain the world's masses and to assist authoritarian rulers and their businessmen friends to plunder the earth and its living beings, would do well to understand that ganja is Jehovah's herb, Siva's herb, Allah's herb - three perspectives of one and the same eternal spirit...

Oct 28, 2022 1:25:09pm

'The legislation acknowledges that those individuals who reside in communities that were most disproportionately impacted by cannabis criminalization "face greater difficulties accessing traditional banking systems and capital for establishing businesses." The measure therefore "offers, among other things, financial and technical assistance and license application benefits to individuals most directly and adversely impacted by the enforcement of cannabis-related laws who are interested in starting cannabis business enterprises."'
https://norml.org/news/2020/04/09/washington-governor-signs-legislation-promoting-social-equity-in-the-cannabis-businesses

'If people tell you that all this is necessary for the maintenance of the existing order of life and that this social order, with its destitution, hunger, prisons, executions, armies and wars, is necessary for society, that still more miseries will ensue were that organization infringed; all that is said only by those who profit by such an organization. Those who suffer from it - and they are ten times as numerous - all think and say the contrary. And in the depth of your soul you yourself know it is untrue, you know that the existing organization of life has outlived its time and must inevitably be reconstructed on new principles, and that therefore there is no need to sacrifice all human feeling to maintain it.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'We applaud the public servants who have worked hard to implement social equity programs in places that have legalized cannabis. Our hope is that jurisdictions considering alternatives to cannabis supply prohibition and seeking to improve social equity outcomes – and public health – not limit their discussions to the “for-profit with license preference” model. We encourage these jurisdictions to consider the pros and cons of various legalization options as well as use the growing evidence about the economics of legalization to implement an approach that is most likely to succeed in its social and economic goals'
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20741

'Ours is the age, among other things, of the automobile and of rocketing population. Alcohol is incompatible with safety on the roads, and its production, like that of tobacco, condemns to virtual sterility many millions of acres of the most fertile soil. The problems raised by alcohol and tobacco cannot, it goes without saying, be solved by prohibition. The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones. Some of these other, better doors will be social and technological in nature, others religious or psychological, others dietetic, educational, athletic. But the need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain.' - The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley, 1954.

From the book that taught me what Tea also means - 'Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the self same deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves of Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cadiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore - they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the 'desert' of history. And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world of 'history' and the Apocalypse of the Fellahins returns once more as so many times before, people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my growing thoughts as I drove the car into the hot, sun-baked town of Gregoria' - On the Road by Jack Kerouac

'Results

Compared to Dauphin, the mean arrest rate for all marijuana-related crimes in Philadelphia declined by 19.9 per 100,000 residents (34.9% reduction), 17.1 per 100,000 residents (43.1% reduction) for possession, and 2.8 per 100,000 resident (15.9% reduction) for sales/manufacturing. Arrest rates also differed by demographic characteristics post-decriminalization. Notably, African Americans had a greater absolute/relative reduction in possession-based arrests than Whites. However, relative reductions for sales/manufacturing-based arrests was nearly 3 times lower for African Americans. Males had greater absolute/relative reduction for possession-based arrests, but lower relative reduction for sales/manufacturing-based arrests compared to females. There were no substantial absolute differences by age; however, youths (vs. adults) experienced higher relative reduction in arrest rates.'
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0376871620302234

'Divide up what you possess with others, do not gather riches, do not exalt yourself, do not steal, do not cause suffering, do not kill anyone, do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself, was said not only nineteen hundred years ago but five thousand years ago. And there can be no doubt of the truth of this law, and but for hypocrisy it would be impossible for men - even if they themselves did not conform to it - to fail to recognize at least its necessity, and that he who does not do these things is doing wrong.

But you say that there is a public welfare for the sake of which these rules may and should be infringed: for the public good it is permissible to kill, torture, and rob. You say, as Caiaphas did, that it is better for one man to perish than the whole nation, and you sign the death sentence of a first, a second, and a third man, load your rifles against this man who is to perish for the public welfare, put him in prison, and take his possessions. You say that you do these cruel things because as a member of society and of the State you feel that it is your duty to serve them: as a landowner, judge, emperor, or military man to conform to their laws. But besides belonging to a certain State and having duties arising from that position, you belong also to eternity and to God and have duties arising from that.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'By using the mass media as his forum (receiving much support from publisher William Randolph Hearst), Anslinger was the main person behind the creating of an anti-marijuana sentiment during those years. The anti-marijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness from 1936 is a good example of his work.

There were two component in his strategy. First, the message that weed is evil. Second, racism, according to him only latinos and black people were smoking 'marihuana' and made them 'forget their place in society'.

Here below you can read 15 of his most ridiculous quotes about cannabis. You have been warned...'
https://www.cannaconnection.com/blog/7217-harry-j-anslinger-15-ridiculous-quotes-about-marihuana

'But he [William Burroughs] was not the first white man to be busted for weed in my time. No. That was Robert Mitchum, the actor, who was arrested three months earlier in Malibu at the front door of a hideaway beach house for possession of marijuana and suspicion of molesting a teenage girl on August 31, 1948. I remember the photos: Mitchum wearing an undershirt and snarling at the cops with the sea rolling up and the palm trees blowing.

Yessir, that was my boy. Between Mitchum and Burroughs and James Dean and Jack Kerouac, I got myself a serious running start before I was twenty years old, and there was no turning back. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

So welcome to Thunder Road, bubba. It was one of those movies that got a grip on me when I was too young to resist. It convinced me that the only way to drive was at top speed with a car full of whiskey, and I have been driving that way ever since, for good or ill.'

- Hey Rube! I Love You: Eerie Reflections on Fuel, Madness & Music, May 13, 1999, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

Karnataka High Court, are turbans part of essential religious practices of Sikhs? What about the bracelets, amulets and pendants that many students of all religions wear? Should we try to take uniforms out of schools, uniforms that aim to out do each other in being more upper class British than the British, or should we try to cloth religion in uniforms? Are we producing a nation of uniforms for the government and the ruling classes or a nation of individuals, proud of their uniformity in diversity, free to be who they choose to be? To me the only requirements for essential religious practices appears to be the presence of the self in body form, not anything else that adorns the body. Should we do away with clothing altogether since none of it is part of essential religious practice? I would like to see the day when every child is free to wear what he or she wants to while going to school, when he or she can do so without feeling inferior to anybody else. I would like to see children dressed in the colors of their personality and cultures, be it turbans, adornments, tattoos, long hair or bald heads...with everybody focusing on the right education of the child, and respecting the child's wishes, individuality and uniqueness, rather than focusing on bringing up children of one color, one religion, one language...Unity in diversity is still one of the strongest pillars in this country, just like biodiversity is one of the strongest pillars in nature, isn't it? Or have we now become a mono-culture representing somebody's warped view of reality?

Mar 16, 2022 11:20:05am

'According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, police made 663,367 arrests for marijuana-related violations in 2018. That is more than 21 percent higher than the total number of persons arrested for the commission of violent crimes (521,103). Of those arrested for cannabis-related activities, some 90 percent (608,776) were arrested for marijuana possession offenses only.

"Police across America make a marijuana-related arrest every 48 seconds," NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri said. "At a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans want cannabis to be legal and regulated, it is an outrage that many police departments across the country continue to waste tax dollars and limited law enforcement resources on arresting otherwise law-abiding citizens for simple marijuana possession."'
https://norml.org/news/2019/10/03/fbi-marijuana-arrests-rise-for-third-year-in-a-row-outpace-arrests-for-all-violent-crimes

'We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible. Our age and history, for these thousand years, has not been the history of kindness, but of selfishness. Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend for courts and prisons is very ill laid out. We make, by distrust, the thief, and burglar, and incendiary, and by our court and jail we keep him so. An acceptance of the sentiment of love throughout Christendom for a season would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tears, with the devotion of his faculties to our service.' - Man the Reformer, Emerson, The Basic Writings of America's Sage

'What would be more insensate and painful than the position in which the European peoples now live, spending a great part of their wealth on preparations to annihilate their neighbours and from whom nothing divides them and with whom they live in close spiritual intercourse? What could be more terrible than that which always awaits European nations, when at any moment in an unlucky hour some madman calling himself a potentate may say something displeasing to another such madman? What could be more terrible than all these newly devised and still to be devised means of destruction: cannon, shells, bombs, rockets with smokeless powder, torpedoes and other instruments of death? Yet everybody acquiesces in this state of affairs. Tomorrow a war may begin, and men driven like cattle to the slaughter, will go where they are sent and perish unprotestingly, and destroy other men without even asking themselves why they do it. And not only will they feel no remorse about it, they will even swagger and be proud of the geegaws they are allowed to wear for their skill in killing people, and they will exalt those unhappy or wicked men who placed them in such a position, and erect monuments to them.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

The story is the same globally..minorities, indigenous people, tribals and the poor are the primary targets of marijuana policing...

'Authors wrote, "In every single state, Black people were more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, and in some states, Black people were up to six, eight, or almost ten times more likely to be arrested. In 31 states, racial disparities were actually larger in 2018 than they were in 2010."

In two states, Montana and Kentucky, African Americans were arrested for marijuana possession violations at more than nine times the rate of Caucasians – the highest disparity in the country. Colorado and Alaska, which legalized adult-use marijuana sales in 2012 and 2014 respectively, possessed the lowest disparity in marijuana possession arrest rates'
https://norml.org/news/2020/04/23/aclu-report-racial-disparities-persist-in-marijuana-possession-arrests

'The verdict finally hinged on whether or not the jury could believe Wilson's testimony that he fired into the Silver Dollar - at the ceiling - in order to ricochet a tear gas shell into the rear of the bar and force the armed stranger inside to come out the front door. But somehow Ruben Salazar had managed to get his head in the way of that carefully aimed shell. Wilson had never been able to figure out, he said, what went wrong.

Nor could he figure out how Raul Ruiz had managed to "doctor" those photographs that made it look like he and at least one other deputy were aiming their weapons straight into the Silver Dollar, pointing them directly at people's heads. Ruiz had no trouble explaining it. His testimony at the inquest was over, there was nothing in the 2,025 pages of testimony - from 61 witnesses and 204 exhibits - to cast any serious doubt on the "Chicano Eyewitness Report" that Ruiz wrote for La Raza when the sheriff was still maintaining that Salazar had been killed by "errant gunfire" during the violence at Laguna Park.'

- Strange Rumblings in Aztlan: The Murder of Ruben Salazar, April 29, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

The American strategy of the 60s is now global strategy to suppress dissent. Today, include Covid (pharma drug abuse wearing a virus mask) as a new strategy to disrupt opposition......was it Trump's advisers who came up with the new idea or Xi's or Modi's or Putin's? Heroin can no longer be associated with blacks because everyone now knows how much the whites like the white powder...Marijuana can still be associated with whichever group you are opposed to - blacks, hippies, anti-war activists, minorities, students...hence another reason to keep it illegal. Covid can also be associated with anybody anywhere globally...what a beauty...the public scream "more testing, more testing"...

'"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt these communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."

"Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did," he concluded, according to Baum.'
https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/top-nixon-adviser-reveals-the-racist-reason-he-started-the-war-on-drugs-decades-ago/articleshow/70473035.cms

'Bundini and Conrad were two of these. They have been around for so long that they had once called the boss "Cassius," or even "Cash' - while Patterson had never addressed him as anything but "Muhammad" or "Champ." He had come aboard at high tide, as it were, and even though he was not in charge of everything from carrying Ali's money - in a big roll of $100 bills - to protecting his life with an ever-present chrome-plated revolver and the lethal fists and feet of a black belt with a license to kill, it had always galled him a bit to know that Muhammad's capricious instincts and occasionally perverse sense of humor made it certifiably impossible for any one bodyguard, or even four, to protect him from danger in public. His moods were too unpredictable: one moment he would be in an almost catatonic funk, crouched in the backseat of a black Cadillac limousine with an overcoat over his head - and then, with no warning at all, he would be suddenly out of the car at a redlight somewhere in the Bronx, playing stickball in the street with a gang of teenage junkies. Patterson had learned to deal with The Champ's moods, but he also knew that in a crowd around The Greatest, there would be at least a few who felt the same way about Ali as they had about Malcolm X or Martin Luther King.

There was a time, shortly after his conversion to the Black Muslim religion in the mid-Sixties, when Ali seemed to emerge as main spokesman for what the Muslims were then perfecting as the State of the Art in racial paranoia - which seemed a bit heavy and not a little naive at the time, but which the White Devils moved quickly to justify...

Yes. But that is a very long story and we will get to it later. The only point we need to deal with right now is that Muhammad Ali somehow emerged from one of the meanest and most shameful ordeals any prominent American has ever endured as one of the few real martyrs of that goddamn wretched war in Vietnam and a sort of instant folk hero all over the world, except in the U.S.A.

That would come later...'

- Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room, May 4 and May 18, 1978, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

The rulers of this world desire that the people of the world toil to make them richer rather than become poets, artists, dreamers and philosophers whiling away their time on things like spirituality, existence and the protection of nature...The removal of natural intoxicants like cannabis, peyote and psilocybin and the introduction in their place of addictive alcohol, opium and synthetic pharmaceutical drugs are one of the means to enslave the masses of humans to the money-churning machines of the rich...To break these chains that bind the global masses needs more awareness and moral fortitude from more people and the increased demand to abolish the enslaving laws that prohibit the wonderful natural intoxicants...

Feb 05, 2022 2:34:54pm

'A terrible weight of evil hangs over the people of the world and presses them down. And men standing beneath that weight, and more and more oppressed by it, seek means of release. They know that by their collective strength they could lift that weight and throw it off, but they cannot agree to do so, and each of them bends lower and lower, letting it lie on other shoulders. And the weight presses on people more and more and would long ago have crushed them had there not been some men among them who were guided in their actions not by the consideration of external consequences but by a desire to make them agree with the voice of conscience. There have been and are such people - Christians, for the essence of Christianity lies in substituting an inward aim (to attain which no one else's consent is necessary) in place of external aims (to attain which everyone's agreement is necessary). And therefore salvation from the slavery men are enduring - impossible for men of the social life-perception - has been and is achieved by Christianity - simply by substituting the Christian in place of the social conception of life.

The aim of universal life cannot be fully known to you, says the Christian teaching to each man, and presents itself to you only as a nearer and nearer approach to the infinite welfare of the world - to the establishment of the Kingdom of God. But the aim of the personal life is certainly known to you, and consists in realizing in yourself the infinite perfecting of love, essential for the realization of the Kingdom of God. And that aim is always known to you and always attainable.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said at a press conference that he’s “very proud of this state” for going beyond issues such as implicit bias in policing and the “deadly use of force.” California’s leadership helped advance “a conversation about broader criminal justice reform to address the issues of the war on drugs” and “race-based sentencing,” he said.

“That’s why the state was one of the early adopters of a new approach as it relates to cannabis reform. Legalization around adult-use of marijuana,” he said. “It was a civil rights call from our perspective.”'
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/california-governor-says-marijuana-legalization-is-a-civil-rights-matter-amid-mass-protests-over-racial-injustice/

'The abolitionist has shown us our dreadful debt to the southern Negro. In the island of Cuba, in addition to the ordinary abominations of slavery, it appears only men are brought for the plantations, and one dies in ten every year, of these miserable bachelors, to yield us sugar. I leave for those who have the knowledge the part of sifting the oaths of our custom-houses; I will not inquire into the oppression of the sailors; I will not pry into the usage of our retail trade. I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade (apart from the blacker traits, which, I hope, are exceptions denounced and unshared by all reputable men) is a system of selfishness; it is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature; is not measured by the exact laws of reciprocity, much less by the sentiments of love and heroism; but is a system of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness, not giving but of taking advantage.' - Man the Reformer, Emerson, The Basic Writings of America's Sage

'Lyndon LaRouche was atomized and the Deviate Reverend Jim Bakker was sent to prison for forty-five years for just dabbling in the kind of brazen, low-rent crimes that were apparently taken for granted and pursued with relentless zeal - day and night, 366 days of the year, in full view of the servants and the Secret Service - by the folks who lived in the White House.

Just folks. No different from you or me or the Mitchell brothers. And they never claimed to be anything else, really. Just Good Ol' Dutch and What's Her Name, the maniac little sex doll who squawked openly (allegedly) with Frank Sinatra on dim-lit couches in TV studios, where she went constantly to tape public-service announcements about Just Say No.

