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THE MEDIA DEBATE 2004
THE ISSUE: CANNABIS IN CANADA





THE CANNABIS DEBATE: BOTH SIDES

One Man Show:
  • Different Take On Marijuana "I'm from the Kootenays and I never saw someone tear up a bar who was high on dope. As an individual I'd say if you want to smoke dope, go get a bong as big as a melon and smoke your brains out. "But guess what? I am not Don Sperry, the individual, I am Don Sperry, the judge. If you don't have a medical exemption, you don't get to smoke dope and break the law."


YOUTH
  • Schools May Feed Students' Info To Police School trustees met last night to discuss supplying police with Personal Digital Assistants programmed with names, addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, photographs and timetables of every student in the board's 18 high schools.

  • School Drug Free Zones Not Working Kelowna - The Adolescent Intervention for Marijuana Suspension (AIMS) program allows kids caught smoking marijuana for the first time to fill out a self-report questionnaire and go through one hour of counselling, instead of being suspended.

HEALTH
  1. Health Risks Outnumber Benefits Of Marijuana Use
  2. Pot May Make Epileptic Seizures Worse, Study Says
  3. Mental Disorders, Marijuana Don't Mix, Society Warns The letter said the Schizophrenia Society of Canada and its provincial counterparts put forward a very emphatic protest against the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes. "This strong opposition was based on both supportive research findings and first-hand experience of care-giving families that marijuana ( and other street drug usage ) has been found to trigger symptoms of schizophrenia if one is genetically or otherwise predisposed to it,"  [Funding comes from pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca Canada Inc. ($700,000)]
  4. Schizophrenia Society of Sask. Warns Doctors of Marijuana Risk   Doctors should be wary when asked to prescribe medical marijuana, says the Schizophrenia Society of Saskatchewan. [Funding comes from pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca Canada Inc. ($700,000)]
  1. You Can't Trust Most Illicit-drug Research The U.S. government is dominated by a drug-war ideology in which drugs are not simply another health risk. Drugs are criminal, immoral, even evil. When most people think of alcohol, we draw a line between "use" and "abuse." Because the drug-war ideology sees drugs as inherently wicked, it erases the line between use and abuse of illicit drugs. Any use is abuse. Any use is destructive. And the job of science is to prove it.
  2. Few Health Risks In Marijuana, Psychologist Says

GROW OPS

  • Realtors Combat Grow Ops
  • 100 Grow-Op Houses Unearthed in Mortgage-Scam Probe  Mortgage Broker, Realtors Alleged to Have Fabricated Records to Obtain Homes  Up to 100 large-scale marijuana growing operations have been found in Lower Mainland houses identified by government regulators as part of an elaborate scheme to get mortgages by using false employment records and banking documents



MISCELLANEOUS

Note: Bill Smith lost his bid for re-election.



  •  Judge Blames Pot In Fatal Stabbing Marijuana, a drug viewed as so harmless that Canada is moving to decriminalize possessing it, is being blamed for driving a Quebec man to stab his roommate to death in a paranoid rage.
  • The Trouble With Interesting Headlines Note: Jerry Paradis is a retired judge of the Provincial Court of British Columbia. The blame lies properly on the prohibition, not on the drug, whatever it may have been.
  • Blame Mary Jane "I've followed it very closely for 30 years and I don't know any other such case where mental disassociation is considered caused by cannabis consumption. From what I know such cases must be extremely rare," says Marie-Andree Bertrand.

  • Greetings From Resisterville Source: New York Times (NY) NELSON, British Columbia
  • Holy Smoke 'Shocked' By NY Times Article Story Indicates Downtown Store Openly Selling Pot; Not So Say Owners - Holy Smoke Culture Shop is debunking statements published in the New York Times last Sunday that alleged the store sold marijuana out of its "produce section."



CONCLUSION


Question: Are the police obsessed with cannabis because it offers them such an easy way to do their jobs and guarantees there will be even more work available?

Question: If God could not impose prohibition on two people, why does the government and law enforcement think they can achieve such a lofty goal of imposing it on an entire society?

It will always be beyond my comprehension why some people believe they have the right to restrict a non-toxic plant, of all things.

People have been peacefully growing cannabis outdoors forever, and hydroponically since it became popular in the 1970's,  but now all of a sudden we are bombarded in the media with the dangers prohibition created - some unsafe commercial grow ops and the emerging violence. They are fairly isolated incidents now, but are bound to spread as the laws become more repressive, so now it is a huge threat to public safety if there are cannabis plants in with the tomatoes and onions. 

The war on cannabis consumers can never be won, yet the war gets ramped up more each year without any rational basis, and every year we are supposed to remain in denial and enable this dysfunctional status quo.  What we really need is an intervention.

I can only conclude that our society is obsessed with drugs.   How else can you explain the huge amount of time, money and resources devoted to banning our choice to use some drugs and herbs, while at the same time devoting huge amounts of time, money and resources to making us aware of what our choices should be - alcohol, Ritalin, Prozac, Valium, Viagra and any other pharmaceutical they have managed to dream up. The headlines neatly sum up how much time, money and energy are diverted away from social responsibility and poured into social engineering.

How bad do things have to get before potsmokers say enough is enough and do something? Critical mass is probably the prohibitionists worst fear.










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Last Modified:Saturday, 15-Jan-2005 22:49:48 PST
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