From: Dorothy Smith <thedish@...>
Subject: The DISH Vol. 15 No 14
To: benziecountynorml@...
Date: Sunday, April 15, 2012, 2:37 PM

Dot’s Information Service Hotline
"Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use"
Visit The DISH online at www.thedish.org
Vol. 15 No.14...Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race...04-15-12

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Table of Contents

1. Intuit’s Vibe...Addiction
2. Venue for an Artist...Inside the Growing Prescription Pill Epidemic...By Evelyn Nieves
3. Hood Notes...Antidepressant Drugs Causing Epidemic of Mania, Mayhem and Murder ...By Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
4. Politics Y2K12...'War on Drugs' Has Failed, Say Latin American Leaders...By Jamie Doward
5. News You Use...Policy Impact: Prescription Painkiller Overdoses
6. Mailbox
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Intuit’s Vibe
Addiction

A shell is all there is
of the person I once knew.
I thought things were great
in my relationship with you.

I began to ask myself each day,
Am I the one who’s wrong
I thought I knew about all drugs
Pot, prescription, coke and bongs.

I looked at myself in the mirror
and saw what I needed to do.
I read books and talked and prayed
that the mirror be revealed to you.

When that did not happen:
I was angry, sick and more,
and found out soon enough
you wouldn’t let me in your door.

The door to your heart is closed, it seems,
and I cannot go there.
Drugs turn you into someone
Who seems not to even care.

I ask and I wait and I wonder,
as I stare at the heavens above,
and I pray that all this chaos
will one day be turned into LOVE.

For it is only LOVE
that will change the way we feel.
For we all need one another,
and we all have to heal.

Let us heal from this addiction
that has robbed us of our lives.
There is no one who is immune from this"
moms, dad, sons, daughters, husbands or wives.

Let us all vow to take a stand
and look into the mirror, each of us,
reach deep within and learn to LOVE,
praying for clarity, truth and trust.

With LOVE, light and hope, Trina
(Source: www.stoprxdrugabuse.org/html/poems.html)



Venue for an Artist
Inside the Growing Prescription Pill Epidemic
By Evelyn Nieves

It takes less than a minute to drive past Kermit, five to tour the place entirely. An old coal mining town with barely 300 residents and one blinking light between the train tracks, Kermit has no supermarket, no clothing store, no main drag. Main Street is really a side street with rows of cottages, its biggest building, the Kermit community center, empty and boarded.

 

Yet in this tiny town, the Kermit Sav-Rite Pharmacy used to be as busy as a New York deli. Six employees worked the counter, lines at the drive-through window snaked around the square cinder-block building, and the parking lot was full day and night.

 

Of course, everyone in Kermit — just about everyone in the wooded hollows of Mingo County — knew the Sav-Rite was a pill mill. It handed out Xanax, Lortabs, Vicodin — all manner of the prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs that are crippling Appalachia like a rogue disease — to anyone with an excuse. Kermit, which sits in the poorest, most remote corner of southwest West Virginia at the Kentucky border, was drawing pill addicts from all over the Eastern seaboard. People were throwing pill parties in the parking lot. Trading pills, buying, selling, injecting, snorting, the works.

 

This went on for years before the law could stop it. In February, more than two years after the DEA and FBI stormed the Sav-Rite, seizing cases of files, its owner, John T. Wooley, pleaded guilty to selling prescription pills by fraudulent means. Wooley, in cahoots with a pill mill "pain management" clinic that existed to sell scripts, was filling prescriptions as if the fate of mankind depended on it. The Kermit Sav-Rite, along with another one Wooley owned in a tiny hamlet about 10 miles from Kermit, together doled out enough hydrocodone, the main ingredient in Vicodin and Lortabs, for every man, woman and child in West Virginia (population: 1. 8 million). The Sav-Rites moved almost 3.2 million dosage units of hydrocodone in 2006, the year the U.S. attorney used to make a case, compared with the national average of 97,000. Wooley, who sold the Kermit store a few months ago (he lost the other to the feds’ raid), faces four years in prison and a $250,000 fine at his sentencing in May. At 76 years old, he could probably better afford the fine than the time. Agents who raided the Kermit store said cash drawers were so stuffed they couldn’t close.

 

But shutting down pill mills in these parts is like playing Whac-A-Mole: As soon as a lawless "pain management" clinic or pharmacy is smacked down, others spring up. Investigations take years before prosecutions can be secured. And pill mills are only part of the problem. Most often, pill addicts get their drugs from friends or on the street. Drug gangs from cities like Detroit, Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio, have also moved in on the action, setting up drug "stores" in residences and other fronts. Almost fondly, people here recall when Oxycontin was jokingly called "hillbilly heroin "and pill addicts were "pillbillies." No one is joking now. What is happening in Appalachia, about 10 years into an explosion of prescription drug abuse, is so pervasive a problem that law enforcement officials say they cannot solve it alone.

 

The West Virginia newspapers offer daily examples of what the Mingo County sheriff, Lonnie Hannah, calls the "spinoffs of drug abuse": Murders, assaults, robberies, burglaries, domestic violence, child abuse, child neglect, elder abuse, DUIs, overdose deaths. West Virginia, the ninth smallest state, has the highest rate of prescription drug overdose deaths in the nation.

 

Hannah estimates that two-thirds of the crimes and incidents his department handles are related to pill abuse. Chasing down pill dealing is more than enough work by itself. "It’s all over the county," Hannah said, at his headquarters in the city of Williamson (nickname: Pill-iamson), the Mingo County seat. Authorities keep busting pill mills and dealers in the city of 3,000 residents, only to see them start up again. "Whenever we move in," Hannah said, "they move around to someplace else."

 

People in these parts have a word for pill abuse: "pilling." So much of it goes on that everyone has a story. They know someone who has abused or is abusing pills. They know parents who have lost custody of their children or neighbors who have lost good jobs or friends who have died because of them. They are shocked to hear that in some places in the country, say, San Francisco, pilling is neither a word nor a fact of life.

 

But that could be changing. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps warning, prescription drug abuse is spreading. Pills, especially Xanax, the anti-anxiety drug manufactured by Pfizer, and Vicodin, Loracet and Lortabs, highly addictive opioid painkillers familiar to anyone who has had a wisdom tooth removed, are being abused more and more, all over. What started out as a situation in poor isolated areas of the country left to their own devices has taken root and spread, across Appalachia and beyond.

 

You can find pockets of pill abuse from Orange County, Calif., to Staten Island, NY (sometimes now called Pill Island). Nationally, the abuse of prescription pain relievers, as evidenced by treatment submissions, has gone up 430 percent in the last decade, according to a new report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in Washington, D.C. The report says states with the highest rise in prescription painkiller abuse include Maine, Vermont, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Arkansas, Rhode Island and West Virginia.

 

Last June, pill addiction on Long Island raged into the headlines when a 33-year-old Army veteran, David Laffer, shot and killed four people in a Medford pharmacy while he robbed the store for hydrocodone. A Vicodin addict, he had been getting the drug through doctor shopping — going from one doctor to another to sidestep the monthly limit for scripts — until he lost his job and his insurance.

 

"If there is a discussion of doctor shopping and prescription pill abuse," Laffer said upon his sentencing to life without parole, "then perhaps some good can come from this."

 

Laffer’s story lingered for barely more than a news cycle. But the spread of pilling may be the saving grace for Appalachia and the other mostly poor, mostly rural parts of the country where little white pills are leveling entire communities.

 

They offer the cautionary tale: Political leaders, health professionals and community groups in these parts who have been crying for help can show the rest of the country what can happen when pilling runs rampant.

 

About Me: Evelyn Nieves is a former staff writer and columnist for the New York Times. Nieves is working on a book. Read her article in its entirety at www.alternet.org/story/154944/inside_the_growing_prescription_pill_epidemic_that%27s_ravaging_communities.



Hood Notes
Antidepressant Drugs Causing Epidemic of Mania, Mayhem and Murder
By Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones

The alleged shooting of a police officer in Austin by a man taking the anti-anxiety drug Xanax is just one of a plethora of recent incidents fueled by anti-depressant pharmaceuticals – an epidemic of mania that has swept the country.