It was a very wild act in a very fast lane, and I have to admire it for the Heaviness. It is no small thing in some circles to make headlines lewd and shocking enough to bump a new Kennedy/Palm Beach rape case off the front page of the tabloids...That is Strong...That is Charles Manson country.

Remember they laughed at Thomas Edison. And don't forget that Deep Throat was a box-office hit in the same years that Nancy spent grooming her mongrel stud for the Real Derby, the biggest race of them all...and They Won!!!Twice!!!'

- The Taming of the Shrew, May 30, 1991, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Still the numbers are undeniable when it comes to the racially disproportionate arrests.Of those approximate 11,700 arrested for a cannabis charge of some kind, around 10,500 were black. Of those 11,700 arrestees, 709 were white. Of those arrests, 5,987 were for cannabis possession or public consumption arrests were black while 451 were white.

The release of this data is useful for partially understanding where the district falls when it comes to cannabis arrests nationwide. On April 20 of this year, The American Civil Liberties Union released a massive report on racial disparities when it comes to who is arrested for cannabis possession. The report, “A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform,” looked at all 50 states’ cannabis possession arrests between 2010-2018 and revealed a national average in which a black person was 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis than a white person.'
https://www.outlawreport.com/blog/washington-dc-cannabis-arrests-race

'I used to respect William Burroughs because he was the first white man to be busted for marijuana in my time. William was the Man. He was the victim of an illegal police raid at his home at 500 Wagner Street in Old Algiers, a low-rent suburb across the river from New Orleans, where he was settling in for a while to do some shooting and smoke marijuana.

William didn't fuck around. He was serious about everything. When the Deal went down William was There, with a gun. Whacko! Boom! Stand back, I am the Law. He was my hero a long time before I ever heard of him.'

- Hey Rube! I Love You: Eerie Reflections on Fuel, Madness & Music, May 13, 1999, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'The victim is always and ever the deceived, foolish, working folk - those who with blistered hands have built all those ships, fortresses, arsenals, barracks, cannon, harbours, steamers, and moles, and all these palaces, halls, platforms, and triumphal arches; who have set up and printed all these newspapers and pamphlets, and have procured and brought all these pheasants and ortolans, oysters, and wines that are consumed by the men who are fed, brought up, and kept by them, and who are deceiving them and preparing the most fearful calamities for them. It is always the same kindly, foolish folk, who stand open-mouthed like children, showing their healthy white teeth, naively delighted by dressed-up admirals and presidents with flags waving above them, and by fireworks and bands of music; and for whom, before they have time to look around, there will be neither admirals nor presidents nor flags nor bands, but only a desolate battlefield, cold, hunger, and anguish - before them murderous enemies and behind them relentless officers preventing their escape - blood, wounds, suffering, putrefying corpses, and a senseless unnecessary death.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The cops who fatally shot Breonna Taylor, the black EMT who was killed in a no-knock raid in her home in Louisville, Ky., were looking for drugs. The NYPD accused Eric Garner, a black man strangled to death by a policeman in 2014, of having marijuana to justify the extrajudicial killing. After the killing of Sylville Smith by the Milwaukee Police Department, which sparked the 2016 Sherman Park riots, the Department of Justice made a point of mentioning that drugs, including “suspected marijuana,” were found in his car.'
https://shepherdexpress.com/hemp/cannabis/the-war-on-drugs-is-a-war-on-black-americans/

'Dubiel and another officer approached the teens hanging outside a Parker Ave. home on June 4, claiming they got a call about someone smoking marijuana, according to ABC 6 News.

“Officer walked up talking about ‘we have a call for marijuana,’ but nobody had marijuana on them,'” James Horn, 16, told the television station.

Shaky cellphone video posted on Woodlynne.net shows Dubiel pulling out the pepper spray and firing it directly at one of the teens, who is sitting on the brick railing of the porch. No one appeared to have approached the cop before he fired the chemical.

“So this is what y’all do now to innocent people?” a woman is heard saying in the video.'
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/ny-woodlynne-pepper-spray-police-20200611-igpfc7lfebelzg7krizffavrlq-story.html

Humans continue to invent innovative ways of discriminating against their fellow humans. The motives for, and the methods of, discrimination are always the same. The motives are the desire of a select few to control, profit from, and become wealthy at the expense of all others. The methods are to convince the mindless majority that they, the select few, are right. In addition to all the existing forms of discrimination against fellow humans on the basis of skin color, gender, sexual alignment, religion, etc., we have now invented discrimination against those not vaccinated for Covid. The not vaccinated are now not allowed entry into many places. In some places they are even being forced to stay captive or are being publicly shamed. The not vaccinated are being portrayed as public health hazards. If we look closely at this discrimination, we can see it for what it is. Do the vaccinated fear the not vaccinated? Or, is this discrimination some new found concern that humans have developed for their fellow humans, where they fear that the not vaccinated will fall ill and so impose these measures to protect them? It is neither. If the vaccines are as effective as they are touted to be, then the vaccinated have nothing to fear from the not vaccinated. On the contrary, it is the not vaccinated who are equally likely to get infected from those who have willingly injected themselves with the virus and turned into incubators for new strains. I believe that the delta variant spawned from Covaxin and the omicron variant spawned from Covishield. We are yet to discover, or are keeping quiet about, the other strains that widespread vaccinations from other vaccines have created. Most vaccines are ineffective against omicron, rendering the entire previous vaccination exercise futile for all but the select few. Regarding concern for the health of a fellow not vaccinated human as the basis for this discrimination, it is highly unlikely. The coercive tactics are being employed to exert pressure on the not vaccinated and to force them to join the game that have made the select few wealthier, completely disregarding the right of every human to choose for themselves the path to survival and health. For governments it is a way to intrude into the lives of people and control them like never before, get kickbacks, and to misuse public funds. All vaccines are said to be effective for not more than a year but nobody is counting. A vaccine certificate is a pass that shows that one is with these crooks, never mind its validity. Now the shelf life of vaccines have been extended, booster shots are being administered, children are being turned into incubators while pharma companies and the petrochemical industry get richer, governments have near complete control on the people, and the mindless herd gathers speed towards its destruction...Whatever it takes to get rich, eh?

Jan 09, 2022 1:20:04pm

'Indeed...and this twisted vision would seem about too bent for print if Bundini hadn't already raised at least the raw possibility of it once by pawning Muhammad Ali's "Heavyweight Champion of the World" gold-and-jewel-studded belt for $500 - just an overnight loan from a friend, he said later; but the word got out, and Bundini was banished from The Family and the whole entourage for eighteen months when The Champ was told what he'd done.

That heinous transgression is shrouded in a mix of jive-shame and real/black humor at this point. The Champ, after all, had once hurled the Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River, in a fit of pique at some alleged racial insult in Louisville - and what was the difference between a gold medal and a jewel-studded belt? They were both symbols of a "white devil's" world that Ali, if not Bundini, was already learning to treat with a very calculated measure of public disrespect...What they shared, far beyond a very real friendship, was a shrewd kind of street-theater sense of how far out on that limb they could go, without crashing. Bundini has always had a finer sense than anybody else in The Family about where The Champ wanted to go, the shifting winds of his instincts, and he has never worried about things like Limits or Consequences. That was the province of others, like Conrad or Herbert. Drew B. has always known exactly which side he was on, and so has Cassius/Muhammad. Bundini is the man who came up with "Float like a butterfly, Sting like a bee," and ever since then he has been as close to both Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali as anyone else in the world.

Pat Patterson, by contrast, was a virtual newcomer in The Family. A two-hundred-pound, forty-year-old black cop, he was a veteran of the Chicago vice squad before he hired on as Ali's personal bodyguard. And, despite the total devotion and relentless zeal he brought to his responsibility for protecting The Champ at all times from any kind of danger, hassles, or even minor inconvenience, six years on the job had caused him to understand, however reluctantly, that there were at least a few people who could come and go as they pleased through the wall of absolute security he was supposed to maintain around The Champ.'

- Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room, May 4 and May 18, 1978, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'It was well for a Jew, Greek or Roman, not only to defend the independence of his people by slaughter, but to subdue other nations by slaughter also, when he firmly believed that his people were the only true, good, fine people beloved of God, and all the rest were Philistines and barbarians. Men of the Middle Ages and at the end of the last and the beginning of the present [nineteenth] century could still believe these things. But now, however provoked we may be, we can no longer believe them, and this contradiction has become so intolerable in our time that we feel it impossible to go on living without solving it.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'Data collected by Kraska shows that municipal police and sheriffs’ departments used no-knock or quick-knock warrants about 1,500 times in the early 1980s, but that number rose to about 40,000 times per year by 2000, he said. In 2010, Kraska estimated 60,000-70,000 no-knock or quick-knock raids were conducted by local police annually. The majority of those raids were looking for marijuana, he added.

Currently, Florida and Oregon ban no-knock warrants. Thirteen states have laws explicitly permitting no-knock warrants, and the remaining states issue them based on a judge’s discretion. '
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-war-on-drugs-gave-rise-to-no-knock-warrants-breonna-taylors-death-could-end-them

'In 2018, more than 660,000 U.S. arrests were made for cannabis-related charges, averaging once per 48 seconds.
Since California became the first state to legalize medical cannabis in 1996, nearly 17,000,000 people have been arrested on cannabis charges.
According to the ACLU, blacks in America are nearly 4x likelier than whites to be arrested for cannabis offenses, despite similar rates of use.
Among states reflecting the most racial disparities (e.g., Kentucky and Montana), blacks were nearly 10x times likelier to be arrested.
While legalization has fundamentally reduced overall U.S. drug arrests, it has not mitigated racial disparities in policing, as minorities continue to bear the brunt of cannabis-related policing'

https://newfrontierdata.com/cannabis-insights/cannabis-injustice-system/

'In 2018, more than 26 million Americans reported their regular consumption of cannabis, marking a 74% increase among the population since 2009. The trend has been fueled by convergence in recognition of the therapeutic value for medical cannabis, greater understanding of cannabis’ comparative health effects relative to alcohol and other drugs, and erosion of the stigma associated with cannabis as more jurisdictions have decriminalized and legalized its use.

Despite the surging usage rates, prohibition enforcement continues apace. In 2018, someone in the U.S. was arrested on average every 48 seconds for a cannabis offense or more than 660,000 times that single year. While arrests rates have fallen from a peak of more than 870,000 in 2007, marijuana continues to make up the largest category of U.S. drug arrests, accounting for upwards of half (45%) of all drug-related charges. Meanwhile, since 1996, nearly 17 million people have been arrested on marijuana offences, a number equivalent to 5% of the overall U.S. population'
https://newfrontierdata.com/cannabis-insights/racial-disparities-and-cannabis-legalization-in-american-policing/

'Indeed. And they were at least half right - which is not a bad average for lawyers - because Oscar Z. Acosta, Chicano lawyer, very definitely could not afford the shitrain of suicidal publicity that he was doing everything possible to bring down on himself. There are a lot of nice ways to behave like a criminal - but hiring a camera to have yourself photographed doing it on the road is not one of them. It would have taken a reputation as formidable as Melvin Belli's to survive the kind of grossly illegal behavior that Oscar was effectively admitting by signing that libel release. He might as well have burned his lawyer's license on the steps of the Superior Court building in downtown L.A.

This was what the Ivy League libel lawyers in New York could not accept. They knew what that license was worth - at least to them, it averaged out to about $150 an hour - even for a borderline psychotic, as long as he had the credentials.

And Oscar had them - not because his father and grandfather had gone to Yale or Harvard Law; he'd paid his dues at night school, the only Chicano in his class, and his record in the courtroom was better than that of most of the colleagues who called him a disgrace to their venal profession.

Which may have been true, for whatever it's worth...but what none of us knew at the time of the Great Madness that came so close to making Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas incurably unfit for publication was that we were no longer dealing with O. Z. Acosta, attorney-at-law - but with Zeta, the King of Brown Buffaloes.'

- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'A Christian is independent of human authority because he only acknowledges the authority of God, whose law revealed by Christ he recognizes in himself and voluntarily obeys. And this liberation is gained not by means of struggle, not by the destruction of existing forms, but only by a change in the understanding of life. A Christian recognizes the law of love revealed to him by his teacher, as perfectly sufficient for all human relations, and therefore regards all use of violence as unnecessary and wrong. He also, with his different conception of life, regards those deprivations, sufferings, or threats of deprivation and suffering, by which a man with the social conception of life is reduced to the necessity of obedience, merely as inevitable conditions of existence (like sickness, hunger, and all sorts of calamities), which he patiently endures without forcible resistance, but not as anything that can serve as a guide to his actions. The only guide for a Christian's actions is to be found in the divine principle that dwells within him, which cannot be checked or governed by anything else.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The Library of Congress (LOC) is documenting racist depictions of marijuana in early 20th century news coverage that helped to drive the criminalization of cannabis, highlighting sensationalized articles about the plant that the federal research body says effectively served as “anti-Mexican propaganda.”

As part of the institution’s “Chronicling America” project, which digitizes media from throughout U.S. history, LOC published a timeline last week that gives examples of headlines concerning cannabis from 1897 to 1915.'
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/library-of-congress-highlights-racist-news-coverage-used-to-justify-criminalizing-marijuana-a-century-ago/

Happy Ganja Day to the lovers, friends and supporters of the divine herb. As we celebrate this day, let us not forget the millions who are imprisoned or face criminal action because of their association with the herb and its current worldwide illegal status. Let us not forget the millions who continue to suffer from physical and mental conditions and their lack of access to the medicinal properties of the plant. Let us not forget the millions who are addicted to heroin, methamphetamine, prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, novel psychoactive substances, synthetic cannabinoids and other dangerous substances without access to the natural, recreational herb. Let us hope that the opponents of the herb find reason and understanding in the coming days. Let us also look forward to the fast approaching inevitable day when the herb is finally free once again and available to every living being worldwide as it was always meant to be.

'The new law also amends the classification of offenses involving the use or possession of marijuana in public from a criminal misdemeanor, formerly punishable by up to 90 days in jail, to a fine-only offense. In New York City, police have made over 700,000 arrests for 'public view' violations. Eighty-six percent of those arrested were either Black or Latino.'
https://norml.org/news/2019/08/29/new-york-law-reducing-marijuana-possession-penalties-takes-effect

'Which brings us back to the story, for good or ill: not everybody who failed to understand the nature of the Social Contract has been terminally banished to the west coast. Some of them still live here - for now, at least - and every once in a while they cause problems that make headlines all over the world.

The strange and terrible case of young Roxanne Pulitzer is one of these, and that is the reason I came to Palm Beach, because I feel a bond with these people that runs deeper and stronger than mere money and orgies and drugs and witchcraft and lesbians and whiskey and red Chrysler convertibles.

Bestiality is the key to it, I think. I have always loved animals. They are different from us, and their brains are not complex, but their hearts are pure and there is usually no fat in their bodies and they will never call the police on you or take you in front of a judge or run off and hide with your money...

Animals don't hire lawyers...'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'It states, "No employer may refuse to hire, discipline, discharge or otherwise penalize an applicant or employee solely on the basis of a positive test for marijuana components or metabolites."

Oklahoma is the fifteenth state to explicitly protect medical cannabis patients from workplace discrimination, according to California NORML.'
https://norml.org/news/2019/08/29/oklahoma-expanded-protections-for-cannabis-patients-take-effect

'And therefore the transformation of human life (through which those in power will renounce power and there will be none anxious to seize it) will not come about solely by all men consciously and separately assimilating a Christian conception of life, but will come when a Christian public opinion so definite and comprehensive as to reach everybody has arisen and subdued the whole inert mass which is not able to attain the truth by its own intuition and is therefore always swayed by public opinion.

Such public opinion does not need hundreds and thousands of years for its formation and growth, for it possesses an infectious quality of acting on people and attracting collective masses with great rapidity.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'Passage of the 2018 Farm Bill sparked both sharp nationwide increases in licensing and explosive sales growth for 2019.
The issuance of U.S. hemp-cultivation licenses saw a year-over-year, nationwide increase of 364% (from 3,546 in 2018 to 16,462 in 2019).
Small family farms’ entry to the space drove licensing booms in some states, while other states saw the arrival of Big Agriculture interests in their markets.
In 2019, Tennessee led the trend with 3,200 new licenses, marking more than a 13x increase over its 226 in 2018. Conversely, Montana’s comparatively low 277 licenses in 2019 represent nearly 40,000 acres, averaging a Big Ag-style footprint of more than 144 acres apiece.
Traditional hemp states Colorado, Kentucky, and Oregon continue to lead in cultivation as the nation overall shows a projected 225,000 acres harvested in 2019, more than a 180% increase beyond 78,176 in 2018.'

https://newfrontierdata.com/marijuana-insights/increases-in-state-issued-hemp-licenses/

'“We have already made provisions for them to have access to land as well so that 60 acres of land being made available in Barbados to the Rastafarian community is the first step towards ensuring that they will not be left out of this.”
https://www.caribbeannationalweekly.com/caribbean-breaking-news-featured/barbados-government-promises-rastafarians-60-acres-of-land-to-grow-marijuana/

'When he came booming into a bar called the Daisy Duck in Aspen and announced he was the trouble we'd all been waiting for, he was definitely into the politics of confrontation - and on all fronts: in the bars or the courts or the streets, if necessary.

