This Week In Marihuana

In a PR effort to counter the damaging international publicity we’ve been getting over the past 48 hours about Venezuela the WH has invited CNN and other media broadcasters to HQ to tell the public what a wonderful and essential job DEA is doing. The first PR broadcast was aired by CNN this morning on the Wolf BlitZion show, but leave it to Blitzer and CNN to screw it up, as usual.

If and when we can get more time to tell the world that DEA is only interested in fighting drugs and not toppling governments to steal their resources we should be able to counter some of the negative press about us coming out of Caracas.

Marc writes about how he feels about this extradition case, and reflects on what he has done so far in his activist career.

I had that ‘life flashing before me’ moment. The frozen second in time when everything was sharp, clear, and signalled a great convergence of all my effort into this precise moment.

“Marc Emery, you are under arrest for Extradition to The United States of America.”

All my seeds sold, all the millions of dollars I had given to the cause, every speech to free our people, every arrest, jailing and raid I had endured: it was all for this moment in time. “For trafficking in marijuana seeds, for the production of marijuana, and for money laundering”

In 1990, when I became a cannabis activist, all books, magazines, videos, pipes, bongs, everything about even saying the word marijuana was illegal in Canada.

America has a serious drug problem, but it’s not the “meth epidemic” getting so much publicity. It’s the problem identified by William Bennett, the former national drug czar and gambler.

“Using drugs,” he wrote, “is wrong not simply because drugs create medical problems; it is wrong because drugs destroy one’s moral sense. People addicted to drugs neglect their duties.”

This problem afflicts a small minority of the people who have tried methamphetamines, but most of the law-enforcement officials and politicians who lead the war against drugs. They’re so consumed with drugs that they’ve lost sight of their duties.

Like addicts desperate for a high, they’ve declared meth the new crack, which was once called the new heroin (that title now belongs to OxyContin). With the help of the press, they’re once again frightening the public with tales of a drug so seductive it instantly turns masses of upstanding citizens into addicts who ruin their health, their lives and their families.

“I have a master plan,” Mr. Emery said in an interview in the offices of his magazine, Cannabis Culture. “I’ve wanted to be the Johnny Appleseed of marijuana, so if we produced millions and millions of marijuana plants all over the world, it would be impossible for governments to eradicate or control all of it.”

In other words, he added, he wants “to overgrow the governments” that punish marijuana users.

By almost any measure, however, the war has been as monumental a failure as the invasion of Iraq. All told, the government sinks an estimated $35 billion a year into the War on Drugs. Yet illegal drugs remain cheap and plentiful, and coca cultivation in the Andes — where the Bush administration has spent $5.4 billion to eradicate cocaine — rose twenty-nine percent last year. “Drug prices are at an all-time low, drug purity is at an all-time high, and polls show that drugs are more available than ever,” says Bill Piper, national affairs director for the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug-reform organization in Washington, D.C. Drug smugglers and South American cocaine growers, he adds, are fast developing new ways to evade U.S. eradication efforts. “All they have to do is double their efforts,” he says. “They can adapt more quickly than the government can.”

According to Indiana Congressman Mark Souder, the use of marijuana for medical purposes is “quackery” and “a myth.” As chairman of the House Subcommittee that oversees the nation’s drug policy, Souder’s opinion echoes that of federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

According to the DEA, “Marijuana is a dangerous, addictive drug that poses significant health threats to users. Marijuana has no medical value that can’t be met more effectively by legal drugs. Drug legalizers use medical marijuana as a red herring in effort to advocate broader legalization of drug use.”

These statements are presented as fact, and are the basis for nearly all public policy and federal law concerning marijuana, not to mention the “evidence” cited by opponents of medical marijuana like Congressman Souder [for more on Souder, see sidebar]. Opposing viewpoints, indeed contradictory scientific, medical, and legal research, are rarely given credence.

However, an examination of the facts about marijuana demonstrates that the most common and dangerous myths about America’s most widely used illegal drug and its medicinal value are actually those perpetuated by the federal government itself.