 

Mary O’Dell, the mother of 24-year-old Brandon Montgomery Daniel told the Associated Press that her son’s role in the fatal shooting of Austin Senior Police Officer Jaime Padron was fueled by alcohol and psychotropic drugs.

 

"She said she talked with her son Thursday evening, and that he had been taking the prescription anti-anxiety drug Xanax and drinking tequila," reports AP. "Hours later, Padron was fatally shot at a Walmart while trying to subdue a potentially intoxicated man who was later identified as Daniel, investigators said. Two employees tackled and disarmed him, then held him until help arrived."

 

O’Dell added that Daniel was not even aware of what had taken place because "he was under the influence of tequila and Xanax."

 

This is just one of a spate of shocking incidents over recent years in which Xanax and other similar pharmaceuticals have played a central role in triggering random violence and mania.

 

The two recent incidents involving airline officials suffering mental breakdowns during flights were also caused by anti-depressant drugs.

 

JetBlue pilot Clayton Osbon, who went crazy and began screaming about Al-Qaeda and threatening to take the plane down during an incident last month was described as a "consummate professional" by colleagues. However, experts looking into the case confirm that "several pharmacological issues under scrutiny within the airline industry are likely to get attention in the Osbon case, including the side effects of medicines that pilots sometimes use to fight fatigue and depression."

 

"Was Osbon, for instance, among those pilots newly permitted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use one of four specific antidepression medications, whose potential side effects are known to include hallucination and panic attacks?" reports the Christian Science Monitor.

 

In a separate incident, an American Airlines flight attendant had to be restrained by passengers after she went on a crazy tirade about crashing the plane and killing everyone onboard. It later emerged that the flight attendant had been on medication to treat a bipolar disorder.

 

A 50-year-old grandmother who went nuts and began kicking, punching and spitting at flight attendants for being refused alcohol last month also blamed her anti-anxiety medication for the outburst.

 

The Save Project, an organization committed to highlighting the dangers of SSRI drugs, highlights a laundry list of cases where use of anti-depressants, particularly amongst young people, has led to violence. Antidepressants are also exacerbating gang on gang violence. Last year the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) produced a study based on FDA figures that illustrated how the antidepressants Pristiq (desvenlafaxine), Paxil (paroxetine) and Prozac (fluoxetine), all appear in the list of the top ten violence-causing drugs. America’s addiction to psychotropic drugs is out of control and growing every year.

 

It’s abundantly clear that the epidemic of craziness and violence we are witnessing both in America and by U.S. troops abroad is being fueled by dangerous psychotropic drugs, subscription pharmaceuticals that are causing normally sane people to fly off the hook and act out with insane acts of mania or violence. (Source: www.infowars.com/antidepressant-drugs-causing-epidemic-of-mania/)



Politics Y2K12
'War on Drugs' Has Failed, Say Latin American Leaders
By Jamie Doward

The Summit of the Americas held in Cartagena, Colombia is seen by foreign policy experts as a watershed moment in the redrafting of global drugs policy in favor of a more nuanced and liberalized approach.

 

Otto Pérez Molina, the president of Guatemala, who as former head of his country's military intelligence service experienced the power of drug cartels at close hand, is pushing his fellow Latin American leaders to use the summit to endorse a new regional security plan that would see an end to prohibition. In the Observer, Pérez Molina writes: "The prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that global drug markets can be eradicated."

 

Pérez Molina concedes that moving beyond prohibition is problematic. "To suggest liberalization – allowing consumption, production and trafficking of drugs without any restriction whatsoever – would be, in my opinion, profoundly irresponsible. Even more, it is an absurd proposition. If we accept regulations for alcoholic drinks and tobacco consumption and production, why should we allow drugs to be consumed and produced without any restrictions?"

 

He insists, however, that prohibition has failed and an alternative system must be found. "Our proposal as the Guatemalan government is to abandon any ideological consideration regarding drug policy (whether prohibition or liberalisation) and to foster a global intergovernmental dialogue based on a realistic approach to drug regulation. Drug consumption, production and trafficking should be subject to global regulations, which means that drug consumption and production should be legalised, but within certain limits and conditions."

 

The decision by Pérez Molina to speak out is seen as highly significant and not without political risk. Polls suggest the vast majority of Guatemalans oppose decriminalisation, but Pérez Molina's comments are seen by many as helping to usher in a new era of debate. They will be studied closely by foreign policy experts who detect that Latin American leaders are shifting their stance on prohibition following decades of drugs wars that have left hundreds of thousands dead.

 

Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón, has called for a national debate on the issue. Last year Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's president, told the Observer that if legalising drugs curtailed the power of organised criminal gangs who had thrived during prohibition, "and the world thinks that's the solution, I will welcome it".

 

One diplomat closely involved with the summit described the event as historic, saying it would be the first time for 40 years that leaders had met to have an open discussion on drugs. "This is the chance to look at this matter with new eyes," he said.

 

Latin America's increasing hostility towards prohibition makes Obama's attendance at the summit potentially difficult. The Obama administration, keen not to hand ammunition to its opponents during an election year, will not want to be seen as softening its support for prohibition. However, it is seen as significant that the US vice-president, Joe Biden, has acknowledged that the debate about legalising drugs is now legitimate. (Source: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/07/war-drugs-latin-american-leaders)



News You Use
Policy Impact: Prescription Painkiller Overdoses

 

In a period of nine months, a tiny Kentucky county of fewer than 12,000 people sees a 53-year-old mother, her 35-year-old son, and seven others die by overdosing on pain medications obtained from pain clinics in Florida. In Utah, a 13-year-old fatally overdoses on oxycodone pills taken from a friend’s grandmother. A 20-year-old Boston man dies from an overdose of methadone, only a year after his friend also died from a prescription drug overdose.

 

These are not isolated events. Drug overdose death rates in the United States have more than tripled since 1990 and have never been higher. In 2008, more than 36,000 people died from drug overdoses, and most of these deaths were caused by prescription drugs.

 

Although many types of prescription drugs are abused, there is currently a growing, deadly epidemic of prescription painkiller abuse. Nearly three out of four prescription drug overdoses are caused by prescription painkillers—also called opioid pain relievers. The unprecedented rise in overdose deaths in the US parallels a 300% increase since 1999 in the sale of these strong painkillers. These drugs were involved in 14,800 overdose deaths in 2008, more than cocaine and heroin combined.

 

The misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers was responsible for more than 475,000 emergency department visits in 2009, a number that nearly doubled in just five years.

 

More than 12 million people reported using prescription painkillers non-medically in 2010, that is, using them without a prescription or for the feeling they cause.

 

Almost all prescription drugs involved in overdoses come from prescriptions originally; very few come from pharmacy theft. However, once they are prescribed and dispensed, prescription drugs are frequently diverted to people using them without prescriptions. More than three out of four people who misuse prescription painkillers use drugs prescribed to someone else.

 

Most prescription painkillers are prescribed by primary care and internal medicine doctors and dentists, not specialists. Roughly 20% of prescribers prescribe 80% of all prescription painkillers.

 

Understanding the groups at highest risk for overdose can help states target interventions. Research shows that some groups are particularly vulnerable to prescription drug overdose:

 

People who obtain multiple controlled substance prescriptions from multiple providers—a practice known as "doctor shopping."

 

People who take high daily dosages of prescription painkillers and those who misuse multiple abuse-prone prescription drugs.

 

Low-income people and those living in rural areas. People on Medicaid are prescribed painkillers at twice the rate of non-Medicaid patients and are at six times the risk of prescription painkillers overdose. One Washington State study found that 45% of people who died from prescription painkiller overdoses were Medicaid enrollees.

 

People with mental illness and those with a history of substance abuse.

 

The drug overdose epidemic is most severe in the Southwest and Appalachian region, and rates vary substantially between states. The highest drug overdose death rates in 2008 were found in New Mexico and West Virginia, which had rates nearly five times that of the state with the lowest rate, Nebraska.

 

For more, including Center for Disease Control recommendations, see www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/rxbrief/.



Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls

Email www.latimes.com...A fog of drugs and war...By Kim Murphy...In a small but growing number of cases across the nation, lawyers are blaming the U.S. military's heavy use of psychotropic drugs for their clients' aberrant behavior and related health problems. Such defenses have rarely gained traction in military or civilian courtrooms, but Burke's case provides the first important indication that military psychiatrists and court-martial judges are not blind to what can happen when troops go to work medicated. After two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, according to figures recently disclosed to The Times by the U.S. Army surgeon general. Nearly 8% of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6% is on antidepressants — an eightfold increase since 2005. "We have never medicated our troops to the extent we are doing now.... And I don't believe the current increase in suicides and homicides in the military is a coincidence," said Bart Billings, a former military psychologist who hosts an annual conference on combat stress.

 

Email http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13438...Is Big Pharma Peddling Narcotics? Take Oxycontin, For Instance...By Mark Karlin...It is difficult to believe that Big Pharma is not aware of this growing abuse of legal drugs. It is difficult to fathom that their actuarial predictions of profit don't take into account the addictive and widespread abuse of narcotics. Perhaps they are indeed innocent bystanders to this spreading problem, but then the companies that make such effective medications would have to be deaf, blind, and dumb, because there is no way to ignore the "legal" drugs that are decimating sections of America. In fact, in 2004, the manufacturer of Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma, settled a case brought by the attorney general of West Virginia charging them with misleading and overly aggressive marketing of Oxycontin in the state. In addition to challenging Purdue's marketing, the suit had accused Purdue of purposely hiding from doctors the extent to which OxyContin's morphinelike qualities could lead to addiction. In a later case, in 2007 in a federal criminal prosecution in the State of Virginia, Purdue settled a for $634.5 million dollars in penalties (and pleaded guilty to a felony charge), according to the New York Times...Maybe Purdue is a bad apple in the Big Pharma orchard. But are mega-billion dollar corporations going to regard growth in sales of a patented drug -- regardless of its misuse -- as anything but an increase in profits?Good question to ask the largest legal drug cartel in the world: Big Pharma.

 

Email www.cnn.com...Drug war, including legalization, hot topic at Summit of the Americas...By Mariano Castillo-- The second and final day of the Summit of the Americas takes place in Cartagena, Colombia, on Sunday, where leaders from more than 30 North and South American countries are discussing several topics, such as bolstering economic ties and who should be part of future discussions. Yet the war on drugs that has drawn some of the sharpest distinctions among leaders at the two-day gathering. On Saturday, leaders debated how to address drug trafficking and violence in the hemisphere, with several calling for new approaches -- something U.S. President Barack Obama said he was open to, though he closed the door on legalization. The possibility of drug legalization has gained traction in Central America, which is being squeezed between suppliers to the south and consumers to the north. Yet the idea goes against decades of the prohibitionist policy backed by the United States, which is largely followed and enforced in Latin America and the Caribbean. Obama voiced his view that legalizing drugs isn't a valid option in the United States twice on Saturday -- first during a meeting of business leaders alongside Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and later during the hemispheric event's opening day session. "I think it is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are doing more harm than good in certain places," he said at the meeting of business leaders. "I personally, and my administration's position is, that legalization is not the answer." He reiterated that position while talking at the summit itself, saying "the United States will not be going in this direction."

 

Email www.cnn.com...Secret Service agents relieved in Colombia amid prostitution allegations...Cartagena, Colombia (CNN) -- A group of Secret Service agents and officers sent to Colombia ahead of President Barack Obama were relieved of duty and returned home amid allegations of misconduct that involved prostitution, according to two U.S. government sources familiar the investigation. The 11 Secret Service members -- both agents and uniformed officers -- were interviewed Saturday at the agency's Washington headquarters, after which they were placed on administrative leave, Assistant Director Paul Morrissey said in a statement. They are under investigation after preliminary findings revealed that they brought back several prostitutes to the Hotel Caribe in Cartagena, sources told CNN on Saturday.

 

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Jailing Americans for Profit: The Rise of the Prison Industrial Complex

By John W. Whitehead

“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”—Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America”In an age when freedom is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business. At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.

As author Adam Gopnik reports for the New Yorker:

[A] growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.

From: Rev. Steven B. Thompson <BenziecountyNORML@...>
Subject: [THC-Ministry Yahoo group] Re: The DISH Vol. 15 No 14
To: "Dorothy Smith" <thedish@...>
Cc: minorml-talk@...
Date: Sunday, April 15, 2012, 1:57 PM