Oscar was not into serious street fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a two-hundred-fifty- pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach - but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de-facto suicidal conviction that we will die at the age of thirty-three - just like Jesus Christ - you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Especially if the bastard is already thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard at his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile-vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila.

This was the Brown Buffalo in the full crazed flower of his prime - a man, indeed, for all seasons. And it was somewhere in the middle of his thirty-third year, in fact, when he came out to Colorado - with his faithful bodyguard, Frank - to rest for a while after his grueling campaign for sheriff of Los Angeles County, which he lost by a million or so votes. But in defeat, Oscar had managed to create an instant political base for himself in the vast Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles - where even the most conservative of the old-line "Mexican-Americans" were suddenly calling themselves "Chicanos" and getting their first taste of tear gas at "La Raza" demonstrations, which Oscar was quickly learning to use as a fire-and-brimstone forum to feature himself as the main spokesman for a mushrooming "Brown Power" movement that the LAPD called more dangerous than the Black Panthers.

Which was probably true, at that time - but in retrospect it sounds a bit different than it did back in 1969 when the sheriff was sending out fifteen or twenty helicopter sorties a night to scan the rooftops and backyards of the barrio with huge sweeping searchlights that drove Oscar and his people into fits of blind rage every time they got nailed in a pool of blazing white light with a joint in one hand and a machete in the other'

- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'A few things that do not work well should be phased out, including the excessively detailed labelling of cannabis products, a cap on the THC percentage that is permitted in such products and overzealous drug-awareness campaigns and messaging. These measures have had the opposite of their intended effects. The priority should be to facilitate research, which will help to inform education and policy agendas as the cannabis industry takes root.

Incremental progress is being made in pursuing policies that support crucial medical research that might unearth discoveries that could benefit millions of people and protect public health, in both the United States and abroad. Here’s to a dab of optimism about what the future could hold.'
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02531-6

Gandhi brought into focus the untouchability that existed in society with regard to humans, calling the social outcasts Harijan or people of god...150 years ago society did the unthinkable and made a plant an untouchable...it was cast out of society and still remains so...the plant is called Shivapatre, Shivji ka buti and Siddi among other names...When will society remove this discrimination against the plant, a creation of nature that came into existence 28 million years ago when man was a primate living in the trees?

Oct 02, 2021 8:51:46pm

'After discussing the data limitations of the study, the authors concluded that “it indeed seems to be the case that legalizing the recreational use of marijuana results in fewer marijuana related arrests and court cases” and that while law enforcement sources voiced various concerns, several “indicated that methamphetamine and heroin were much larger problems for their agencies than was marijuana.”

The team “saw no evidence that marijuana legalization had an impact on indicators in border states,” adding that they “found no indications of increases in arrests related to transportation/trafficking offenses.”'
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/study-funded-by-feds-debunks-myths-about-marijuana-legalizations-alleged-harms/

'The police are no problem in Palm Beach. We own then and they know it. They work for us, like any other servant, and most of them seem to like it. When we run out of gas in this town, we call the police and they bring it, because it is boring to run out of gas.

The rich have special problems, and running out of gas on Ocean Boulevard on the way to an orgy at six o'clock on Sunday morning is one of them. Nobody needs that. Not with naked women and huge bags of cocaine in the car. The rich love music, and we don't want it interrupted.

A state trooper was recently arrested in Miami for trying to fuck a drunk woman on the highway, in exchange for dropping all charges. But that would not happen in Palm Beach. Drunk women roam free in this town, and they cause a lot of trouble - but one thing they don't have to worry about, thank God, is the menace of getting pulled over and getting fondled by armed white trash wearing uniforms. We don't pay these people much, but we pay them every week, and if they occasionally forget who really pays their salaries, we have ways of reminding them.

The whole west coast of Florida is full of people who get fired from responsible jobs in Palm Beach, if only because they failed to understand the nature of the Social Contract.'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'When whole nations have sometimes submitted to a new religious creed, and become Christians or Mohammedans, these conversions have been accomplished not because men wielding power rendered them compulsory by violence (on the contrary, violence has more often acted in the contrary direction) but because public opinion made such a change inevitable. Nations forced by violence to accept the faith of their conquerors have always remained antagonistic to it.

And it is the same with savage elements existing in our society. Neither the increase or decrease of the severity of the punishments, nor modifications of the prison system, nor increase of the police, either diminish or increase the quantity of crime. Changes occur only in consequence of changes in the moral standard of society. No severities have eradicated duelling and blood-fueds in certain countries. No matter how many Circassians were executed for robbery, they continued to rob out of bravado because no maiden would marry a young man who had not shown his daring by stealing a horse or at least a sheep. If men cease to fight duels and the Circassians cease to rob, it is not from fear of punishment (indeed that makes the bravado more attractive), but through a change in public opinion. And it is the same with all other crimes. Violence can never destroy what is sanctioned by public opinion. On the contrary, public opinion need only be directly opposed to violence to neutralize its whole effect, as has been shown by all martyrdoms both past and present.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'A searing, on-the-ground look at President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly campaign against suspected drug dealers and users in the Philippines, “On the President’s Orders” is told with unprecedented access to the police themselves. It offers a gripping, visually stunning window into the war on drugs — those carrying it out, and those most impacted by it.'
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/on-the-presidents-orders/

'With new approaches being tried in Illinois, observers are hopeful the state could act as a true blueprint for social equity progress in the cannabis industry, avoiding some of the pitfalls seen in other states and cities. They also know it could take some time.'
https://mjbizdaily.com/will-illinois-change-the-social-equity-landscape-for-the-marijuana-industry/

'Except that Richard Nixon got rich from his crimes, and Oscar Acosta got killed. The wheels of Justice grind small and queer in this life, and if they seem occasionally unbalanced or even stupid and capricious in their grinding, my own midnight guess is that they were probably fixed from the start. And any judge who can safely slide into full-pension retirement without having to look back on anything worse in the way of criminal vengeance than a few scorched lawns is a man who got off easy.

There is, after all, considerable work and risk - and even a certain art - to the torching of a half-acre lawn without also destroying the house or exploding every car in the driveway. It would be a lot easier to simply make a funeral pyre of the whole place and leave the lawn for dilettantes.

That's how Oscar viewed arson - anything worth doing is worth doing well - and I'd watched enough of his fiery work to know he was right. If he was a King-Hell Pyromaniac, he was also a gut politician and occasionally a very skilled artist in the style and tone of his teachings.'

- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'The social equity program in California is designed to help people or communities disproportionately impacted by cannabis criminalization by providing funding for assistance and services to local equity applicants and licensees.'
https://mjbizdaily.com/california-awards-cities-10-million-in-social-equity-marijuana-grants/

'The percentage of chronic pain patients using cannabis therapeutically is increasing, according to data published in the journal Advances in Therapy.

Investigators affiliated with Harvard Medical School assessed trends in cannabis use among pain patients in a nationally representative sample during the years 2011 to 2015.

Authors reported, “Over the course of our study, … we identified a significant and progressive increase in the number of patients using cannabis. In patients with chronic pain, cannabis use more than doubled during this period.”

They reported that the average age of chronic pain patients who consumed cannabis was 45 and that the majority of users were lower on the socioeconomic scale than were non-users.'
https://norml.org/blog/2020/07/14/cannabis-use-rising-among-chronic-pain-patients/

'In the end it was basically a cocaine trial, which it had looked to be from the start. There was no real money at stake: Peter Pulitzer ended up paying more money to lawyers, accountants, "expert witnesses," and other trial-related bozos than Roxanne would have happily settled for if the case had never gone to court in the first place. A few of the reporters covering the trial sat around a gray Formica table in the Alibi Lounge during the lunch breaks and figured out that the trial had cost Pulitzer about a half-million dollars in real money and perhaps a million more down the line, for no good reason at all. Here was a man who normally earned $700,000 a year just by answering his phone a few hours a day and paying a secretary to open his mail - something like $60,000 a month just to mind his own store, as it were - who somehow got himself whopped into such a public frenzy that he didn't even have a bed to sleep in except on his boat for at least a year, and he was spending his time raving crazily at his own lawyers at $150 an hour instead of taking care of his business, which was naturally going to pieces, because all the people who worked for him, from his accountants and psychiatrists all the way down to his gardeners and deckhands, were going made from fear and confusion and constant legal harassment by vicious lawyers and always worried about saying something by accident that might get them either fired or locked up for perjury, and in the midst of all that he let one of his hired dingbats come into court with a financial statement so careless and flagrant that the simple fact of his filing it would have been cause for public outrage almost anywhere else in America except in Palm Beach County. There are a lot of people in this country who spend $1 million a year, and some of them pay no income tax at all. Nelson Rockefeller was one of them, for at least one year in the late Sixties or early Seventies, and there were to other years around that time when he paid less than I did...'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Those who do violence (that is, those who take part in government) and those who profit by violence (that is, the rich) no longer represent as used to be the case the flower of our society and the ideal of all human well-being and grandeur towards which all the violated used formerly to strive. Now very often the oppressed do not strive to gain the position of the oppressors or try to imitate them. On the contrary, users of violence often voluntarily renounce the advantages of their position, choose the condition of the oppressed, and try to resemble them in the simplicity of their life.

Not to speak of the now openly despised duties and occupations - such as those of spies, agents of the secret police, usurers, and publicans - a large number of professions held by users of violence, which used to be considered honourable (such as those of police officials, courtiers, officers of the law, administrative functionaries, the clergy, the military, the monopolists and bankers) are no longer accounted honourable by everyone, but are even condemned by a certain much respected section of people. There are already people who voluntarily abandon these positions which were once accounted irreproachable, and prefer less advantageous positions not connected with violence.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The practice itself – of landowners entering into contracts with farmers to grow marijuana – is nothing new, said Hezekiah Allen, board chair of California cannabis farmer cooperative Emerald Grown.

Allen, who grew up in Humboldt County, the heart of California’s Emerald Triangle, said he took part in such a deal himself from 2006 to 2008.

“I was a sharecropper for a few years. It was kind of how you got established in the business,” Allen said.

In that sense, he said, it was akin to “an apprenticeship, where you manage someone else’s farm for less than you were worth before you got your own farm.”

These days, Allen said, it’s more a question of precisely how such agreements and contracts are structured, which he noted can often get “messy.”'
https://mjbizdaily.com/contract-cannabis-farming-gaining-popularity-in-california-but-practice-draws-lawsuits/

'The purpose of this systematic review was to explore available peer-reviewed evidence related to the use of cannabis as a potential alternative to opioids in the treatment of chronic pain. The Johns Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice model was used to review 32 peer-reviewed articles published between 2008 and 2018. Findings suggest cannabis as a promising alternative to opioids and supports the medical use of cannabis as a safer first-line pharmacological treatment for chronic pain compared to opioids. The use of cannabis as a safer alternative to opioids can promote social change directly and indirectly across a variety of social and economic dimensions due to increased access to medication at reduced cost, elimination of opioid-related death due to overdose, diminished individual and social harms related to cannabis. A medical alternative to opioids may also lead to a reduction of the inequitable incarceration of cannabis users across demographic categories of ethnicity and race.'
https://search.proquest.com/openview/a69d6774a45ea04c630c10a84ea2cc8e/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

'Where data are available, they show a steady decline in the use of NPS in Europe, but such substances have established themselves in some marginalized groups in society, such as the homeless or people in prison, among whom the smoking of synthetic cannabinoids has been identified as a problem. In Europe, the use of NPS in prisons was reported by 22 countries, with synthetic cannabinoids identified as posing the main challenge and health risks (16 countries), whereas the use of synthetic cathinones in prisons was reported by 10 countries, NPS with opioid effects by six, and new benzodiazepines by four countries. In Latvia, the use of synthetic opioids in prisons has also been linked to an increase in overdose cases and in injecting drugs and sharing needles among prisoners who use drugs.' - United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2020, https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2020/field/WDR20_BOOKLET_4.pdf

'In an era when the vice president of the United States held court in Washington to accept payoffs from his former vassals in the form of big wads of $100 bills - and when the president himself routinely held secretly tape-recorded meetings with his top aides in the Oval Office to plot illegal wiretaps, political burglaries, and other gross felonies in the name of a "silent majority," it was hard to feel anything more than a flush of high, nervous humor at the sight of some acid-bent lawyer setting fire to a judge's front yard at four o'clock in the morning.

I might even be tempted to justify a thing like that - but of course it would be wrong...And my attorney was Not a Crook, and, to the best of my knowledge, his mother was just as much a "saint" as Richard Nixon's.

Indeed. And now - as an almost perfect tribute to every icepick ever wielded in the name of Justice - I want to enter into the permanent record, at this point, as a strange but unchallenged fact that Oscar Z. Acosta was never disbarred from the practice of law in the state of California - and ex-president Richard Nixon was.

There are some things, apparently, that not even lawyers will tolerate, and in a naturally unjust world where the image of "Justice" is honored for being blind, even a blind pig will find an acorn once in a while.

Or maybe not - because Oscar was eventually hurt far worse by professional ostracism than Nixon was hurt by disbarment. The Great Banshee screamed for both of them at almost the same time - for entirely different reasons, but with ominously similar results.'

- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

Inclusiveness is fundamental to public policy making. A system designed for public good must include all types of users, especially the marginalized. The trend however, has been to create
exclusive systems that only consider a certain type of users, typically the elite, and then to try and forcefully implement these improperly designed systems. The vaccine, with its focus on the elite and their affinity for synthetic pharma medicines, implemented as public medicine excluding all forms of natural medicine is one classical example. Another is the Fast tag system implemented on roads for public conveyance. What is essentially an option for the section of society that counts its time in terms of money, as the system's name itself conveys, has been now forced down the throats of all. A road user who is not inclined to the Fast tag system is now forced to pay double the toll fee in cash for use of a public road, with the penalty called 'Fast tag penalty'. Cash is a more fundamental form of transaction which must always be considered legal tender. It is also the fool-proof fall back mode should the Fast tag system collapse. However, policy makers in India live in a world far removed from ground reality. There are a significant number of people who do not have the latest technology options, and for many it is a conscious choice. To penalize these people by designing exclusive systems, when equity in public service is mandatory, is another of the blunders that incompetent governments repeatedly commit. The attempt to coerce conversion to Fast tag is doomed, because as long as there is even a single cash user, the public roadways authorities must maintain the manpower to provide the service, or provide an alternate path for the user with minimum inconvenience and discrimination. Denial to do so goes against the right to equity and right to freedom of movement...

Dec 21, 2021 5:02:52pm

'The trafficking and availability of tramadol for its non-medical use is a public health concern, but limited distribution of tramadol for medical use would also pose a public health concern, in particular in Africa, where there is a chronic shortage of pain medications. There are no data on the availability and use of tramadol for medical purposes, but data on internationally controlled substances clearly highlight the gaps in the accessibility of pain medications. The general lack of access to opioid-related pain medications under international control is a specific problem for developing countries, which is even more pronounced in countries in West and Central Africa than in other parts of the world.

Against this background of a de facto non-availability of internationally controlled opioids for pain medication for large sections of the population in West and Central Africa, tramadol – even though it is under national control in some West African countries – is in fact a widely available opioid in those countries, used for both medical purposes (including outside prescription) and for non-medical purposes' - United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2020, https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2020/field/WDR20_BOOKLET_4.pdf

'When all this becomes quite evident to everybody it will be natural for men to ask themselves:

"Why should we feed and maintain all these kings, emperors, presidents, and members of various chambers and ministries, since nothing comes of their meetings and talks? Would it not be better, as some humorist has said, to make an India-rubber queen?

And what do we want armies for with their general, and their bands, and cavalry, and drums? What are they wanted for when there is no war and no one wants to conquer anybody? And even if there were a war, other nations would not let us profit by it, and the army will not fire on its own people.