I have been preaching since the 1970's (to anyone who will listen to me) that Cannabis IS NOT a drug, but in FACT, it is a seed-bearing herbal plant that was created by God for human use, and the Bible backs me up on this. Yet, many (even those in the Cannabis reform movement) disagree with me and even say that I am only hurting the movement to end the prohibition of it by my statements.   Until people start to realize that this IS THE TRUTH ABOUT CANNABIS, and this wonderful miracle plant is re-introduced into it's rightful place in our ecology & society, people are doomed, our planet is doomed, and evil like this will continue to flourish.   This is why I will fight for the Cannabis PLANT to my dying breath, and hope & pray that it is not too late. It IS my calling from God.   Have YOU collected any Michigan signatures today to help end this insanity?? Rev.Steven B.Thompson,Chapter Director Benzie County NORML 6215 Smeltzer Rd. Benzonia,MI 49616 (231) 882-4496 www.minorml.org  (Former Executive Director of Michigan NORML from May,2007 to November,2011)                                  Help end Cannabis Prohibition at www.repealtoday.org   WE DO NOT MANUFACTURE A DRUG...WE GROW A PLANT!!   --- On Sun, 4/15/12, Dorothy Smith <thedish@...> wrote: From: Dorothy Smith <thedish@...> Subject: The DISH Vol. 15 No 14 To: benziecountynorml@... Date: Sunday, April 15, 2012, 2:37 PM Dot’s Information Service Hotline "Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use" Visit The DISH online at www.thedish.org Vol. 15 No.14...Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race...04-15-12 ***************************************************** Table of Contents 1. Intuit’s Vibe...Addiction 2. Venue for an Artist...Inside the Growing Prescription Pill Epidemic...By Evelyn Nieves 3. Hood Notes...Antidepressant Drugs Causing Epidemic of Mania, Mayhem and Murder ...By Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones 4. Politics Y2K12...'War on Drugs' Has Failed, Say Latin American Leaders...By Jamie Doward 5. News You Use...Policy Impact: Prescription Painkiller Overdoses 6. Mailbox ***************************************************** Intuit’s Vibe Addiction A shell is all there is of the person I once knew. I thought things were great in my relationship with you. I began to ask myself each day, Am I the one who’s wrong I thought I knew about all drugs Pot, prescription, coke and bongs. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw what I needed to do. I read books and talked and prayed that the mirror be revealed to you. When that did not happen: I was angry, sick and more, and found out soon enough you wouldn’t let me in your door. The door to your heart is closed, it seems, and I cannot go there. Drugs turn you into someone Who seems not to even care. I ask and I wait and I wonder, as I stare at the heavens above, and I pray that all this chaos will one day be turned into LOVE. For it is only LOVE that will change the way we feel. For we all need one another, and we all have to heal. Let us heal from this addiction that has robbed us of our lives. There is no one who is immune from this" moms, dad, sons, daughters, husbands or wives. Let us all vow to take a stand and look into the mirror, each of us, reach deep within and learn to LOVE, praying for clarity, truth and trust. With LOVE, light and hope, Trina (Source: www.stoprxdrugabuse.org/html/poems.html) Venue for an Artist Inside the Growing Prescription Pill Epidemic By Evelyn Nieves It takes less than a minute to drive past Kermit, five to tour the place entirely. An old coal mining town with barely 300 residents and one blinking light between the train tracks, Kermit has no supermarket, no clothing store, no main drag. Main Street is really a side street with rows of cottages, its biggest building, the Kermit community center, empty and boarded.   Yet in this tiny town, the Kermit Sav-Rite Pharmacy used to be as busy as a New York deli. Six employees worked the counter, lines at the drive-through window snaked around the square cinder-block building, and the parking lot was full day and night.   Of course, everyone in Kermit — just about everyone in the wooded hollows of Mingo County — knew the Sav-Rite was a pill mill. It handed out Xanax, Lortabs, Vicodin — all manner of the prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs that are crippling Appalachia like a rogue disease — to anyone with an excuse. Kermit, which sits in the poorest, most remote corner of southwest West Virginia at the Kentucky border, was drawing pill addicts from all over the Eastern seaboard. People were throwing pill parties in the parking lot. Trading pills, buying, selling, injecting, snorting, the works.   This went on for years before the law could stop it. In February, more than two years after the DEA and FBI stormed the Sav-Rite, seizing cases of files, its owner, John T. Wooley, pleaded guilty to selling prescription pills by fraudulent means. Wooley, in cahoots with a pill mill "pain management" clinic that existed to sell scripts, was filling prescriptions as if the fate of mankind depended on it. The Kermit Sav-Rite, along with another one Wooley owned in a tiny hamlet about 10 miles from Kermit, together doled out enough hydrocodone, the main ingredient in Vicodin and Lortabs, for every man, woman and child in West Virginia (population: 1. 8 million). The Sav-Rites moved almost 3.2 million dosage units of hydrocodone in 2006, the year the U.S. attorney used to make a case, compared with the national average of 97,000. Wooley, who sold the Kermit store a few months ago (he lost the other to the feds’ raid), faces four years in prison and a $250,000 fine at his sentencing in May. At 76 years old, he could probably better afford the fine than the time. Agents who raided the Kermit store said cash drawers were so stuffed they couldn’t close.   But shutting down pill mills in these parts is like playing Whac-A-Mole: As soon as a lawless "pain management" clinic or pharmacy is smacked down, others spring up. Investigations take years before prosecutions can be secured. And pill mills are only part of the problem. Most often, pill addicts get their drugs from friends or on the street. Drug gangs from cities like Detroit, Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio, have also moved in on the action, setting up drug "stores" in residences and other fronts. Almost fondly, people here recall when Oxycontin was jokingly called "hillbilly heroin "and pill addicts were "pillbillies." No one is joking now. What is happening in Appalachia, about 10 years into an explosion of prescription drug abuse, is so pervasive a problem that law enforcement officials say they cannot solve it alone.   The West Virginia newspapers offer daily examples of what the Mingo County sheriff, Lonnie Hannah, calls the "spinoffs of drug abuse": Murders, assaults, robberies, burglaries, domestic violence, child abuse, child neglect, elder abuse, DUIs, overdose deaths. West Virginia, the ninth smallest state, has the highest rate of prescription drug overdose deaths in the nation.   Hannah estimates that two-thirds of the crimes and incidents his department handles are related to pill abuse. Chasing down pill dealing is more than enough work by itself. "It’s all over the county," Hannah said, at his headquarters in the city of Williamson (nickname: Pill-iamson), the Mingo County seat. Authorities keep busting pill mills and dealers in the city of 3,000 residents, only to see them start up again. "Whenever we move in," Hannah said, "they move around to someplace else."   People in these parts have a word for pill abuse: "pilling." So much of it goes on that everyone has a story. They know someone who has abused or is abusing pills. They know parents who have lost custody of their children or neighbors who have lost good jobs or friends who have died because of them. They are shocked to hear that in some places in the country, say, San Francisco, pilling is neither a word nor a fact of life.   But that could be changing. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps warning, prescription drug abuse is spreading. Pills, especially Xanax, the anti-anxiety drug manufactured by Pfizer, and Vicodin, Loracet and Lortabs, highly addictive opioid painkillers familiar to anyone who has had a wisdom tooth removed, are being abused more and more, all over. What started out as a situation in poor isolated areas of the country left to their own devices has taken root and spread, across Appalachia and beyond.   You can find pockets of pill abuse from Orange County, Calif., to Staten Island, NY (sometimes now called Pill Island). Nationally, the abuse of prescription pain relievers, as evidenced by treatment submissions, has gone up 430 percent in the last decade, according to a new report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in Washington, D.C. The report says states with the highest rise in prescription painkiller abuse include Maine, Vermont, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Arkansas, Rhode Island and West Virginia.   Last June, pill addiction on Long Island raged into the headlines when a 33-year-old Army veteran, David Laffer, shot and killed four people in a Medford pharmacy while he robbed the store for hydrocodone. A Vicodin addict, he had been getting the drug through doctor shopping — going from one doctor to another to sidestep the monthly limit for scripts — until he lost his job and his insurance.   "If there is a discussion of doctor shopping and prescription pill abuse," Laffer said upon his sentencing to life without parole, "then perhaps some good can come from this."   Laffer’s story lingered for barely more than a news cycle. But the spread of pilling may be the saving grace for Appalachia and the other mostly poor, mostly rural parts of the country where little white pills are leveling entire communities.   They offer the cautionary tale: Political leaders, health professionals and community groups in these parts who have been crying for help can show the rest of the country what can happen when pilling runs rampant.   About Me: Evelyn Nieves is a former staff writer and columnist for the New York Times. Nieves is working on a book. Read her article in its entirety at www.alternet.org/story/154944/inside_the_growing_prescription_pill_epidemic_that%27s_ravaging_communities. Hood Notes Antidepressant Drugs Causing Epidemic of Mania, Mayhem and Murder By Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones The alleged shooting of a police officer in Austin by a man taking the anti-anxiety drug Xanax is just one of a plethora of recent incidents fueled by anti-depressant pharmaceuticals – an epidemic of mania that has swept the country.   Mary O’Dell, the mother of 24-year-old Brandon Montgomery Daniel told the Associated Press that her son’s role in the fatal shooting of Austin Senior Police Officer Jaime Padron was fueled by alcohol and psychotropic drugs.   "She said she talked with her son Thursday evening, and that he had been taking the prescription anti-anxiety drug Xanax and drinking tequila," reports AP. "Hours later, Padron was fatally shot at a Walmart while trying to subdue a potentially intoxicated man who was later identified as Daniel, investigators said. Two employees tackled and disarmed him, then held him until help arrived."   O’Dell added that Daniel was not even aware of what had taken place because "he was under the influence of tequila and Xanax."   This is just one of a spate of shocking incidents over recent years in which Xanax and other similar pharmaceuticals have played a central role in triggering random violence and mania.   The two recent incidents involving airline officials suffering mental breakdowns during flights were also caused by anti-depressant drugs.   JetBlue pilot Clayton Osbon, who went crazy and began screaming about Al-Qaeda and threatening to take the plane down during an incident last month was described as a "consummate professional" by colleagues. However, experts looking into the case confirm that "several pharmacological issues under scrutiny within the airline industry are likely to get attention in the Osbon case, including the side effects of medicines that pilots sometimes use to fight fatigue and depression."   "Was Osbon, for instance, among those pilots newly permitted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use one of four specific antidepression medications, whose potential side effects are known to include hallucination and panic attacks?" reports the Christian Science Monitor.   In a separate incident, an American Airlines flight attendant had to be restrained by passengers after she went on a crazy tirade about crashing the plane and killing everyone onboard. It later emerged that the flight attendant had been on medication to treat a bipolar disorder.   A 50-year-old grandmother who went nuts and began kicking, punching and spitting at flight attendants for being refused alcohol last month also blamed her anti-anxiety medication for the outburst.   The Save Project, an organization committed to highlighting the dangers of SSRI drugs, highlights a laundry list of cases where use of anti-depressants, particularly amongst young people, has led to violence. Antidepressants are also exacerbating gang on gang violence. Last year the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) produced a study based on FDA figures that illustrated how the antidepressants Pristiq (desvenlafaxine), Paxil (paroxetine) and Prozac (fluoxetine), all appear in the list of the top ten violence-causing drugs. America’s addiction to psychotropic drugs is out of control and growing every year.   It’s abundantly clear that the epidemic of craziness and violence we are witnessing both in America and by U.S. troops abroad is being fueled by dangerous psychotropic drugs, subscription pharmaceuticals that are causing normally sane people to fly off the hook and act out with insane acts of mania or violence. (Source: www.infowars.com/antidepressant-drugs-causing-epidemic-of-mania/) Politics Y2K12 'War on Drugs' Has Failed, Say Latin American Leaders By Jamie Doward The Summit of the Americas held in Cartagena, Colombia is seen by foreign policy experts as a watershed moment in the redrafting of global drugs policy in favor of a more nuanced and liberalized approach.   Otto Pérez Molina, the president of Guatemala, who as former head of his country's military intelligence service experienced the power of drug cartels at close hand, is pushing his fellow Latin American leaders to use the summit to endorse a new regional security plan that would see an end to prohibition. In the Observer, Pérez Molina writes: "The prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that global drug markets can be eradicated."   Pérez Molina concedes that moving beyond prohibition is problematic. "To suggest liberalization – allowing consumption, production and trafficking of drugs without any restriction whatsoever – would be, in my opinion, profoundly irresponsible. Even more, it is an absurd proposition. If we accept regulations for alcoholic drinks and tobacco consumption and production, why should we allow drugs to be consumed and produced without any restrictions?"   He insists, however, that prohibition has failed and an alternative system must be found. "Our proposal as the Guatemalan government is to abandon any ideological consideration regarding drug policy (whether prohibition or liberalisation) and to foster a global intergovernmental dialogue based on a realistic approach to drug regulation. Drug consumption, production and trafficking should be subject to global regulations, which means that drug consumption and production should be legalised, but within certain limits and conditions."   The decision by Pérez Molina to speak out is seen as highly significant and not without political risk. Polls suggest the vast majority of Guatemalans oppose decriminalisation, but Pérez Molina's comments are seen by many as helping to usher in a new era of debate. They will be studied closely by foreign policy experts who detect that Latin American leaders are shifting their stance on prohibition following decades of drugs wars that have left hundreds of thousands dead.   Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón, has called for a national debate on the issue. Last year Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's president, told the Observer that if legalising drugs curtailed the power of organised criminal gangs who had thrived during prohibition, "and the world thinks that's the solution, I will welcome it".   One diplomat closely involved with the summit described the event as historic, saying it would be the first time for 40 years that leaders had met to have an open discussion on drugs. "This is the chance to look at this matter with new eyes," he said.   Latin America's increasing hostility towards prohibition makes Obama's attendance at the summit potentially difficult. The Obama administration, keen not to hand ammunition to its opponents during an election year, will not want to be seen as softening its support for prohibition. However, it is seen as significant that the US vice-president, Joe Biden, has acknowledged that the debate about legalising drugs is now legitimate. (Source: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/07/war-drugs-latin-american-leaders) News You Use Policy Impact: Prescription Painkiller Overdoses   In a period of nine months, a tiny Kentucky county of fewer than 12,000 people sees a 53-year-old mother, her 35-year-old son, and seven others die by overdosing on pain medications obtained from pain clinics in Florida. In Utah, a 13-year-old fatally overdoses on oxycodone pills taken from a friend’s grandmother. A 20-year-old Boston man dies from an overdose of methadone, only a year after his friend also died from a prescription drug overdose.   These are not isolated events. Drug overdose death rates in the United States have more than tripled since 1990 and have never been higher. In 2008, more than 36,000 people died from drug overdoses, and most of these deaths were caused by prescription drugs.   Although many types of prescription drugs are abused, there is currently a growing, deadly epidemic of prescription painkiller abuse. Nearly three out of four prescription drug overdoses are caused by prescription painkillers—also called opioid pain relievers. The unprecedented rise in overdose deaths in the US parallels a 300% increase since 1999 in the sale of these strong painkillers. These drugs were involved in 14,800 overdose deaths in 2008, more than cocaine and heroin combined.   The misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers was responsible for more than 475,000 emergency department visits in 2009, a number that nearly doubled in just five years.   More than 12 million people reported using prescription painkillers non-medically in 2010, that is, using them without a prescription or for the feeling they cause.   Almost all prescription drugs involved in overdoses come from prescriptions originally; very few come from pharmacy theft. However, once they are prescribed and dispensed, prescription drugs are frequently diverted to people using them without prescriptions. More than three out of four people who misuse prescription painkillers use drugs prescribed to someone else.   Most prescription painkillers are prescribed by primary care and internal medicine doctors and dentists, not specialists. Roughly 20% of prescribers prescribe 80% of all prescription painkillers.   Understanding the groups at highest risk for overdose can help states target interventions. Research shows that some groups are particularly vulnerable to prescription drug overdose:   People who obtain multiple controlled substance prescriptions from multiple providers—a practice known as "doctor shopping."   People who take high daily dosages of prescription painkillers and those who misuse multiple abuse-prone prescription drugs.   Low-income people and those living in rural areas. People on Medicaid are prescribed painkillers at twice the rate of non-Medicaid patients and are at six times the risk of prescription painkillers overdose. One Washington State study found that 45% of people who died from prescription painkiller overdoses were Medicaid enrollees.   People with mental illness and those with a history of substance abuse.   The drug overdose epidemic is most severe in the Southwest and Appalachian region, and rates vary substantially between states. The highest drug overdose death rates in 2008 were found in New Mexico and West Virginia, which had rates nearly five times that of the state with the lowest rate, Nebraska.   For more, including Center for Disease Control recommendations, see www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/rxbrief/. Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls Email www.latimes.com...A fog of drugs and war...By Kim Murphy...In a small but growing number of cases across the nation, lawyers are blaming the U.S. military's heavy use of psychotropic drugs for their clients' aberrant behavior and related health problems. Such defenses have rarely gained traction in military or civilian courtrooms, but Burke's case provides the first important indication that military psychiatrists and court-martial judges are not blind to what can happen when troops go to work medicated. After two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, according to figures recently disclosed to The Times by the U.S. Army surgeon general. Nearly 8% of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6% is on antidepressants — an eightfold increase since 2005. "We have never medicated our troops to the extent we are doing now.... And I don't believe the current increase in suicides and homicides in the military is a coincidence," said Bart Billings, a former military psychologist who hosts an annual conference on combat stress.   Email http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13438...Is Big Pharma Peddling Narcotics? Take Oxycontin, For Instance...By Mark Karlin...It is difficult to believe that Big Pharma is not aware of this growing abuse of legal drugs. It is difficult to fathom that their actuarial predictions of profit don't take into account the addictive and widespread abuse of narcotics. Perhaps they are indeed innocent bystanders to this spreading problem, but then the companies that make such effective medications would have to be deaf, blind, and dumb, because there is no way to ignore the "legal" drugs that are decimating sections of America. In fact, in 2004, the manufacturer of Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma, settled a case brought by the attorney general of West Virginia charging them with misleading and overly aggressive marketing of Oxycontin in the state. In addition to challenging Purdue's marketing, the suit had accused Purdue of purposely hiding from doctors the extent to which OxyContin's morphinelike qualities could lead to addiction. In a later case, in 2007 in a federal criminal prosecution in the State of Virginia, Purdue settled a for $634.5 million dollars in penalties (and pleaded guilty to a felony charge), according to the New York Times...Maybe Purdue is a bad apple in the Big Pharma orchard. But are mega-billion dollar corporations going to regard growth in sales of a patented drug -- regardless of its misuse -- as anything but an increase in profits?Good question to ask the largest legal drug cartel in the world: Big Pharma.   Email www.cnn.com...Drug war, including legalization, hot topic at Summit of the Americas...By Mariano Castillo-- The second and final day of the Summit of the Americas takes place in Cartagena, Colombia, on Sunday, where leaders from more than 30 North and South American countries are discussing several topics, such as bolstering economic ties and who should be part of future discussions. Yet the war on drugs that has drawn some of the sharpest distinctions among leaders at the two-day gathering. On Saturday, leaders debated how to address drug trafficking and violence in the hemisphere, with several calling for new approaches -- something U.S. President Barack Obama said he was open to, though he closed the door on legalization. The possibility of drug legalization has gained traction in Central America, which is being squeezed between suppliers to the south and consumers to the north. Yet the idea goes against decades of the prohibitionist policy backed by the United States, which is largely followed and enforced in Latin America and the Caribbean. Obama voiced his view that legalizing drugs isn't a valid option in the United States twice on Saturday -- first during a meeting of business leaders alongside Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and later during the hemispheric event's opening day session. "I think it is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are doing more harm than good in certain places," he said at the meeting of business leaders. "I personally, and my administration's position is, that legalization is not the answer." He reiterated that position while talking at the summit itself, saying "the United States will not be going in this direction."   Email www.cnn.com...Secret Service agents relieved in Colombia amid prostitution allegations...Cartagena, Colombia (CNN) -- A group of Secret Service agents and officers sent to Colombia ahead of President Barack Obama were relieved of duty and returned home amid allegations of misconduct that involved prostitution, according to two U.S. government sources familiar the investigation. The 11 Secret Service members -- both agents and uniformed officers -- were interviewed Saturday at the agency's Washington headquarters, after which they were placed on administrative leave, Assistant Director Paul Morrissey said in a statement. They are under investigation after preliminary findings revealed that they brought back several prostitutes to the Hotel Caribe in Cartagena, sources told CNN on Saturday.   *************************************************************** Send comments, inquiries and requests to unsubscribe to thedish@... ***************************************************************   You are subscribed as benziecountynorml@....  Unsubscribe  Forward This Page  Print