And what are the judges and lawyers for, who in civil cases decide nothing according to justice, and in criminal affairs themselves recognize the uselessness of punishments?

And what are the tax-gatherers for, who exact taxes reluctantly while what is really needed is easily collected without them?

And what is the use of the clergy, who have long since ceased to believe in what they have to preach?

And what use is capital in private hands, if it can be useful only after becoming public property?"

And once they ask themselves these questions, men cannot fail to conclude that they ought not to support all these institutions which have become useless.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'But this bill fails to fully address issues like police militarization and the use of quick-knock warrants, policing practices that are disproportionately used against people of color in drug investigations. While the bill places restrictions on programs that facilitate the transfer of military equipment to local police departments, it does not outright put an end to such programs. And while this bill prohibits no-knock warrants for drug cases, it does not outlaw quick-knock warrants which can be just as deadly. Moreover, the bill continues to fund police departments and the war on drugs, rather than shift resources to education, housing, harm reduction services, and other infrastructure that strengthens communities and increases public safety. '
https://www.drugpolicy.org/press-release/2020/06/dpa-urges-congress-strengthen-police-reform-bill

'Long after the Pulitzer divorce case was finally over - after the verdict was in and there were no more headlines, and the honor of Palm Beach had been salvaged by running Roxanne out of town; after all the lawyers had been paid off and the disloyal servants had been punished and reporters who covered the trial were finally coming down from the long-running high that the story had been for so long that some of them suffered withdrawal symptoms when it ended...Long after this, I was still brooding darkly on the case, still trying to make a higher kind of sense of it.

I have a fatal compulsion to find a higher kind of sense in things that make no sense at all. We are talking about hubris, delusions of wisdom and prowess that can only lead to trouble.

Or maybe we are talking about cocaine. That thought occurred to me more than once in the course of the Pulitzer divorce trial. Cocaine is the closest thing to instant hubris in the market these days, and there is plenty of it around. Any fool with an extra $100-bill in his pocket can whip a gram of cocaine into his head and make sense of just about anything.

Ah, yes. Wonderful. Thank you very much. I see it all very clearly now. These bastards have been lying to me all along. I should never have trusted them in the first place. Stand aside. Let the big dog eat.

Take my word for it, folks. I know how these things work.'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'There is no doubt that our national discussion over matters of race and policing will continue long after these public protests have ceased. NORML believes that calls for cannabis legalization need to be an important part of this emerging discussion — but only a part. Black and brown lives matter and we owe it to our country and to ourselves to take tangible steps toward dismantling many of the power structures that perpetuate injustice. Marijuana prohibition is simply one of them.

We are at a crossroads in this country and it is time for all of us to march as allies in the fight for racial justice and equality. It is important during this process for those of us not from these marginalized communities to truly listen to those who are facing this oppression and support them in this struggle. Let us take this moment in time to pledge to put in the work necessary in order to make America the better and more just nation that we know it can be'
https://www.aspentimes.com/news/high-country-marijuana-legalization-and-the-fight-for-racial-justice/

'The time for studies and commissions on police reform has long passed: this moment requires action. We cannot continue to make the mistakes of the past and pass meaningless feel-good measures that do nothing but seek to minimize the outrage of the moment—while Black, Latinx and Native American communities continue to lose their lives and suffer through the trauma of living in a police state. We must dramatically rethink the way we view public safety and health, and that requires a sizable shift in how we invest our resources - away from police and back into communities. We call on Congress to turn their attention to improving the Justice in Policing Act.”'
https://www.drugpolicy.org/press-release/2020/06/drug-policy-alliance-statement-tim-scott-senate-police-bill

'This is what ought to happen wherever violence is used. The officer feels dull. He has nothing to do. He has been put, poor fellow, in a position in which he has to give orders. He is shut off from all rational human existence. He can only look on and give orders, give orders and look on, though nobody needs either his orders or his attention. All our unfortunate rulers, ministers, members of parliament, governors, generals, officers, archbishops, bishops, priests, and even rich men, already find themselves partly, and soon will find themselves completely, in that position. They can do nothing but give orders, and so they make a fuss and send their subordinates about, as that officer sent the gendarme, to interfere with people. And as the people they interfere with ask them not to interfere, they imagine themselves to be quite indispensable men.

But a time is approaching and draws near when it will become perfectly evident to everyone that these people are of no use at all but are merely a hindrance, and those whom they interfere with will say amiably and quietly, like the man in the peasant's coat: "Don't interfere with us, please!" And then all these emissaries, and those who send them, will have to follow the good advice, that is, cease to ride about with an arm akimbo hindering people, and get off their horses, doff their uniforms, listen to what is being said, and join with others in real human work.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The Washington Post feature, entitled, “Marijuana really can be deadly, but not in the way you probably expect,” highlights numerous other incidences where suspected marijuana use was the key factor in police engagements that resulted in civilian murders.

Since Congress classified the cannabis plant as an illicit Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, well over 20 million Americans have been subject to arrest for violating marijuana laws, and untold millions more who have been harassed under the pretense that they may have been in violation of the law. Entire communities have lost generations of citizens to cyclical poverty and incarceration due to the collateral consequences of having a cannabis-related conviction on their record.

These consequences include the loss of access to higher education, the inability to qualify for government-subsidized housing, employment discrimination, the loss of child custody, homelessness, and more. In large part due to the modern War on Drugs, the United States’ prison population has skyrocketed by over 500 percent over the last 40 years, with nearly 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States at the beginning of 2019.'
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/502489-criminalization-that-never-should-have-been-cannabis

'Oscar Zeta Acosta - despite any claims to the contrary - was a dangerous thug who lived every day of his life as a stalking monument to the notion that a man with a greed for the Truth should expect no mercy and give none...

...and that was the difference between Oscar and a lot of the merciless geeks he liked to tell strangers he admired: class acts like Benito Mussolini and Fatty Arbuckle.

When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar's name, one of the first few lines in the ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity, and generosity in that overweight, overworked, and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar's size for the rest of our lives - which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.

He was a drug-addled brute and a genuinely fiendish adversary in court or in the street - but it was none of these things that finally pressured him into death or a disappearance so finely plotted that it amounts to the same thing.'

- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Schwartz and Jahn’s study is the latest of a raft of studies showing that black people in the US are killed by police more often than white people. Young black men are at highest risk. A 2019 study found that black men aged 25-29 were being killed at rates between 2.8 and 4.1 in 100,000.

Neighbourhoods are also a factor. Death rates are highest in poor neighbourhoods and neighbourhoods with high non-white populations, but black people are at higher risk of being killed in white neighbourhoods.

There is evidence that the killings have wide-ranging effects beyond those killed and bereaved. A 2018 study found that the killings had a harmful impact on the mental health of the wider black population.'
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2246987-us-police-kill-up-to-6-times-more-black-people-than-white-people/

'As Black farm ownership hits historic lows, Minnesota entrepreneur Angela Dawson thinks hemp could be part of the solution.

And she’s looking to an old-fashioned model – cooperative farming – to do it. Dawson left a career in food writing and marketing to start 40 Acre Co-op, a network of Black and socially disadvantaged farmers who share resources and profits.

Farming co-ops were once common across the U.S. as farmers pooled resources to acquire land and equipment. In the Black community, co-ops were a way out of sharecropping and tenant-farming agreements that left them mired in poverty.'
https://hempindustrydaily.com/interview-how-one-entrepreneur-is-using-hemp-to-restore-black-farm-ownership/

'The condition of Christian humanity, with its fortresses, cannon, dynamite, rifles, torpedoes, prisons, gallows, churches, factories, custom-house and palaces, is really terrible. But neither the fortresses nor the cannon nor the rifles will attack anyone of themselves, the prisons will not of themselves lock anyone up, the gallows will not of themselves hang anyone, nor will the churches delude anyone or the custom-houses hold anyone back, and the palaces and factories do not build themselves or maintain themselves. All this is done by people. And if they once understand that there is no necessity for all these things, these things will disappear.

And men already begin to understand. If they do not all understand, the leaders among them do - those whom the rest will follow. And what the leaders have once understood they cannot possibly cease to understand. And what the leaders have understood the rest of mankind not only can, but inevitably must, understand too.

So that the prediction that a time will come when men will be taught of God, will cease to learn war any more, and will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks (which translated into our own tongue means that all the prisons, fortresses, barracks, palaces, and churches, will remain empty, and that all the gallows, guns and cannon will remain unused), is no longer a dream but a definite new form of life, to which humanity is approaching with ever-increasing rapidity.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'Elias, in his testimony, shed light on the extent of the reviews, and how it preoccupied the antitrust division:
- Nine cannabis cases accounted for 29% of the antitrust division’s full-review or second-request merger investigations in fiscal year 2019.
- At one point, cannabis investigations accounted for five of the eight active merger investigations in the office that is responsible for the transportation, energy and agriculture sectors of the U.S. economy. The investigations were so numerous that staff from other offices were pulled in to assist, including employees from the telecommunications, media and technology offices'
https://mjbizdaily.com/doj-whistleblower-attorney-general-barrs-treatment-of-cannabis-industry-tantamount-to-harassment/

'"Ten pounds," she said. "That's how much I would have to take off." We were talking about the possibility of her doing a nude spread for one of the men's magazines, something on the order of a Rita Jenrette appearance in Playboy, with a little less leg. Dark humor, and it was out of the question, of course, until the trial was over. What would that horny old bastard of a judge say if she suddenly turned up in a naked centerfold in some skin magazine on sale in the courthouse newstand?

What indeed? There is much in the evidence to suggest, in fact, that the judge would not even have blinked. He had seen all he needed to see of Roxanne Pulitzer at that point, and a handful of naked pictures wasn't going to make much of a difference either way. She had already made her personal impression on the court, and it was not one that she and her lawyers had hoped for.

The language of Harper's final judgement in the now infamous Palm Beach divorce case of Pulitzer v. Pulitzer left little doubt that he had taken one long look at Roxanne and concluded that she was a raging slut, a homosexual adultress so addicted to drugs and drink as to pose a direct threat to the welfare of her own children, who were removed at once from her custody.

The decision stripped Roxanne Pulitzer naked in a way that no Playboy or Penthouse photographer would want to put on film. The message was clear: let this be a lesson for all gold diggers.'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Worldwide, drug use is more widespread in developed countries than in developing countries. Drugs such as cocaine are even more firmly associated with the wealthier parts of the world. Likewise, within countries, the wealthier sectors of society have a higher prevalence of drug use.' - United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2020, https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2020/field/WDR20_BOOKLET_1.pdf

'I certainly knew about anxiety. For any woman, just walking down a street can sometimes be an anxiety-inducing experience. It’s worse for a woman of color. Now picture a black trans woman and what she’s dealing with. Sometimes, knowing the kind of day that lies ahead, it’s almost impossible to just get out of bed, let alone walk down a street without fear due to the high rates of violence she faces. For me, cannabis made it possible.

For trans people, the hurdles of everyday life are often much higher, the barriers to basic needs are much wider, and the structural nature of discrimination and exclusion is much deeper. Shouldering that weight every single day results in debilitating stress, anxiety and depression.'
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/cannabis-is-critical-to-trans-health-and-self-care-sponsored-op-ed/

'"I expect a record number of states to legalize marijuana in 2021, in part due to the financial pressures, along with the racial injustice imperative to reduce unnecessary police-civilian interactions," said Karen O'Keefe, director of state policies for the Marijuana Policy Project, the lobbying organization behind many state cannabis policies in place today.

In recent weeks, a spate of US states have sought to relax decades-old drug laws that criminalized cannabis use and possession and disproportionately jailed Black people for non-violent offenses. '
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/24/business/cannabis-legalize-2021-recession/index.html

'But by that time his deal had already gone down. None of the respectable Chicano pols in East L.A. had ever liked him anyway, and that "high-speed drug bust" was all they needed to publicly denounce everything Left of huevos rancheros and start calling themselves Mexican-American again. The trial of the Biltmore Five was no longer a do-or-die cause for La Raza, but a shameful crime that a handful of radical dope fiends had brought down on the whole community. The mood on Whittier Boulevard turned sour overnight, and the sight of a Brown Beret was suddenly as rare as a cash client for Oscar Zeta Acosta - the ex-Chicano lawyer.

The entire ex-Chicano political community went as public as possible to make sure that the rest of the city understood that they had known all along that this dope-addict rata who had somehow been one of their most articulate and certainly their most radical, popular, and politically aggressive spokesmen for almost two years was really just a self-seeking publicity dope freak who couldn't even run a bar tab at the Silver Dollar Cafe, much less rally friends or a following. There was no mention in the Mexican-American press about Acosta's surprisingly popular campaign for sheriff of L.A. County a year earlier, which had made him a minor hero among politically hip Chicanos all over the city.

No more of that dilly-dong bullshit on Whittier Boulevard. Oscar's drug bust was still alive on the Evening News when he was evicted from his apartment on three days' notice and his car was either stolen or towed away from its customary parking place on the street in front of his driveway. His offer to defend his two friends on what he later assured me were absolutely valid charges of first degree murder were publicly rejected. Not even for free, they said. A dope-addled clown was worse than no lawyer at all.

It was dumb gunsel thinking, but Oscar was in no mood to offer his help more than once. So he beat a strategic retreat to Mazatlan, which he called his "other home," to lick his wounds and start writing the Great Chicano Novel. It was the end of an era! The fireball Chicano lawyer was on his way to becoming a half-successful writer, a cult figure of sorts - then a fugitive, a freak, and finally either a permanently missing person or an undiscovered corpse.'

- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'After my thoughts had been fixed for two years in one and the same direction, fate seems to have brought me for the first time in my life expressly in contact with an occurrence which plainly showed me in practice what had long been clear to me in theory, namely, that the whole order of our lives rests not on principles of jurisprudence (as people occupying advantageous positions are pleased to imagine) but on the simplest, coarsest violence - on the murder and torture of men.

Those who own large estates and fortunes, or who receive large incomes drawn from working people who go short even of necessities; and those who, like tradesmen, doctors, artists, clerks, scientists, cooks, writers, valets, and lawyers, live by serving those rich people like to believe that the advantages they enjoy result not from violence, but from an absolutely free and proper exchange of services. They like to believe that their advantages - far from being gained by beatings and murders such as took place in Orel and in many parts of Russia this summer, and that occur continually all over Europe and America - have no connexion with such violence. They like to believe that their privileges exist of themselves, and result from voluntary agreements among people, and that the violence enacted also exists of itself, and results from some general, higher judicial, political, or economic laws. They try not to see that they enjoy their advantages as a result of the very thing which forces the peasants who have tended the wood and are in great need of the timber to yield it up to a wealthy landowner, who took no part in tending it during its growth and is in no need of it - that is, the knowledge that if they do not give it up they will be flogged or killed.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'"Rejecting the analysis of career staff, Attorney General Barr ordered the Antitrust Division to issue Second Request subpoenas," Elias said, referencing the division's most comprehensive type of merger probe. "The rationale for doing so centered not on an antitrust analysis, but because he did not like the nature of their underlying business." '
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/23/politics/elias-testimony-barr-cannabis-trump-automobile-california/index.html

'A ballot issue passed in 2015 by Pueblo County voters stipulates that the first 50 percent of marijuana excise tax dollars are required to go toward scholarships. The second half can be used for capital infrastructure projects.

“This is tremendously impactful for local students who receive this award,” said Pueblo County Commissioner Garrison Ortiz.

Ortiz said the goal always was to increase the amount of the scholarships.'
https://www.chieftain.com/news/20200626/2m-plus-in-marijuana-scholarships-to-be-given-to-pueblo-students

'We also summarise the evidence relating to our current cannabis laws, to show what the impacts of maintaining the status quo might be. For example, the life-long collateral consequences of a drug conviction have detrimental social outcomes on individuals, whanau, and communities. Maori are disproportionately impacted by cannabis-related arrests and convictions and – despite recent changes to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 that affirm police discretion to take a health-oriented approach – this is unlikely to change while cannabis remains illegal.

The impacts of legalising cannabis are wide-ranging, including changes to social outcomes, public health outcomes and criminal justice. There may be some outcomes people haven’t yet considered, and we hope that having accessible information from trusted sources helps New Zealanders in their decision-making process.'
https://twitter.com/ChiefSciAdvisor/status/1280276739839496192

'And six months later, when the National Chicano Moratorium Committee felt it was time for another mass rally, they called it to "carry on the spirit of Ruben Salazar."