From: James Karl <bong_jamesbong2001@...>
Subject: Re: [THC-Ministry Yahoo group] Re: The DISH Vol. 15 No 14
To: THC-Ministry@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, April 16, 2012, 5:50 AM

 

Technically Steve, according to the FDA and the USSC, anything that goes into the body is a drug.  That includes pork, corn,  broccoli, thalidomide and even prosthetics.     Your point is well taken, though.     Your old friend,  End the oppression of cannabis and its consumers. Self defense is always correct, and it is never illegal.  b_jb2001 --- On Sun, 4/15/12, Rev. Steven B. Thompson <BenziecountyNORML@...> wrote: From: Rev. Steven B. Thompson <BenziecountyNORML@...> Subject: [THC-Ministry Yahoo group] Re: The DISH Vol. 15 No 14 To: "Dorothy Smith" <thedish@...> Cc: minorml-talk@... Date: Sunday, April 15, 2012, 1:57 PM I have been preaching since the 1970's (to anyone who will listen to me) that Cannabis IS NOT a drug, but in FACT, it is a seed-bearing herbal plant that was created by God for human use, and the Bible backs me up on this. Yet, many (even those in the Cannabis reform movement) disagree with me and even say that I am only hurting the movement to end the prohibition of it by my statements.   Until people start to realize that this IS THE TRUTH ABOUT CANNABIS, and this wonderful miracle plant is re-introduced into it's rightful place in our ecology & society, people are doomed, our planet is doomed, and evil like this will continue to flourish.   This is why I will fight for the Cannabis PLANT to my dying breath, and hope & pray that it is not too late. It IS my calling from God.   Have YOU collected any Michigan signatures today to help end this insanity?? Rev.Steven B.Thompson,Chapter Director Benzie County NORML 6215 Smeltzer Rd. Benzonia,MI 49616 (231) 882-4496 www.minorml.org  (Former Executive Director of Michigan NORML from May,2007 to November,2011)                                  Help end Cannabis Prohibition at www.repealtoday.org   WE DO NOT MANUFACTURE A DRUG...WE GROW A PLANT!!   --- On Sun, 4/15/12, Dorothy Smith <thedish@...> wrote: From: Dorothy Smith <thedish@...> Subject: The DISH Vol. 15 No 14 To: benziecountynorml@... Date: Sunday, April 15, 2012, 2:37 PM Dot’s Information Service Hotline "Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use" Visit The DISH online at www.thedish.org Vol. 15 No.14...Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race...04-15-12 ***************************************************** Table of Contents 1. Intuit’s Vibe...Addiction 2. Venue for an Artist...Inside the Growing Prescription Pill Epidemic...By Evelyn Nieves 3. Hood Notes...Antidepressant Drugs Causing Epidemic of Mania, Mayhem and Murder ...By Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones 4. Politics Y2K12...'War on Drugs' Has Failed, Say Latin American Leaders...By Jamie Doward 5. News You Use...Policy Impact: Prescription Painkiller Overdoses 6. Mailbox ***************************************************** Intuit’s Vibe Addiction A shell is all there is of the person I once knew. I thought things were great in my relationship with you. I began to ask myself each day, Am I the one who’s wrong I thought I knew about all drugs Pot, prescription, coke and bongs. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw what I needed to do. I read books and talked and prayed that the mirror be revealed to you. When that did not happen: I was angry, sick and more, and found out soon enough you wouldn’t let me in your door. The door to your heart is closed, it seems, and I cannot go there. Drugs turn you into someone Who seems not to even care. I ask and I wait and I wonder, as I stare at the heavens above, and I pray that all this chaos will one day be turned into LOVE. For it is only LOVE that will change the way we feel. For we all need one another, and we all have to heal. Let us heal from this addiction that has robbed us of our lives. There is no one who is immune from this" moms, dad, sons, daughters, husbands or wives. Let us all vow to take a stand and look into the mirror, each of us, reach deep within and learn to LOVE, praying for clarity, truth and trust. With LOVE, light and hope, Trina (Source: www.stoprxdrugabuse.org/html/poems.html) Venue for an Artist Inside the Growing Prescription Pill Epidemic By Evelyn Nieves It takes less than a minute to drive past Kermit, five to tour the place entirely. An old coal mining town with barely 300 residents and one blinking light between the train tracks, Kermit has no supermarket, no clothing store, no main drag. Main Street is really a side street with rows of cottages, its biggest building, the Kermit community center, empty and boarded.   Yet in this tiny town, the Kermit Sav-Rite Pharmacy used to be as busy as a New York deli. Six employees worked the counter, lines at the drive-through window snaked around the square cinder-block building, and the parking lot was full day and night.   Of course, everyone in Kermit — just about everyone in the wooded hollows of Mingo County — knew the Sav-Rite was a pill mill. It handed out Xanax, Lortabs, Vicodin — all manner of the prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs that are crippling Appalachia like a rogue disease — to anyone with an excuse. Kermit, which sits in the poorest, most remote corner of southwest West Virginia at the Kentucky border, was drawing pill addicts from all over the Eastern seaboard. People were throwing pill parties in the parking lot. Trading pills, buying, selling, injecting, snorting, the works.   This went on for years before the law could stop it. In February, more than two years after the DEA and FBI stormed the Sav-Rite, seizing cases of files, its owner, John T. Wooley, pleaded guilty to selling prescription pills by fraudulent means. Wooley, in cahoots with a pill mill "pain management" clinic that existed to sell scripts, was filling prescriptions as if the fate of mankind depended on it. The Kermit Sav-Rite, along with another one Wooley owned in a tiny hamlet about 10 miles from Kermit, together doled out enough hydrocodone, the main ingredient in Vicodin and Lortabs, for every man, woman and child in West Virginia (population: 1. 8 million). The Sav-Rites moved almost 3.2 million dosage units of hydrocodone in 2006, the year the U.S. attorney used to make a case, compared with the national average of 97,000. Wooley, who sold the Kermit store a few months ago (he lost the other to the feds’ raid), faces four years in prison and a $250,000 fine at his sentencing in May. At 76 years old, he could probably better afford the fine than the time. Agents who raided the Kermit store said cash drawers were so stuffed they couldn’t close.   But shutting down pill mills in these parts is like playing Whac-A-Mole: As soon as a lawless "pain management" clinic or pharmacy is smacked down, others spring up. Investigations take years before prosecutions can be secured. And pill mills are only part of the problem. Most often, pill addicts get their drugs from friends or on the street. Drug gangs from cities like Detroit, Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio, have also moved in on the action, setting up drug "stores" in residences and other fronts. Almost fondly, people here recall when Oxycontin was jokingly called "hillbilly heroin "and pill addicts were "pillbillies." No one is joking now. What is happening in Appalachia, about 10 years into an explosion of prescription drug abuse, is so pervasive a problem that law enforcement officials say they cannot solve it alone.   The West Virginia newspapers offer daily examples of what the Mingo County sheriff, Lonnie Hannah, calls the "spinoffs of drug abuse": Murders, assaults, robberies, burglaries, domestic violence, child abuse, child neglect, elder abuse, DUIs, overdose deaths. West Virginia, the ninth smallest state, has the highest rate of prescription drug overdose deaths in the nation.   Hannah estimates that two-thirds of the crimes and incidents his department handles are related to pill abuse. Chasing down pill dealing is more than enough work by itself. "It’s all over the county," Hannah said, at his headquarters in the city of Williamson (nickname: Pill-iamson), the Mingo County seat. Authorities keep busting pill mills and dealers in the city of 3,000 residents, only to see them start up again. "Whenever we move in," Hannah said, "they move around to someplace else."   People in these parts have a word for pill abuse: "pilling." So much of it goes on that everyone has a story. They know someone who has abused or is abusing pills. They know parents who have lost custody of their children or neighbors who have lost good jobs or friends who have died because of them. They are shocked to hear that in some places in the country, say, San Francisco, pilling is neither a word nor a fact of life.   But that could be changing. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps warning, prescription drug abuse is spreading. Pills, especially Xanax, the anti-anxiety drug manufactured by Pfizer, and Vicodin, Loracet and Lortabs, highly addictive opioid painkillers familiar to anyone who has had a wisdom tooth removed, are being abused more and more, all over. What started out as a situation in poor isolated areas of the country left to their own devices has taken root and spread, across Appalachia and beyond.   You can find pockets of pill abuse from Orange County, Calif., to Staten Island, NY (sometimes now called Pill Island). Nationally, the abuse of prescription pain relievers, as evidenced by treatment submissions, has gone up 430 percent in the last decade, according to a new report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in Washington, D.C. The report says states with the highest rise in prescription painkiller abuse include Maine, Vermont, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Arkansas, Rhode Island and West Virginia.   Last June, pill addiction on Long Island raged into the headlines when a 33-year-old Army veteran, David Laffer, shot and killed four people in a Medford pharmacy while he robbed the store for hydrocodone. A Vicodin addict, he had been getting the drug through doctor shopping — going from one doctor to another to sidestep the monthly limit for scripts — until he lost his job and his insurance.   "If there is a discussion of doctor shopping and prescription pill abuse," Laffer said upon his sentencing to life without parole, "then perhaps some good can come from this."   Laffer’s story lingered for barely more than a news cycle. But the spread of pilling may be the saving grace for Appalachia and the other mostly poor, mostly rural parts of the country where little white pills are leveling entire communities.   They offer the cautionary tale: Political leaders, health professionals and community groups in these parts who have been crying for help can show the rest of the country what can happen when pilling runs rampant.   About Me: Evelyn Nieves is a former staff writer and columnist for the New York Times. Nieves is working on a book. Read her article in its entirety at www.alternet.org/story/154944/inside_the_growing_prescription_pill_epidemic_that%27s_ravaging_communities. Hood Notes Antidepressant Drugs Causing Epidemic of Mania, Mayhem and Murder By Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones The alleged shooting of a police officer in Austin by a man taking the anti-anxiety drug Xanax is just one of a plethora of recent incidents fueled by anti-depressant pharmaceuticals – an epidemic of mania that has swept the country.   Mary O’Dell, the mother of 24-year-old Brandon Montgomery Daniel told the Associated Press that her son’s role in the fatal shooting of Austin Senior Police Officer Jaime Padron was fueled by alcohol and psychotropic drugs.   "She said she talked with her son Thursday evening, and that he had been taking the prescription anti-anxiety drug Xanax and drinking tequila," reports AP. "Hours later, Padron was fatally shot at a Walmart while trying to subdue a potentially intoxicated man who was later identified as Daniel, investigators said. Two employees tackled and disarmed him, then held him until help arrived."   O’Dell added that Daniel was not even aware of what had taken place because "he was under the influence of tequila and Xanax."   This is just one of a spate of shocking incidents over recent years in which Xanax and other similar pharmaceuticals have played a central role in triggering random violence and mania.   The two recent incidents involving airline officials suffering mental breakdowns during flights were also caused by anti-depressant drugs.   JetBlue pilot Clayton Osbon, who went crazy and began screaming about Al-Qaeda and threatening to take the plane down during an incident last month was described as a "consummate professional" by colleagues. However, experts looking into the case confirm that "several pharmacological issues under scrutiny within the airline industry are likely to get attention in the Osbon case, including the side effects of medicines that pilots sometimes use to fight fatigue and depression."   "Was Osbon, for instance, among those pilots newly permitted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use one of four specific antidepression medications, whose potential side effects are known to include hallucination and panic attacks?" reports the Christian Science Monitor.   In a separate incident, an American Airlines flight attendant had to be restrained by passengers after she went on a crazy tirade about crashing the plane and killing everyone onboard. It later emerged that the flight attendant had been on medication to treat a bipolar disorder.   A 50-year-old grandmother who went nuts and began kicking, punching and spitting at flight attendants for being refused alcohol last month also blamed her anti-anxiety medication for the outburst.   The Save Project, an organization committed to highlighting the dangers of SSRI drugs, highlights a laundry list of cases where use of anti-depressants, particularly amongst young people, has led to violence. Antidepressants are also exacerbating gang on gang violence. Last year the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) produced a study based on FDA figures that illustrated how the antidepressants Pristiq (desvenlafaxine), Paxil (paroxetine) and Prozac (fluoxetine), all appear in the list of the top ten violence-causing drugs. America’s addiction to psychotropic drugs is out of control and growing every year.   It’s abundantly clear that the epidemic of craziness and violence we are witnessing both in America and by U.S. troops abroad is being fueled by dangerous psychotropic drugs, subscription pharmaceuticals that are causing normally sane people to fly off the hook and act out with insane acts of mania or violence. (Source: www.infowars.com/antidepressant-drugs-causing-epidemic-of-mania/) Politics Y2K12 'War on Drugs' Has Failed, Say Latin American Leaders By Jamie Doward The Summit of the Americas held in Cartagena, Colombia is seen by foreign policy experts as a watershed moment in the redrafting of global drugs policy in favor of a more nuanced and liberalized approach.   Otto Pérez Molina, the president of Guatemala, who as former head of his country's military intelligence service experienced the power of drug cartels at close hand, is pushing his fellow Latin American leaders to use the summit to endorse a new regional security plan that would see an end to prohibition. In the Observer, Pérez Molina writes: "The prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that global drug markets can be eradicated."   Pérez Molina concedes that moving beyond prohibition is problematic. "To suggest liberalization – allowing consumption, production and trafficking of drugs without any restriction whatsoever – would be, in my opinion, profoundly irresponsible. Even more, it is an absurd proposition. If we accept regulations for alcoholic drinks and tobacco consumption and production, why should we allow drugs to be consumed and produced without any restrictions?"   He insists, however, that prohibition has failed and an alternative system must be found. "Our proposal as the Guatemalan government is to abandon any ideological consideration regarding drug policy (whether prohibition or liberalisation) and to foster a global intergovernmental dialogue based on a realistic approach to drug regulation. Drug consumption, production and trafficking should be subject to global regulations, which means that drug consumption and production should be legalised, but within certain limits and conditions."   The decision by Pérez Molina to speak out is seen as highly significant and not without political risk. Polls suggest the vast majority of Guatemalans oppose decriminalisation, but Pérez Molina's comments are seen by many as helping to usher in a new era of debate. They will be studied closely by foreign policy experts who detect that Latin American leaders are shifting their stance on prohibition following decades of drugs wars that have left hundreds of thousands dead.   Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón, has called for a national debate on the issue. Last year Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's president, told the Observer that if legalising drugs curtailed the power of organised criminal gangs who had thrived during prohibition, "and the world thinks that's the solution, I will welcome it".   One diplomat closely involved with the summit described the event as historic, saying it would be the first time for 40 years that leaders had met to have an open discussion on drugs. "This is the chance to look at this matter with new eyes," he said.   Latin America's increasing hostility towards prohibition makes Obama's attendance at the summit potentially difficult. The Obama administration, keen not to hand ammunition to its opponents during an election year, will not want to be seen as softening its support for prohibition. However, it is seen as significant that the US vice-president, Joe Biden, has acknowledged that the debate about legalising drugs is now legitimate. (Source: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/07/war-drugs-latin-american-leaders) News You Use Policy Impact: Prescription Painkiller Overdoses   In a period of nine months, a tiny Kentucky county of fewer than 12,000 people sees a 53-year-old mother, her 35-year-old son, and seven others die by overdosing on pain medications obtained from pain clinics in Florida. In Utah, a 13-year-old fatally overdoses on oxycodone pills taken from a friend’s grandmother. A 20-year-old Boston man dies from an overdose of methadone, only a year after his friend also died from a prescription drug overdose.   