There is irony in this, because Salazar was nobody's militant. He was a professional journalist with ten years of experience on a variety of assignments for the neo-liberal Los Angeles Times. He was a nationally known reporter, winning prizes for his work in places like Vietnam, Mexico City, and the Dominican Republic. Ruben Salazar was a veteran war correspondent, but he had never shed blood under fire. He was good, and he seemed to like his work. So he must have been slightly bored when the Times called him back from the war-zones, for a raise and a well-deserved rest covering "local affairs."

He focused on the huge barrio just east of city hall. This was a scene he had never really known, despite his Mexican-American heritage. But he locked into it almost instantly. Within months, he had narrowed his work for the times down to a once-a-week column for the newspaper, and signed on as news director for KMEX-TV - the "Mexican-American station," - which he quickly transformed into an energetic, aggressively political voice for the whole Chicano community. His coverage of police activities made the East Los Angeles Sheriff's Department so unhappy that they soon found themselves in a sort of running private argument with this man Salazar, this spic who refused to be reasonable. When Salazar got into a routine story like some worthless kid named Ramirez getting beaten to death in a jail fight, he was likely to come up with almost anything - including a series of hard-hitting news commentaries suggesting that the victim had been beaten to death by the jailers. In the summer of 1970 Ruben Salazar was warned three times, by the cops, to "tone down his coverage." And each time he told them to fuck off.'

- Strange Rumblings in Aztlan: The Murder of Ruben Salazar, April 29, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Both those in authority and their subordinates, though they explain the motives of their conduct differently, agree that they act as they do because the existing order is just the order that must and should exist at the present time, and that to support it is therefore each man's sacred duty.

On this acceptance of the necessity and therefore the immutability of the existing order rests also the argument by which those who take part in governmental violence always justify themselves. They say that as the existing order is immutable, the refusal of some one individual to fulfill the duties laid upon him has no real influence on things, but only means that his place will be taken by someone else who may do worse than he; that is, exercise more cruelty and do more harm to the victims.

It is this conviction that the existing order is a necessary and therefore immutable order, to support which is the sacred duty of every man, that makes it possible for good men, of high principles in private life, to take part with more or less untroubled conscience in affairs such as that committed in Orel, and that which the men in the Tula train were going to perpetrate.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'However, the conversation on police reform cannot simply start and end with these measures, and it must include a reexamination of our entire criminal justice system. We should be repealing mandatory sentencing and reducing over-policing (which includes finally legalizing adult-use marijuana)'
https://www.poconorecord.com/opinion/20200707/lt-gov-john-fetterman-discretion-and-de-escalation-are-police-officerrsquos-strongest-tools

'The agency is proposing that all fees will be 50% lower than the current fee for a Tier 1 License. That would make a special permit $1,000.

Tier 1 cultivation licenses limit canopy space to 1 acre or less.

The draft policy also proposes that applicants may apply for a waiver, deferment or payment plan if the reduced fees are too high'
https://mjbizdaily.com/jamaica-to-lower-cannabis-industry-entry-barriers-for-small-farmers/

'Among significant challenges faced by those interested in entering the cannabis industry is the cost. While the early stages of the industry may have been less capital-intensive, current regulatory, legal, and compliance costs have risen significantly long before any efforts for building effective products and branding.

SEP participants are simultaneously tasked with learning the nuances of the process along with juggling myriad considerations required in identifying one’s niche in the market and building a business. In such a fast-moving, dynamic space, potential entrepreneurs are often left a step behind their privileged peers.

If the ultimate goal of these programs is equity, additional consideration may be required to ensure that all applicants, regardless of status, are able to enter the market with equal opportunity. For those issues to be addressed long-term, a regulatory foundation needs to prioritize inclusivity and equity, with execution to deliver on those best of intentions.'
https://newfrontierdata.com/cannabis-insights/civil-protests-give-urgency-to-cannabis-industrys-social-equity-programs/

'Social Equity Programs (SEPs) are focused initiatives designed to address inequality in the national cannabis market.
A reported 70% of Americans believe smoking cannabis to be “morally acceptable.”
In 2018, 663,367 people were arrested for marijuana violations — about one per every 48 seconds.
Black people are 3.6x more likely than are whites to be arrested for marijuana possession'

https://newfrontierdata.com/cannabis-insights/social-equity-in-cannabis/

'All the injustice and cruelties customary in present-day life have become habitual only because there are men always ready to carry out these injustices and cruelties. If it were not for them there would not only be no one to wreak violence on those immense masses of oppressed people, but those who issued the orders would never venture to do so, and would not even dare to dream of the sentences they now confidently pass.

Were it not for these men ready to torture or kill anyone they are commanded to, no one would dare to claim what is confidently claimed by all the non-working landowners, namely that land surrounded by men who are suffering for lack of land, is the property of a man who does not work on it, or that stores of grain collected by trickery ought to be preserved untouched in the midst of a population dying of hunger, because the merchant wants to make a profit. But for the existence of these people, ready at the will of the authorities to torture and kill anyone they are told to, it could never enter the head of a landowner to deprive the peasants of a wood they had grown, or of the officials to consider it proper to receive salaries taken from the famishing people for oppressing them, not to mention executing, imprisoning, or evicting people for exposing falsehood and preaching the truth. In fact all this is demanded and done only because the authorities are all fully convinced that they have always at hand servile people ready to carry out all their demands by means of tortures and killings.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'Oscar Costa, the Chicano lawyer, was there, leaning on the bar, talking idly with some of the patrons. Of the four people around him - all in their late twenties - two were ex-cons, two were part-time dynamite freaks and known fire-bombers, and three of the four were veteran acid-eaters. Yet none of this surfaced in the conversation. The talk was political, but only in terms of the courtroom. Oscar was dealing with two hyperpolitical trials at the same time.

In one, the trial of the "Biltmore Six," he was defending six young Chicanos who'd been arrested for trying to burn down the Biltmore Hotel one night about a year ago, while Governor Ronald Reagan was delivering a speech in the ballroom. Their guilt or innocence was immaterial at this point, because the trial had developed into a spectacular attempt to overturn the entire Grand Jury selection system. In the preceding months, Acosta had subpoenaed every superior court judge in Los Angeles County and cross-examined all 109 of them at length, under oath, on the subject of their "racism." It was a wretched affront to the whole court system, and Acosta was working overtime to make it as wretched as possible. Here were these 109 old men, these judges, compelled to take time out from whatever they were doing and go into another courtroom to take the stand and deny charges of "racism" from an attorney they all loathed.

Oscar's contention, throughout, was that all Grand Juries are racist, since all grand jurors have to be recommended by superior court judges - who naturally tend to recommend people they know personally or professionally. And that therefore no rat-bastard Chicano street crazy, for instance, could possibly be indicted by "a jury of his peers." The implications of a victory in this case were so obvious, so clearly menacing to the court system, that interest in the verdict had filtered all the way down to places like the Boulevard, the Silver Dollar, and the Sweetheart. The level of political consciousness is not normally high in these places - especially on Saturday mornings - but Acosta's very presence, no matter where he goes or what he seems to be doing, is so grossly political that anybody who wants to talk to him has to figure out some way to deal on a meaningful polictical level.'

- Strange Rumblings in Aztlan: The Murder of Ruben Salazar, April 29, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Data on the annual prevalence of drug use among adults in Australia, the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, for example, show there is much higher drug use in urban areas than in rural areas, with the divide being even more pronounced among frequent users in the United States, where, in 2018, past-month prevalence of drug use was almost 80 per cent higher in large metropolitan areas than in rural areas.' - United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2020, https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2020/field/WDR20_BOOKLET_4.pdf

'This suggests that while people with higher socioeconomic status may have a greater propensity to experiment, it is among the lower socioeconomic classes that the most negative impact of the onset of recreational drug use is found, with a higher proportion of people becoming dependent. This suggests that poverty is associated with drug use disorders. Indeed, poor people living on the margins of society tend to be more vulnerable to slipping from recreational drug use into full-scale drug abuse and drug dependence because treatment facilities for intervening at an early stage in a drug career are often unavailable or unaffordable for such population groups. In this context, drug use itself may exacerbate poverty and marginalization, thus creating the potential for a vicious cycle' - United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2020, https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2020/field/WDR20_BOOKLET_4.pdf

'In a nut, Herbert "Pete" Pulitzer rented the Best Piece of Ass in Palm Beach for six and a half years at a net cost of about $1,000 a month in alimony, and when it was over, he got the house and the children, along with everything else.

Roxanne was awarded about 10 percent of this, to be paid out over two years or until she remarries. The judge gave her two weeks to get out of the house where she'd been living for seven years, and Herbert took physical custody of the twins immediately.

Judge Harper had run the whole show with an evil glint in his eye, enduring a shitrain of perjury from both sides and day after day of relentless haggling and posturing by teams of Palm Beach lawyers and a circus parade of rich fools, dumb hustlers, and dope fiends who were all getting famous just for being in his courtroom - where smoking was not allowed, except for the judge, who smoked constantly.

That should have been the tip off, but we missed it. The judge had made up his mind early on, and the rest was all show business, a blizzard of strange publicity that amused half the English-speaking world for a few months and in the end meant nothing at all.'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Cannabis arrests accounted for 43 percent of all drug arrests in 2018, the most recent year the report covers, and an overwhelming majority of those arrests—89.6 percent—were for possession alone.

Overall, black people are 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession, even though usage rates are comparable. The trend toward legalization and decriminalization hasn’t reduced national trends in disparate enforcement—and in some parts of the country, they have worsened.

African Americans are more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession in every single state in the country.'
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomangell/2020/04/20/on-420-aclu-highlights-racist-marijuana-enforcement-in-new-report/#7b25e6dd7487

'One of his "associates" was usually a well-dressed, well-mannered young Chicano whose only job was to carry at least 100 milligrams of pure speed at all times and feed Oscar whenever he signaled; the other was not so well dressed or mannered; his job was to stay alert and be one step ahead of the bailiffs when they made a move on Oscar - at which point he would reach out and grab any pills, powders, shivs, or other evidence he was handed, then sprint like a human bazooka for the neatest exit.

This strategy worked so well for almost two years that Oscar and his people finally got careless. They had survived another long day in court - on felony arson charges, this time, for trying to burn down the Biltmore Hotel during a speech by then governor Ronald Reagan - and they were driving back home to Oscar's headquarters pad in the barrio (and maybe running sixty or sixty-five in a fifty m.p.h. speed zone, Oscar later admitted) when they were suddenly jammed to a stop by two LAPD cruisers. "They acted like we'd just robbed a bank," said Frank, looking straight down the barrel of a shotgun. "They made us all lie face down on the street and then they searched the car, and - "

Yes. That's when they found the drugs: twenty or thirty white pills that the police quickly identified as "illegal amphetamine tablets, belonging to attorney Oscar Acosta.

The spic for all seasons was jailed once again, this time on what the press called a "high-speed drug bust." Oscar called a press conference in jail and accused the cops of "planting" him - but not even his bodyguards believed him until long after the attendant publicity had done them all so much damage that the whole "Brown Power Movement" was effectively stalled, splintered, and discredited by the time all charges, both arson and drugs, were either dropped or reduced to small print on the back of the blotter.'

- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'The “war on drugs” is harming the most vulnerable and criminalising poverty. It is not a war on drugs – despite decades of prohibition, drug production and consumption is on the increase globally – it is a war on the poor. Prohibition damages people and the planet.

It is also a staggering waste of money. The cost of enforcing the war on drugs is in excess of $100bn (£77bn) a year. This rivals the size of the global aid budget (about $146bn). If redirected, that money could help provide healthcare, education and clean water to people across the world.'
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jan/22/take-power-away-criminal-gangs-legalise-drugs

'Often when I see not only the levies of recruits, the military exercises and the manoeuvres, but also the policemen with loaded revolvers and the sentries with rifles and fixed bayonets, when for whole days at a time I hear (as I do in the Khamovniki where I live) the whistling and rattle of bullets as they hit the target; and when I see in the city (where any attempt at violence in self-defence is suppressed, where the sale of drugs and ammunition is prohibited, and where rapid driving and treatment by an unlicenced doctor is forbidden) thousands of disciplined men trained to murder and subject to one man's will, I ask myself: How can people who value their safety quietly allow and put up with this? Apart from its harmfulness and immorality, nothing can be more dangerous. What are men - I do not speak of Christians, ministers of religion, humanitarians, and moralists, but simply men who value their own lives, safety, and welfare - what are they thinking about? For this organization will act in the same way in whomsoever's hands it may be. Today, let us say, the power is in the hands of a tolerable ruler, but tomorrow it may be seized by a Biron, an Elizabeth, a Catherine, a Pugachev, a Napoleon I or a Napoleon III. And the man in whose hands the power lies may be tolerable today but tomorrow may become a beast or he may be succeeded by a mad or crazy heir - like the King of Bavaria, or our Paul I.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'There were still almost more than 1,100 criminal summonses for marijuana possession in September and almost 1,400 in August. And the data shows that racial disparities in summonses were similar to those in arrests.

In 2016 through 2018, 78 percent of summonses for marijuana possession where the race was recorded were issued to people of color — 48 percent were handed out to black people and 30 percent to Hispanic people. In 2017, 86 percent of people arrested were black or Hispanic.

The disproportionate number persists despite research that shows black and whites use marijuana in roughly the same rates.'
https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2018/11/07/marijuana-enforcement-declines-dramatically-in-new-york-city-687362

'The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world and incarcerates African Americans at more than five times the rate of white people. Our job is to end the destructive “war on drugs,” eliminate private prisons and cash bail and bring about major police department reform.'
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1100100241465004033

'A judge, a policeman, a governor, or an officer, can keep his position just the same under Boulanger, Pugachev, Catherine, or a republic. But should the existing order which secures him his advantageous position collapse, he would certainly lose that position. And so these people are none of them alarmed as to who will be at the head of the organization of violence - they can adapt themselves to anyone. They only fear the abolition of the organization itself, and that is the reason - though sometimes an unconscious one - why they maintain it.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'“We cannot direct revenues to entities like the MTA, NYCHA and Health and Hospitals, which have consistently propagated harm and been complicit in the arrest crusade by targeting people who have used marijuana by calling the police or taking black and Latina mothers away from their children after nonconsensual maternal drug tests,” DPA New York State deputy director Melissa Moore wrote in an editorial for New York Daily News.

“Marijuana revenues do need to be directed to marginalized communities, and the people first in line need to be the people who have been ravaged by overpolicing and impacted by other insidious criminalization. That means sending cash to the areas where New Yorkers of color have lost their homes, been separated from their children and been denied citizenship and freedom because of racist enforcement.”'
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/new-york-cannabis-clash-should-marijuana-taxes-fund-subways-or-social-justice/

"I walk in the night rain until the dawn of the new day. I have devised the plan, straightened out the philosophy, and set up the organization. When I have the 1 million Brown Buffaloes on my side I will present the demands for a new nation to the U.S. Government and the United Nations...and then I'll split and write the book. I have no desire to be a politician. I don't want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right. Once in every century comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people. Moses, Mao, and Martin [Luther King Jr.] are examples. Who's to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices. Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine, and Juarez. Perhaps that is why I have been taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique?" - Oscar Costa, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Well...not me, old sport. Wherever you are and in whatever shape - dead or alive or even both, eh? That's one thing they can't take away from you...Which is lucky, I think, for the rest of us: because (and, yeah - let's face it, Oscar) you were not really light on your feet in this world, and you were too goddamn heavy for most of the boats you jumped into. One of my greatest regrets in life is that I was not able to introduce you to my old football buddy, Richard Nixon. The main thing he feared in his life - even worse than the Queers and Jews and Mutants - was people who might run amok; he called them "loose cannons on the deck," and he wanted them all put to sleep.

That's one graveyard we never even checked, Oscar, but why not? If your classic "doomed nigger" style of paranoia had any validity at all, you must understand that it was not just Richard Nixon who was out to get you - but all the people who thought like Nixon and all the judges and U.S. attorneys he appointed in those weird years. Were there any of Nixon's friends among all those superior court judges you subpoenaed and mocked and humiliated when you were trying to bust the grand jury selection system in L.A.? How many of those Brown Beret "bodyguards" [in the La Raza Movement] you called "brothers' were deep-cover cops or informants? I recall being seriously worried about that when we were working on that story about the killing of the Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar by an L.A. County sheriff's deputy. How many of those bomb-throwing, trigger-happy freaks who slept on mattresses in your apartment were talking to the sheriff on a chilli-hall pay phone every morning? Or maybe to the judges who kept jailing you for contempt of court, when they didn't have anything else?'

- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'While marijuana arrests have declined and tax revenue has begun to flow in most states that have legalized pot, the gains have accrued most heavily to white residents, even though black Americans paid the drug war’s biggest costs, according to a statistical analysis conducted by the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit group that advocates drug policy reform.'
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/legal-marijuana-made-big-promises-racial-equity-fell-short-n952376?cid=sm_tw

'I shrugged and went back to fondling the goods on the shirt rack. The concept of victimless crime is well understood in Palm Beach, and the logic is hard to argue. No harm, no crime. If a pretty girl from Atlanta can sleep late in the morning, have lunch at the Everglades Club, and make $50,000 tax free a year fucking dogs in rich people's bedrooms on weekends, why should she fear the police? What is the difference between bestiality and common sodomy? Is it better to fuck swine at the Holiday Inn or donkeys in a penthouse on Tarpon Island? And what's wrong with incest, anyway? It takes two hundred years of careful inbreeding to produce a line of beautiful daughters, and only a madman would turn them out to strangers. Feed them cocaine and teach them to love their stepsisters - or even their fathers and brothers, if that's what it takes to keep ugliness out of the family.

Look at the servants. They have warts and fat ankles. Their children are too dumb to learn and too mean to live, and there is no sense of family continuity. There is a lot more to breeding than teaching children good table manners, and a lot more to being rich than just spending money on wearing alligator shirts. The real difference between the Rich and the Others is not just that "they have more money," as Hemingway noted, but that money is not a governing factor in their lives, as it is with people who work for a living. The truly rich are born free, like dolphins, they will never feel hungry, and their credit will never be questioned. Their daughters will be debutantes and their sons will go to prep schools, and if their cousins are junkies and lesbians, so what? The breeding of humans is still an imperfect art, even with all the advantages.

Where are the Aryan thoroughbreds that Hitler bred so carefully in the early days of the Third Reich? Where are the best and brightest children of Bel Air and Palm Beach?

These are awkward questions in some circles, and the answers can be disturbing. Why do the finest flowers of the American Dream so often turn up in asylums, divorce courts, and other grey hallways of the living doomed? What is it about being born free and rich beyond worry that makes people crazy?'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'In 2016, black adults comprised only 30.6 percent of the state’s adult population, but accounted for 53.7 percent of adults who were arrested. That same year, black people were 2.9 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession in Louisiana, even though black adults are statistically less likely than white adults to use marijuana.'
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2018/09/18/splc-report-racial-profiling-law-enforcement-widespread-across-louisiana

'But is it possible that people of the upper classes support this order of things only because it is advantageous for them? They cannot but see that this order of things is in itself irrational, no longer corresponds to men's consciousness or even to public opinion, and is full of danger.

People of the governing classes - the honest, good, clever people among them - cannot fail to suffer from those inner contradictions and to see the dangers they are exposed to. And is it possible that all of the millions of people of the lower order can with tranquil minds perform all the evidently evil actions - tortures and murders - they are compelled to do, merely because they fear punishment? It cannot be so, and neither the one nor the other could fail to see the unreasonableness of their conduct if the complexity of the state-structure did not conceal from them the irrationality and unnaturalness of what they are doing.

The irrationality is concealed by the fact that when any such action is committed there are so many instigators, accomplices, and abettors, that not one of those concerned in the affair feels himself morally responsible. Murderers oblige all those who witness murder to strike at the body of the man who has been killed, so that the responsibility may rest on as large a number of people as possible. That same principle, in a more definitely organized form, is applied to the penetration of those crimes without the constant commission of which no governmental organization could exist. Rulers always try to draw as many citizens as possible into as much participation as possible in the crimes they commit and that are necessary for them.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'Making licenses available to people who are low-income, reside in a “Disproportionately Impacted Area,” and have an arrest or conviction for a marijuana offense is a key part of the vision for Social Equity. But 200 storefront retail licenses remain unallocated—and the DCR is still unprepared to support applicants who “by definition, have been disproportionately excluded from the economic and professional resources that are essential to navigating a licensing process and launching a successful business,” as Packer underscored in her recommendations made to the Rules, Elections, and Intergovernmental Relations Committee on February 8, 2019.'
https://filtermag.org/2019/03/29/funding-los-angeles-social-equity/

'Most disturbing about the data, however, is the implication that law enforcement still polices certain neighborhoods and people of a particular hue much tougher than everyone else. This is no surprise to the people living in these communities who have long complained they receive more attention than they care for from the police.'
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-0103-african-americans-marijuana-arrests-20190102-story.html

'At first I wasn't sure I was hearing him right, and I looked over at Jimmy King. "What the hell did I just hear?" I asked.

King smiled and looked at Paul Kirk, who leaned across the table and whispered, "He said his top two advisers are Bob Dylan and Reinhold Niebuhr."

I nodded and got up to go outside for my tape recorder. I could tell by the rising anger in Carter's voice that we were in for an interesting ride...And by the time I got back, he was whipping on the crowd about judges who took bribes in return for reduced prison sentences, lawyers who deliberately cheated illiterate blacks, and cops who abused people's rights with something they called a "consent warrant."

"I had lunch this week with members of the Judicial Selection Committee, and they were talking about a 'consent search warrant,'" he said. "I didn't know what a consent search warrant was. They said, "Well, that's when two policemen go to a house. One of them goes to the front door and knocks on it, and the other one runs around to the back door and yells 'come in'""

The crowd got a laugh out of that one, but Carter was just warming up, and for the next twenty or thirty minutes, his voice was the only sound in the room. Kennedy was sitting just a few feet to Carter's left, listening carefully but never changing the thoughtful expression on his face as Carter railed and bitched about a system of criminal justice that allows the rich and the privileged to escape punishment for their crimes and sends poor people to prison because they can't afford to bribe the judge...'

- Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '76: Third-Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous, June 3, 1976, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Their idea: Neighborhood groups would designate areas for adults to consume cannabis without risking arrest or run-ins with police, and also avoid exposing children or neighbors to unwanted smoke. The neighborhood would appoint residents to supervise, and police would stop by and ensure it’s being used as promised—that is, for consumption, not for dealing or other criminal activity. “It’s a way to move the drugs in the city to a more controlled area,” Guyton said, as well as a “postponement method, if you will, until the state’s attorney and the [police] commissioner can come together.”

Guyton and Gladden attempted to demonstrate that idea in early February. While residents and media turned out for the demo-protest, police, unsurprisingly, weren’t fans, and suppressed it with a contingent of officers placed across the street'
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/03/marijuana-laws-baltimore-police-weed-arrests-decriminalize/585406/

'But not only do all men involved in the State organization throw the responsibility for their acts on one another - the soldier on the nobleman or merchant who is his officer, and the officer on the nobleman who occupies the post of Governor, and the Governor on the gentleman or son of an official who holds the post of minister, and the minister on the member of the royal family who occupies the position of the Tsar, and the Tsar again on all those officials, nobles, merchants, and peasants - not only do people free themselves in this way from the sense of responsibility for their actions, but they also lose their moral consciousness of responsibility because, being involved in a State organization, they so unceasingly, strenuously, and persistently assure themselves and one another that they are not all equal, but different among themselves "as one star differeth from another", that they begin to really believe this. Thus some are persuaded that they are not simple people like other folk but are special beings who ought to be specially honoured. And it is instilled into others by all possible means that they are inferior creatures, and should therefore uncomplainingly submit to what those above them dictate.

This inequality, this exaltation of some and degradation of others, is the chief cause of men's capacity to ignore the irrationality and cruelty and wickedness of the existing order, as well as the deception practised by some and suffered by others.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The A.C.L.U. report said that one possible reason that the racial disparity in arrests remained despite shifting state policies toward the drug is that police practices are slow to change.

Federal programmes like the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant Program continue to provide incentives for racial profiling, the report said, by including arrest numbers in its performance measures when distributing hundreds of millions of dollars to local law enforcement each year.'
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/drug-arrests-that-uncover-the-racial-bias/article4785236.ece

'New research from New Frontier Data finds that cannabis arrests account for 41.6% of all drug-related arrests, with 15.7 million Americans having been arrested for cannabis (either possession, sales, or manufacturing) from 1997-2016. Yet application of unequal justice finds that black or Hispanic suspects are arrested and convicted at rates more than 9x that of whites.'

'The commission on Tuesday approved earmarking fees collected through marijuana business licenses to help some of the roughly 6,000 homeless people countywide.

“We know that if we can provide the full service to one client, it saves us for the long run,” Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick said, “because it saves us in the jail, it saves us at the hospital, it saves us for overall.”'
https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/clark-county/clark-county-to-direct-marijuana-money-to-homelessness-fight-1579502/

'In just the same way the judges who wrongfully awarded the wood to the landowner, did so only because they considered themselves to be not ordinary men like everybody else and therefore bound to be guided in everything by truth alone, but, under the intoxication of power, imagined themselves to be guardians of official justice and incapable of error. And while under the intoxicating influence of servility they imagined themselves to be men bound to execute certain rules written down in a certain book, called laws. And all the participants in the affair - from the highest representative of authority who signed the report, the marshal of nobility who presided at the recruiting sessions, and the priest who deluded the conscripts, to the lowest soldier now preparing to shoot his fellow-men - under the influence of power or servility considered themselves to be, and represented themselves to others as being, not what they really are but something quite different. They all did what they did, and prepare to do what they still have to do, only because they seem to themselves and to others to be not what they are in reality - men faced with the question whether they ought or ought not to take part in wicked actions which their conscience condemns - but different, conventional characters: one an anointed Tsar, a special being destined to watch over the welfare of a hundred million people; another the representative of the nobility; another a priest who has received special grace by his ordination; another a soldier bound by his oath unreflectingly to do all that he is commanded to do. All these people could only, and can only, act as they do under the influence of intoxication by power or servility, resulting from their imagined positions.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'That is the weak reed, a cruel and incurable problem the rich have never solved - how to live in peace with the servants. Sooner or later, the maid has to come in the bedroom, and if you're only paying her $150 a week, she is going to come in hungry, or at least curious, and the time is long past when it was legal to cut their tongues out to keep them from talking.

The servant problem is the Achilles' heel of the rich. The only solution is robots, but we are still a generation or so away from that, and in the meantime, it is just about impossible to hire a maid who is smart enough to make a bed but too dumb to wonder why it is full of naked people every morning. The gardener will not be comfortable with the sight of rope ladders hanging from the master-bedroom windows when he mows the lawn at noon, and any chauffeur with the brains to work a stick shift on a Rolls will also understand what's happening when you wake him up at midnight and send him across the bridge to a goat farm in Loxahatchee for a pair of mature billys and a pound of animal stimulant.

Nakedness is a way of life in Palm Beach, and the difference between a picnic and an orgy is not always easy to grasp. If a woman worth $40 million wants to swim naked in the pool with her billy goat at four in the morning it's nobody's business but hers. There are laws in Florida against sexual congress with beasts, but not everybody feels it is wrong.

"My roommate fucks dogs at parties," said a sleek blonde in her late twenties, who sells cashmere and gold gimcracks in a stylish boutique on Worth Avenue. "So what?" Who gets hurt by it?"'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'The mayor touted a record $50 million funding for affordable housing, achieved by harnessing marijuana tax revenue. In 2019, $10 million of the Affordable Housing Fund will go to support people experiencing homelessness. The plan calls for creating or preserving 6,000 housing units over the next five years.

The budget plan includes an ambitious – and potentially controversial – program to provide a mobile van that would offer needle exchange and syringe access, part of a larger $3.1 million effort to combat opioid and substance abuse, paid in part by revenue from the special retail marijuana tax.'
https://www.9news.com/article/news/politics/denver-mayor-unveils-2019-proposed-budget-outlines-priorities/73-594033043

'Unlike Colorado, which has a lower tax rate and spends most of its marijuana money on schools, Washington allocates a portion of its marijuana tax dollars to substance-abuse education and treatment programs.

But the biggest slice of the pie, more than $262 million in 2018, helps the state pay for its share of Medicaid, which provides health insurance to nearly 1.8 million low-income Washington residents.'
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/where-does-washingtons-marijuana-tax-money-go/281-581833195

'The electorate feels a need to be cleansed, reassured, and revitalized. The underdogs of yesteryear have had their day, and they blew it. The radicals and reformers of the Sixties promised peace, but they turned out to be nothing but incompetent troublemakers. Their plans that had looked so fine on paper led to chaos and disaster when hack politicians tried to implement them. The promise of civil rights turned into the nightmare of busing. The call for law and order led straight to Watergate. And the long struggle between the Hawks and Doves caused violence in the streets and a military disaster in Vietnam. Nobody won, in the end, and when the dust finally settled, "extremists" at both ends of the political spectrum were thoroughly discredited. And by the time the 1976 presidential campaign got underway, the high ground was all in the middle of the road.

Jimmy Carter understands this, and he has tailored his campaign image to fit the new mood almost perfectly...But back in May of '74 when he flew up to Athens to make his "remarks" at the Law Day ceremonies, he was not as concerned with preserving his moderate image as he is now. He was thinking more about all the trouble he'd had with judges, lawyers, lobbyists, and other minions of the Georgia establishment while he was governor - and now, with only six more months in the office, he wanted to have a few words with these people.

There was not much anger in his voice when he started talking, but halfway through the speech it was too obvious for anybody in the room to ignore. But there was no way to cut him short, and he knew it. It was the anger in his voice that first caught my attention, I think, but what sent me out to the trunk to get my tape recorder instead of another drink was the spectacle of a southern politician telling a crowd of southern judges and lawyers that "I'm not qualified to talk to you about law, because in addition to being a peanut farmer, I'm an engineer and nuclear physicist, not a lawyer...But I read a lot and I listen a lot. One of the sources of my understanding about the proper application of criminal justice and the system of equities is from Reinhold Niebuhr. The other source of my understanding about what's right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. Listening to his records about 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll' and 'Like a Rolling Stone' and 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' I've learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.'

- Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '76: Third-Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous, June 3, 1976, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

"We are excited to be able to base this new industry in our community, a rural region that desperately needs new economic development opportunities. Without the strong local support believing in this goal it would not have been possible."
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12113686

'The ruling classes, having no longer any reasonable justification for the advantageous position they hold, are obliged, in order to keep these positions, to repress their higher rational capacities and their love for their fellow-men, and to hypnotize themselves into the belief that their exceptional positions are necessary. And the lower classes, crushed by toil and intentionally stupefied, live in a continual condition of hypnotization, deliberately and incessantly induced by people of the upper classes.

Only in this way can one explain the amazing contradiction that fills our life, and of which a striking example was presented by those kindly and mild acquaintances whom I met on the 9th of September, who with quiet minds were going to commit the most cruel, senseless, and vile crimes. Had conscience not been stifled in some way in those men, not one of them could have done a one-hundredth part of what they were preparing to do, and very likely will do.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

Equality for marijuana will be the day when we treat marijuana just like any other plant completely free of all curbs related to its existence and usage....

'"And as someone who was a lone voice on this issue just one year ago, I especially commend statewide efforts to legalize the adult recreational use of marijuana— ending a prohibition that has plagued communities of color for far too long.”'
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/statement-attorney-general-james-response-governor-cuomos-state-state-address

'You can’t separate marijuana legalization from the injustices of the War on Drugs. If you do, those who profit from private prisons can get another payday w/ marijuana. $ is a justice issue. Communities decimated by mass incarceration need to see investments w/ legalization.'
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1096512666649141248

'There was, however, one item which begged for attention. The figure was $441,000, and the column was "miscellaneous and unknown."

Right. Miscellaneous and unknown: $441,000. And nobody in the courtroom even blinked. Here were two coke fiends who came into court because their marriage didn't seem to be working and the children were getting nervous.

And the servants were turning weird and on some nights there were naked people running around on the lawn and throwing rocks at the upstairs bedroom windows and people with white foam in their mouths were jacking off like apes in the hallways...people screeching frantically on the telephone at four in the morning about volcanic eruptions in the Pacific that were changing the temperature of the ocean forever and causing the jet stream to move south, which would bring on a new ice age - and that's why neither one of us could get any sleep for two years, your Honor, and the sky was full of vultures so we called a plastic surgeon because her tits were starting to sag and my eyes didn't look right anymore and then we drove halfway to Miami at 100 miles an hour before we realized it was Sunday and the hospital wouldn't be open so we checked into the Holiday Inn with Jim's wife and ye gods, your Honor, this woman is a whore and I can't really tell you what it means because the children are in danger and we're afraid they might freeze in their sleep and I can't trust you anyway but what else can I do. I'm desperate - and, by the way, we spent $441,000 last year on things I can't remember.

Welcome to cocaine country. White Line Fever. Bad craziness. What is a judge to make of two coke fiends who spent $441,000 last year on "miscellaneous and unknown"? The figure for the previous year was only $99,000, at a time when the Pulitzers' cocaine use was admittedly getting out of hand. They said that they were holding it down to just a few grams a week, at that point, a relatively moderate figure among the Brotherhood of the Bindle, but the evidence suggests a genuinely awesome rate of consumption - something like thirteen grams a day - by the time they finally staggered into divorce court and went public with the whole wretched saga.

The numbers are staggering, even in the context of Palm Beach. Thirteen grams a day would kill a whole family of polar bears.'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law Thursday a bill hailed by supporters as a way to begin addressing the disproportionate effect the War on Drugs had on minority communities.'
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article219148070.html

'Let all the external improvements that religious and scientific people dream of be accomplished; let all men accept Christianity and all the improvements the Bellamys and Richets desire be accomplished with all possible additions and corrections, but if at the same time the hypocrisy remains that now exists, if people do not profess the truth they know but continue to feign belief in what they do not themselves believe and veneration for what they do not respect, the condition of people will not only merely remain what it is but will become worse and worse. The better men are materially provided for, the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers and periodicals they have the more means there will be of spreading contradictory lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently unhappy will men become, as indeed occurs now.

Let all those external alterations be realized and the position of humanity will not be bettered. But let each man according to the strength that is in him profess the truth he knows and practises in his own life - or at least cease to excuse the falsehood he supports by representing it as truth - and at once, in this very year 1893, such changes would be accomplished towards man's liberation and the establishment of truth on earth, as we dare not hope for in hundreds of years.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino made the remarks on the day of Murphy’s inauguration as governor back in January, and a recording of them was obtained by WNYC on Wednesday night.

“He talked about the whole thing, the marijuana, sanctuary state…better criminal justice reform. Christ almighty, in other words let the blacks come in, do whatever the fuck they want, smoke their marijuana, do this do that, and don’t worry about it,” Saudino said of Murphy’s inaugural address. “You know, we’ll tie the hands of cops.”'
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/cop-caught-on-tape-making-racist-comments-about-marijuana-legalization/

'Anybody who doubts it should go out and catch the president's act, the next time he swoops into the local airport. Watch the big silver-and-blue custom-built 707 come booming down the runway and roll up in front of the small but well-disciplined crowd of Nixon Youth cheerleaders singing the "Nixon Now" song, waving their freshly painted red-white-and-blue "Re-Elect the President" signs and then pausing, in perfect unison, before intimidating every TV crew on the runway with the stylish "Four More Years!" chant.

Watch the president emerge from the belly of the plane, holding hands with the aging Barbie doll known as his wife, and ooze down the rolling VIP stairway while the 105th Division Rolling Thunder Women & Children Classic Napalm U.S. Army Parade Band whips the crowd higher and higher with a big-beat rendition of "God Save the Freaks."

See the generals strut down from the plane behind the president. Take a long look at the grinning "local dignitaries" who are ushered out, by armed guards, to greet him. See the White House press corps over there about two hundred yards away, herded into that small corral behind heavy ropes stretched around red-white-and-blue painted oil drums. Why are they smiling?'

- The Campaign Trail: The Fat City Blues, October 26, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Speaking during a meeting in Diego Martin, on Sunday night, Dr Rowley stated that ganja prohibition unfairly penalizes members of the lower economic classes more than those of the higher classes.'
https://www.tv6tnt.com/news/7pmnews/gov-t-to-examine-marijuana-decriminalization/article_57be2266-b558-11e8-a553-07723af73eb6.html

'Findings from this study adds to the growing literature that suggests that discrimination is associated with marijuana use among Black men. Furthermore, findings suggest that men who use marijuana almost every day have a decrease risk for major discrimination. '
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1557988316664896

'A single execution carried out dispassionately by prosperous and educated men with the approval and participation of Christian minister and presented as something necessary and even just, perverts and brutalizes men more than thousands of murders committed by uneducated working people under the influence of passion. An execution such as Zukhovsky proposed to arrange, which was to arouse in men a sentiment of religious emotion, would have the most depraving influence imaginable.

Every war, even the briefest, with the expenditure usual to war, the destruction of crops, the plundering, the licensed debauchery and murders, the sophisticated excuses as to its necessity and justice, the exaltation and glorification of military exploits, patriotism and devotion to the flag, the feigned solicitude for the wounded, and so on, does more to deprave people in a single year than millions of robberies, arsons, and murders committed in hundreds of years by individual men under the influence of passion.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

This should be a global standard because worldwide the persons arrested for marijuana are always the poor and minorities. They should be given first right to cultivate and sell before big businesses.

'The model ordinance is designed to even the playing field. People who were arrested on charges related to marijuana prior to legalization, who had a family member arrested on such charges and/or lived in an area with disproportionately high cannabis arrest rates would be eligible to participate in the program. It also invites people with low income—defined as those with “household income of less than 80 percent of the current fiscal year median family income for the county of residence”—to participate as well.

“The licensing structure… prioritizes folks who have been impacted by the war on drugs for ownership,” Jason Ortiz, MCBA vice president, told Marijuana Moment in a phone interview. “Those folks are often left behind, if included at all. We put them at the front of the line.”'
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/model-legislation-aims-to-help-cities-bring-people-of-color-into-marijuana-industry/

'On the surface, the story was not complex. Basically, it was just another tale of Cinderella gone wrong, a wiggy little saga of crime, hubris, and punishment.

Herbert "Pete" Pulitzer Jr., fifty-two-year-old millionaire grandson of the famous newspaper publisher and heir to the family name as well as the fortune, had finally come to his senses and cast out the evil gold-digger who had caused him so much grief. She was an incorrigible coke slut, he said, and a totally unfit mother. She stayed up all night at discos and slept openly with her dope pusher, among others. There was a house painter, a real-estate agent, a race-car driver, and a French baker - and on top of all that, she was a lesbian, or at least some kind of pansexual troilist. In six and a half years of marriage, she had humped almost everything she could get her hands on.

Finally his lawyers explained, Mr. Pulitzer had no choice but to rid himself of this woman. She was more like Marilyn Chambers than Cinderella. When she wasn't squawking wantonly in front of the children with Grand Prix driver Jacky Ickx or accused Palm Beach cocaine dealer Brian Richards, she was in bed with her beautiful friend Jacquie Kimberly, thirty-two, wife of seventy-six-year-old socialite James Kimberly, heir to the Kleenex fortune. There was no end to it, they said. No even when Pulitzer held a loaded .45-caliber automatic pistol to her head - and then his own - in a desperate last-ditch attempt to make her seek help for her drug habits, which she finally agreed to do.

And did, for that matter, but five days in Highland Park Central Hospital was not enough. The cure didn't take, Pete's attorneys charged, and she soon went back on the whiff and also back to the pusher, who described himself in the courtroom as a "self-employed handyman" and gave his age as twenty-nine.'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

This Model Ordinance can be applied at multiple levels - municipal, county, state, national and global (possibly at the level of the UN) with the necessary tweaking needed to work at the appropriate level. This is because the issues it aims to address are globally relevant.

'“The Model Ordinance is a statement from the communities we represent to the local lawmakers, regulators, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders who are building our nation’s cannabis industry one town at time – social equity is not only possible, it should be the industry standard moving forward. Our work gives those actors the tools they need to make equity a present reality in our industry rather than a lost opportunity.”'
https://thecannabisindustry.org/mcbas-model-municipal-social-equity-ordinance/

'Men of our time, availing themselves of the order of things maintained by violence, and at the same time protesting that they love their neigbours very much, and who do not notice that they are doing evil to their neighbours all the time, are like a man who, after a life of robbery, when at last caught with lifted knife in the act of striking a victim who is frantically crying for help, should declare that he did not know that what he was doing was unpleasant to the man he had robbed and was just about to kill. As that robber and murderer could not deny what was evident to everyone, so it would seem impossible for men of our time, living on the sufferings of the oppressed classes, to persuade themselves and others that they desire the welfare of those whom they unceasingly plunder, and that they do not know how the advantages they enjoy are obtained.

We cannot now assert that we do not know of those hundred thousand men in Russia alone who are always confined in prisons and convict settlements fr the security of our tranquility and property, and that we do not know of those trials in which we ourselves take part, and which at our instigation condemn men who have made attempts to our property or security prisons, exile, or convict settlements where men no worse than those who sentence them, perish pr become corrupt. Nor can we pretend that all that we have obtained and is maintained for us by murders and violence. We cannot pretend that we do not see the constable who with a loaded revolver walks in front of our windows defending us while we eat our appetizing dinner or see a new play at the theatre, or that we do not know of those soldiers who set off so promptly with rifles and live cartridges to where our property is in danger of being infringed.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'That was one project. The other was to somehow pass through the fine eye of the White House security camel and go out on the campaign trail with Richard Nixon, to watch him waltz in - if only to get the drift of his thinking, to watch his moves, his eyes. It is a nervous thing to consider: not just four more years of Nixon, but Nixon's last four years in politics - completely unshackled, for the first time in his life, from the need to worry about who might or might not vote for him the next time around.

If he wins in November, he will finally be free to do whatever he wants...or maybe "wants" is too strong a word for right now. It conjures up images of Papa Doc, Batista, Somoza; jails full of bewildered "political prisoners" and the constant cold-sweat fear of jackboots suddenly kicking your door off its hinges at four in the morning.

There is no point in kidding ourselves about what Richard Nixon really wants for America. When he stands at his White House window and looks out at an anti-war demonstration, he doesn't see "dissenters," he sees criminals. Dangerous parasites, preparing to strike at the heart of the Great American System that put him where he is today.'

- The Campaign Trail: The Fat City Blues, October 26, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'While the present study provides strong empirical evidence for the lack of minority inclusion in modern psychedelic medicine, the factors that have contributed to this issue are complex. It will be impossible to fully characterize these factors until more minorities are included in the movement. In many regards, the psychedelic medicine movement both exemplifies the existing inequities and barriers to mental healthcare treatment inherit in modern psychiatry, while also presenting an enormous opportunity to acknowledge the efficacy and powerful contributions of indigenous medicine and rectify the injustices of the past (George et al., in press). However, it will only be successful in doing so to the extent that those with power acknowledge the importance of this issue and consciously make an effort to address the concerns presented herein.'
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6069717/

My understanding is that no government or law enforcement agency imposes ganja prohibition on the sadhus in Varanasi. Can you imagine a police crackdown on the sadhus for consuming the plant or the burning and destruction of the plant there? This situation begs the question as to why is the plant prohibited for individuals in the rest of the country? Should Indians everywhere else in the country wait for medical associations with their own biased interests to give their certification for the plant or for lawmakers mainly concerned with securing and retaining seats to wake up and announce it is legal? Why is the plant and its users venerated and worshiped in one place and discriminated against and destroyed in the rest of the country? Are we saying that Siva has jurisdiction only in Varanasi and the rest of the country is out of bounds for him, the plant and persons who revere both? Are not humans and ganja plants everywhere forms and manifestations of Siva? Then why this hypocrisy and discrimination against the ganja plant and its lovers if equality is a human right and every species of plant on this planet has the right given by nature to exist?

'Hypocrisy in our time is supported by two things - pseudo-religion and pseudo-science - and has reached such colossal dimensions that were we not living in the midst of it, it would be impossible to believe, that men could reach such a degree of self-deception. They have now reached such a strange condition and their hearts are so hardened that though they have eyes they see not, and having ears they hear not, neither do they understand.

Men have long been living in antagonism with their conscience. If it were not for hypocrisy they could not continue to do so. Their present arrangement of life in opposition to their conscience only exists because it is masked by hypocrisy.

And the more the divergence between reality and men's conscience increases, the more is that hypocrisy extended. But hypocrisy has its limits. And it seems that in our day those limits have been reached.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'Hong Kong police, it's said, fear local youth might discover the pleasures of grass, and what is currently a minor problem might mushroom. They quickly grabbed the "killer drug" image of cannabis and tied it to Lee as an anti-drug message. Lee's image, of course, suffered for it.' - The Legend of Bruce Lee by Alex Ben Block, 1974

'That's the way it was last fall at the start of Pulitzer v. Pulitzer, and not even the worst winter rains in forty years could explain why the town was so empty of locals when Palm Beach had a world-class spectacle to fill the dull days of the off-season.

The Miami Herald called it the nastiest divorce trial in Palm Beach history, a scandal so foul and far reaching that half the town fled to France or Majorca for fear of being dragged into it. People who normally stay at home in the fall to have all their bedrooms redecorated or to put a new roof on the boathouse found reasons to visit Brazil. The hammer of Palm Beach justice was coming down on young Roxanne Pulitzer, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who had married the town's most eligible bachelor a few years back and was now in the throes of divorce.

The trial was making ugly headlines all over the world, and nobody wanted to testify. Divorce is routine in Palm Beach, but this one had a very different and dangerous look to it. The whole lifestyle of the town was suddenly on trial, and prominent people were being accused of things that were not fashionable.

Some of the first families of Palm Beach society will bear permanent scars from the Pulitzer v. Pulitzer proceedings, a maze of wild charges and countercharges ranging from public incest and orgies to witchcraft, craziness, child abuse, and hopeless cocaine addiction.

The Filthy Rich in America were depicted as genuinely filthy, a tribe of wild sots and sodomites run amok on their private island and crazed all day and night on cocaine. The very name Palm Beach, long synonymous with old wealth and aristocratic style, was coming to be associated with berserk sleaziness, a place where price tags mean nothing, and the rich are always in heat, where pampered animals are openly worshiped in church and naked millionaires gnaw brassieres off the chest of their own daughters in public.'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'In Hong Kong however, where there is almost no marijuana use, the drug conjures up images of harder drugs, much as "grass" used to be considered the "devil weed" in the United States before its usage spread in the late 1960s. Police in Hong Kong, even now, tend to pay more attention to hash or grass, it seems, than heroin or opium, simply because the substances are less familiar and have come to be associated with the dreaded "hippie tourist Europeans" (anyone in Hong Kong who is not Chinese, and who has white skin, is called a European, just as all Japanese and Chinese are lumped together in America with Vietnamese and others as Orientals).' - The Legend of Bruce Lee by Alex Ben Block, 1974

'When you're sick, music is a great help. Once, in Texas, I kicked a habit on weed, a pint of paregoric and a few Louis Armstrong records.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953 - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953

'There is a lot of wreckage in the fast lane these days. Not even the rich feel safe from it, and people are looking for reasons. The smart say they can't understand it, and the dumb snort cocaine in rich discos and stomp to a feverish beat. Which is heard all over the country, or at least felt. The stomping of the rich is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times. It usually feels they are feeling anxious or confused about something, and when the rich feel anxious and confused, they act like wild animals.

That is the situation in Palm Beach these days, and the natives are not happy with it. There is trouble on all fronts. Profits are down, the whole concept of personal privacy has gone up for grabs, and the president might be a fool. That is not the kind of news these people want to hear, or even think about. Municipal bonds and dividend checks are the lifeblood of this town, and the flow shall not be interrupted for any reason.

Nor shall privacy be breached. The rich have certain rules, and these are two of the big ones: maintain the privacy and the pipeline at all costs - although not necessarily in that order - it depends on the situation, they say; and everything has a price, even women.'

- A Dog Took My Place, July 21, 1983, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Narcotics agents operate largely with the aid of informers. The usual routine is to grab someone with junk on him, and let him stew in jail until he is good and sick. Then comes the spiel:
"We can get you five years for possession. On the other hand, you can walk out of here right now. The decision is up to you. If you work with us, we can give you a good deal. For one thing, plenty of junk and pocket money. That is, if you deliver. Take a few minutes to think it over." - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953

'According to the Blue Grass Law of Kentucky, any "known user of narcotic drugs can be sentenced to the county jail for one year, with the alternative of taking the cure in Lexington."' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953

'About this time an anti-narcotics drive hit the town. The chief of police said, "This drive is going to continue as long as there is a single violator left in the city." The State legislators drew up a law making it a crime to be a drug addict. They did not specify where or when or what they meant by drug addict.
The cops began stopping addicts on the street and examining arms for needle marks. If they found marks, they pressured the addict to sign a statement admitting his condition so he could be charged under the "drug addicts law." The addicts were promised a suspended sentence if they would plead guilty and get the new law started. Addicts ransacked their persons looking for places to shoot in outside the arm area. If the law could find no marks on a man they usually let him go. If they found marks they would hold him for seventy-two hours and try to make him sign a statement.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953

'When I jumped bail and left the States, the heat on junk already looked like something new and special. Initial symptoms of nationwide hysteria were clear. Louisiana passed a law making it a crime to be a drug addict. Since no place or time is specified and the term "addict" is not clearly defined, no proof is necessary or even relevant under a law so formulated. No proof, and consequently, no trial. This is police-state legislation penalizing a state of being. Other states were emulating Louisiana. I saw my chance of escaping conviction dwindle daily as the anti-junk feeling mounted to a paranoid obsession, like anti-Semitism under the Nazis. So I decided to jump bail and live permanently outside the United States.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953

Officially sponsored myth 10 - '"There is a connection between addiction and crime. Marijuana, especially, is supposed to cause people to commit crimes."
There is no direct connection between crime and drug intoxication that I have ever seen or heard of. The people who talk about drugs causing crime never seem to follow through and take into account the vast number of crimes committed by drunks. Alcohol is a crime-producing drug that outclasses all others. Of course, a lot of junkies steal to keep up their habit. It isn't easy to get up $10-15 per day, which is what the addict has to pay out for a day's supply of junk in the US.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953

'"Hear me, people: We have now to deal with another race - small and feeble with our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules which the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule." - Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference in 1877.

If George McGovern had a speechwriter half as eloquent as Sitting Bull, he would be home free today - instead of 22 points behind and racing around the country with both feet in his mouth. The Powder River Conference ended ninety-five years ago, but the old chief's baleful analysis of the White Man's rape of the American continent was just as accurate then as it would be today if he came back from the dead and said it for the microphones on prime-time TV. The ugle fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull's time - and the only real difference now, with Election Day '72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.

Sitting Bull made no distinctions between Democrats and Republicans - which was probably just as well, in 1877 or any other year - but it's also true that Sitting Bull never knew the degradation of traveling on Richard Nixon's press plane, he never had the bilious pleasure of dealing with Ron Ziegler, and he never met John Mitchell, Nixon's king fixer.

If the old Sioux Chief had ever done these things, I think - despite his angry contempt at the White Man and everything he stands for - he'd be working overtime for George McGovern today'

- The Campaign Trail: The Fat City Blues, October 26, 1972, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'Any anti-narcotic legislation is considered a good thing by the public. For this reason the field of narcotic legislation has become a testing ground for a type of law new to this country but familiar in police states. In the states of Louisiana and Kentucky it is a crime punishable by imprisonment (La., two to five years; Ky., one year) to be an addict. This is police-state legislation penalizing a condition or state of being. In the Louisiana law, no time or place is specified, nor is the term "addict" defined.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953

'Federal and state narcotic authorities put every obstacle in the way of addicts who want a cure. No reduction cures are given in city or state institutions. Two hundred dollars is minimum for a ten-day cure in a private sanatorium. Hospitals are forbidden by law to give addicts any junk. I knew an addict who needed an operation for stomach cancer. The hospital could not give him any junk. Sudden withdrawal of junk plus the operation would likely have killed him so he decided to skip the operation.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953

'Lexington and Forth Worth are the only two public institutions in the U.S. that give reduction cures. Both are usually full. According to bureaucratic regulations, anyone seeking admission to either hospital must send an application (in triplicate, of course) to Washington and wait several months to be admitted. Then he must stay at least six months. In Louisiana a man could be arrested as a drug addict if he applied for the cure.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953

So governments, the pharmaceutical industry and the medical industry cut off the supply of natural intoxicants like cannabis, opium, coca and palm toddy. They create refined and much more potent extracts from these natural materials. They control the supply and stock of these chemical drugs. They use the doctor-pharmacist route to administer these drugs to the public legally and the peddler-narcotics agent-rehabilitation center route to administer these drugs illegally. The individual is not allowed to grow or procure these intoxicants from nature. He must rely on the system to get his intoxicant and pay the maximum price for it. To realize more and more profits the system creates more and more potent chemical intoxicants moving further and further away from natural territory into synthetic chemically constructed territory. As the toxicity and addictive power of these drugs increase, the public gets addicted to an even greater extent and pays even more for any available intoxicant. Profits rise and fuel the growth of the system tremendously. The individual pays for the system, pays for the synthetic drug, pays for the treatment which is further synthetic drugs and eventually pays with his life for the synthetic intoxicant. Legalize all natural drugs - opium, coca, cannabis and toddy to name a few. Most importantly, legalize cannabis, the universal drug of the world...

'There is only one kind of help possible - the abolition of that terrible cone of violence which enables the person or persons who succeed in seizing the apex to have power over all the rest, and to hold that power the more firmly the more cruel and inhuman they are, as we see, by the cases of the Napoleons, Nicholas I, Bismarck, Chamberlain, Rhodes, and our Russian Dictators who rule the people in the Tsar's name.

There is only one way to destroy the binding together of this cone - it is by shaking off the hypnotism of patriotism.Understand that you yourselves cause all the evils from which you suffer, by yielding to the suggestions by which emperors, kings, members of Parliament, governors, officers, capitalists, priests, authors, artists, and all who need this fraud of patriotism in order to live upon your labour, deceive you!

Whoever you may be - Frenchman, Russian, Pole, Englishman, Irishman, or Bohemian - understand that all your real human interests, whatever they may be - agricultural, industrial, commercial, artistic, or scientific - as well as your pleasures and joys, in no way run counter to the interests of other peoples or States, and that you are united with the folk of other lands by mutual co-operation, by interchange of services, by the joy of wide brotherly intercourse, and by the interchange not merely of goods but also of thoughts and feelings.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The only reminder of my other visit was a thing hanging over the cash register that we all noticed immediately. It was a black gas mask, staring blindly out at the room - and behind the gas mask was a stark handprinted sign that said: "In memory of August 29, 1970."

Nothing else, no explanation. But no explanation was necessary - at least not to anybody likely to be found drinking in the Silver Dollar. The customers are locals: Chicanos and barrio people - and every one of them is acutely aware of what happened in the Silver Dollar on August 29, 1970.

That was the day that Ruben, the prominent Mexican-American columnist for the Los Angeles Times and news director for bilingual KMEX-TV, walked into the place and sat down on a stool near the doorway to order a beer he would never drink. Because just about the time the barmaid was sliding his beer across the bar, a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy named Tom Wilson fired a tear gas bomb through the front door and blew half of Ruben Salazar's head off. All the other customers escaped out the back exit to the alley, but Salazar never emerged. He died on the floor in a cloud of CS gas - and when his body was finally carried out, hours later, his name was already launched into martyrdom. Within twenty-four hours, the very mention of the name Ruben Salazar was enough to provoke tears and a fist-shaking tirade not only along Whittier Boulevard but all over East L.A.'

- Strange Rumblings in Aztlan: The Murder of Ruben Salazar, April 29, 1971, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

'The abolition of governments will merely rid us of an unnecessary organization for the commission of violence and for its justification.

'But there will then be no laws, no property, no courts of justice, no police, no popular education', say people who intentionally confuse the use of violence by governments with various social activities.

The abolition of the organization of government formed to do violence does not at all involve the abolition of what is reasonable and good, and therefore not based on violence, in laws or law courts, or in property, or in police regulations, or in financial arrangements, or in popular education. On the contrary, the absence of the brutal power of government which is needed only for its own support, will facilitate a more just and reasonable social organization, needing no violence. Courts of justice, and public affairs, and popular education, will all exist to the extent to which they are really needed by the people, but in a form which will not involve the evils contained in the present form of government. Only that will be destroyed which was evil and hindered the free expression of the people's will.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The more patriotic an official is, the more he prospers in his career. The war produced by patriotism gives the army man a chance of a promotion.

Patriotism and its resulting wars give an enormous revenue to the newspaper trade and profits to many other trades. The more every writer, teacher, and professor preaches patriotism the more secure is he in his place. The more every emperor and king is addicted to patriotism the more fame he obtains.

The ruling classes have in their hands the army, the schools, the churches, the press, and money. In the schools they kindle patriotism in the children by means of histories describing their own people as the best of all peoples and always on the right. Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, monuments, and by a lying patriotic press. Above all they inflame patriotism by perpetrating every kind of injustice and harshness against other nations, provoking in them enmity towards their own people, and then in turn exploit that enmity to embitter their people against the foreigner.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'If only free men would not rely on what has no power and is never free, that is, external force, but would trust in what is always powerful and free, that is, the truth and its expression! If only men would boldly and clearly express the truth already manifest to them (of the brotherhood of all nations and the crime of exclusive devotion to one's own) that defunct, false, public opinion on which rests the power of governments and all the evil they produce, would slough off by itself like a dead skin and reveal that new, living, public opinion which now only awaits the shedding of the old husk that has confined it, in order to announce its demands clearly and powerfully and establish new forms of existence in conformity with the conscience of mankind.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'Men have only to understand that what is given out to them as public opinion and is maintained by such complicated, strenuous, and artificial means, is not public opinion but a dead relic of what was once public opinion; they have only, above all, to believe in themselves - in the fact that what they are conscious of in the depths of their souls and what craves expression in each of them and remains unexpressed only because it runs counter to existing social opinion, is that force which transforms that world and to express which is man's vocation - they have only to believe that the truth lies not in what is said by the people around them, but in what is said by their conscience, that is, by God, - and the false and artificially maintained public opinion will instantly vanish and a true public opinion establish itself.

If only people would say what they think and refrain from saying what they do not think, all the superstitions bred by patriotism would fall away at once with all the evil feelings and acts of violence that are based upon them. The hatred and enmity of one country for another that is fanned by the governments would cease, and so would the glorification of warlike exploits, that is, of murder; and above all there would be an end of respect and subservience towards those in power and of the surrender to them of men's labour - for these things have no foundation but patriotism.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'But yet in these apparently unimportant actions - in our indicating to the extent of our powers the unreasonableness of what we clearly see to be irrational and refraining from taking part in it - lies our great and irresistible power: the power which constitutes that unconquerable force which makes up real genuine public opinion - that opinion which with its own advance moves all humanity. Governments know this. They tremble before that force and strive in every possible way to counteract and overcome it.

They know that strength lies not in force but in the action of the mind and in the clear expression. And they fear that expression of independent thought more than an army. So they establish censorship, bribe newspapers, and seize control of the Churches and schools. But the spiritual force which moves the world eludes them. It is not in a book or a newspaper: it cannot be trapped but is always free, for it lies in the depth's of man's consciousness. This most powerful, elusive, and free force shows itself in a man's soul when he is alone and reflects on the phenomena of the world and then involuntarily expresses his thoughts to his wife, his brother, his friend, and to all whom he accounts it a sin to conceal what he considers to be the truth. No milliards of rubles, or millions of troops, or any institutions, or wars, or revolutions, can or will produce what a free man can produce by the simple expression of what he considers right, independently of what exists and what is impressed upon him.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'No feats of heroism are needed to bring about the greatest and most important changes in the life of humanity; neither the arming of millions of men, nor the construction of new railways and machines, nor the organization of exhibitions or trade unions, nor revolutions, nor barricades, nor dynamite outrages, nor the perfection of aerial navigation, and so forth. All that is necessary is a change of public opinion.

And for that change no effort of thought is demanded, no refutation of any existing thing, and no planning of anything new and extraordinary. All that is necessary is to cease acquiescing in the public opinion of the past, now false and already defunct and only artificially induced by governments. It is only necessary for each individual to say what he really thinks and feels or at least refrain from saying what he does not think.

If only men - even a few - would do that, the out-worn public opinion would at once and of itself fall away and a new, real, and vital opinion would manifest itself. And with this change of public opinion all that inner fabric of men's lives which oppresses and torments them would change of its own accord. One is ashamed to say how little is needed to deliver all men from the calamities which now oppress them. It is only necessary to give up lying! Only let men reject the lie which is imposed upon them; only let them stop saying what they neither think nor feel, and at once such a change of the whole structure of our life will be accomplished as the revolutionaries would not achieve in centuries even if all the power were in their hands.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'However much the governments try to excite in people the old public opinion of the heroism of patriotism - now no longer natural to them - men of our time no longer believe in it, but believe more and more in the solidarity and brotherhood of all nations. Patriotism does not now offer men anything but a most terrible future; while the brotherhood of all the people is an ideal which becomes ever more and more intelligible and desirable to mankind. And so the transition from the old, outlived public opinion to the new one must inevitably be accomplished. That transition is as inevitable as the fall of the last dry leaves in spring and the opening out of the young ones from the swollen buds.

And the longer the transition is postponed the more insistent it becomes and the more obvious is its inevitability.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The power of the governments rests on public opinion and possessing power they can always support the sort of public opinion they require by their whole organization, officials, law courts, schools, the Church, and even the Press. Public opinion produces power , power produces public opinion; and it seems as if there were no escape from this position.

And that would really be the case if public opinion were something fixed and unchanging and if governments could always produce the public opinion they desired.

But fortunately that is not so. In the first place, public opinion is not something constant, unchanging and stagnant, but on the contrary is something continually changing and moving with the movement of mankind. And secondly, public opinion not only cannot be produced at will by governments, but is what produces governments and gives or deprives them of power.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'For a very long time past the power of the governments over the peoples has not rested on force, as it did in the days when one people conquered another and held it in subjection by force of arms, or when the rulers had legions of janissaries, oprichniki, and armed guards amid an unarmed people. For a long time past the power of the government rested on what is called public opinion.

There is a public opinion that patriotism is a great moral sentiment, and that people should consider their own nation and State as the best in the world; and this results in a public opinion that it is right and proper to acknowledge the authority of the government and to submit to it, that it is right and proper to serve in the army and submit to its discipline, that it is right and proper to give one's earnings to the government in the form of taxes, that it is right and proper to accept the decisions of the courts, and that it is right and proper to accept as divine truth whatever the emissaries of the government deliver to us.

And once such a public opinion exists, a mighty power is established, controlling in our days milliards of money, an organized mechanism of administration, the postal service, telegraphy, telephones, disciplined armies, the law courts, the police, a submissive clergy, schools, and even newspapers; and this power maintains among the people the public opinion needed for its own maintenance.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The advocates of peace by means of arbitration reason thus: two animals cannot divide their prey except by fighting: children act thus also, and so do barbarians and the barbarous nations, but rational men settle their disagreements by discussion, persuasion, and by referring the decision of the question to disinterested and reasonable people, and the nations of our day ought to act so. These arguments seem quite correct. The peoples of our time have reached a period of enlightenment and have no enmity towards one another and would settle their differences in a peaceful manner. But the argument is correct only in so far as it applies to the people alone, and only if the people are not under the sway of their governments. People in subjection to government is already an indication of the utmost irrationality. ' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The governments assure their peoples that they are in danger of being attacked by other nations or by foes in their midst, and that the only way to escape the danger is by slavish obedience to their governments. This is seen very plainly during revolutions and dictatorships, and it occurs always and everywhere where there is arbitrary rule. Every government explains its existence and justifies all its violence on the ground that if it were not there things would be worse. Having convinced the people that they are in danger, the governments dominate them. And when the people are dominated by governments the latter compel them to attack each other. And in this way a belief in the governments' assurance of the danger of attacks by other nations is confirmed among the peoples.

Divide et impera.

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed.

Patriotism is slavery'
- Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

'The sight of these two men, so different from one another - the well-fed elegant Frenchman, in a top-hat and a long overcoat that was then very fashionable, radiant with freshness and self-confidence, with his white hand, unused to work, energetically showing how the Germans must be squeezed; and the shaggy figure of Prokofy, shriveled up by constant labour, always tired but always at work despite his enormous rupture, with fingers swollen by toil, with wisps of hay in his hair, with slack home-made breeches and down-trodden bark shoes, striding along with an enormous fork of hay on his shoulder, with that step, not lazy but economical in movement, with which a working man always moves - the strong contrast presented by those two men made much clear to me then, and now, after the Toulon-Paris festivities, vividly occurs. One of them personified all those who, fed by the people's toil, afterwards use those same people for cannon-fodder, while the other personified that very cannon-fodder which feeds and protects the others who afterwards so dispose of it.' - Leo Tolstoy - The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays

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