These are not isolated events. Drug overdose death rates in the United States have more than tripled since 1990 and have never been higher. In 2008, more than 36,000 people died from drug overdoses, and most of these deaths were caused by prescription drugs.   Although many types of prescription drugs are abused, there is currently a growing, deadly epidemic of prescription painkiller abuse. Nearly three out of four prescription drug overdoses are caused by prescription painkillers—also called opioid pain relievers. The unprecedented rise in overdose deaths in the US parallels a 300% increase since 1999 in the sale of these strong painkillers. These drugs were involved in 14,800 overdose deaths in 2008, more than cocaine and heroin combined.   The misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers was responsible for more than 475,000 emergency department visits in 2009, a number that nearly doubled in just five years.   More than 12 million people reported using prescription painkillers non-medically in 2010, that is, using them without a prescription or for the feeling they cause.   Almost all prescription drugs involved in overdoses come from prescriptions originally; very few come from pharmacy theft. However, once they are prescribed and dispensed, prescription drugs are frequently diverted to people using them without prescriptions. More than three out of four people who misuse prescription painkillers use drugs prescribed to someone else.   Most prescription painkillers are prescribed by primary care and internal medicine doctors and dentists, not specialists. Roughly 20% of prescribers prescribe 80% of all prescription painkillers.   Understanding the groups at highest risk for overdose can help states target interventions. Research shows that some groups are particularly vulnerable to prescription drug overdose:   People who obtain multiple controlled substance prescriptions from multiple providers—a practice known as "doctor shopping."   People who take high daily dosages of prescription painkillers and those who misuse multiple abuse-prone prescription drugs.   Low-income people and those living in rural areas. People on Medicaid are prescribed painkillers at twice the rate of non-Medicaid patients and are at six times the risk of prescription painkillers overdose. One Washington State study found that 45% of people who died from prescription painkiller overdoses were Medicaid enrollees.   People with mental illness and those with a history of substance abuse.   The drug overdose epidemic is most severe in the Southwest and Appalachian region, and rates vary substantially between states. The highest drug overdose death rates in 2008 were found in New Mexico and West Virginia, which had rates nearly five times that of the state with the lowest rate, Nebraska.   For more, including Center for Disease Control recommendations, see www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/rxbrief/. Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls Email www.latimes.com...A fog of drugs and war...By Kim Murphy...In a small but growing number of cases across the nation, lawyers are blaming the U.S. military's heavy use of psychotropic drugs for their clients' aberrant behavior and related health problems. Such defenses have rarely gained traction in military or civilian courtrooms, but Burke's case provides the first important indication that military psychiatrists and court-martial judges are not blind to what can happen when troops go to work medicated. After two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, according to figures recently disclosed to The Times by the U.S. Army surgeon general. Nearly 8% of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6% is on antidepressants — an eightfold increase since 2005. "We have never medicated our troops to the extent we are doing now.... And I don't believe the current increase in suicides and homicides in the military is a coincidence," said Bart Billings, a former military psychologist who hosts an annual conference on combat stress.   Email http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13438...Is Big Pharma Peddling Narcotics? Take Oxycontin, For Instance...By Mark Karlin...It is difficult to believe that Big Pharma is not aware of this growing abuse of legal drugs. It is difficult to fathom that their actuarial predictions of profit don't take into account the addictive and widespread abuse of narcotics. Perhaps they are indeed innocent bystanders to this spreading problem, but then the companies that make such effective medications would have to be deaf, blind, and dumb, because there is no way to ignore the "legal" drugs that are decimating sections of America. In fact, in 2004, the manufacturer of Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma, settled a case brought by the attorney general of West Virginia charging them with misleading and overly aggressive marketing of Oxycontin in the state. In addition to challenging Purdue's marketing, the suit had accused Purdue of purposely hiding from doctors the extent to which OxyContin's morphinelike qualities could lead to addiction. In a later case, in 2007 in a federal criminal prosecution in the State of Virginia, Purdue settled a for $634.5 million dollars in penalties (and pleaded guilty to a felony charge), according to the New York Times...Maybe Purdue is a bad apple in the Big Pharma orchard. But are mega-billion dollar corporations going to regard growth in sales of a patented drug -- regardless of its misuse -- as anything but an increase in profits?Good question to ask the largest legal drug cartel in the world: Big Pharma.   Email www.cnn.com...Drug war, including legalization, hot topic at Summit of the Americas...By Mariano Castillo-- The second and final day of the Summit of the Americas takes place in Cartagena, Colombia, on Sunday, where leaders from more than 30 North and South American countries are discussing several topics, such as bolstering economic ties and who should be part of future discussions. Yet the war on drugs that has drawn some of the sharpest distinctions among leaders at the two-day gathering. On Saturday, leaders debated how to address drug trafficking and violence in the hemisphere, with several calling for new approaches -- something U.S. President Barack Obama said he was open to, though he closed the door on legalization. The possibility of drug legalization has gained traction in Central America, which is being squeezed between suppliers to the south and consumers to the north. Yet the idea goes against decades of the prohibitionist policy backed by the United States, which is largely followed and enforced in Latin America and the Caribbean. Obama voiced his view that legalizing drugs isn't a valid option in the United States twice on Saturday -- first during a meeting of business leaders alongside Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and later during the hemispheric event's opening day session. "I think it is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are doing more harm than good in certain places," he said at the meeting of business leaders. "I personally, and my administration's position is, that legalization is not the answer." He reiterated that position while talking at the summit itself, saying "the United States will not be going in this direction."   Email www.cnn.com...Secret Service agents relieved in Colombia amid prostitution allegations...Cartagena, Colombia (CNN) -- A group of Secret Service agents and officers sent to Colombia ahead of President Barack Obama were relieved of duty and returned home amid allegations of misconduct that involved prostitution, according to two U.S. government sources familiar the investigation. The 11 Secret Service members -- both agents and uniformed officers -- were interviewed Saturday at the agency's Washington headquarters, after which they were placed on administrative leave, Assistant Director Paul Morrissey said in a statement. They are under investigation after preliminary findings revealed that they brought back several prostitutes to the Hotel Caribe in Cartagena, sources told CNN on Saturday.   *************************************************************** Send comments, inquiries and requests to unsubscribe to thedish@... ***************************************************************   You are subscribed as benziecountynorml@....  Unsubscribe  Forward This Page  Print

The Top Five Special Interest Groups Lobbying To Keep Marijuana Illegal

 

By Lee Fang posted Apr 20th 2012 at 9:04AM

 
Last year, over 850,000 people in America were arrested for marijuana-related crimes. Despite public opinion, the medical community, and human rights experts all moving in favor of relaxing marijuana prohibition laws, little has changed in terms of policy.
There have been many great books and articles detailing the history of the drug war. Part of America’s fixation with keeping the leafy green plant illegal is rooted in cultural and political clashes from the past.
However, we at Republic Report think it’s worth showing that there are entrenched interest groups that are spending large sums of money to keep our broken drug laws on the books:

1.) Police Unions: Police departments across the country have become dependent on federal drug war grants to finance their budget. In March, we published a story revealing that a police union lobbyist in California coordinated the effort to defeat Prop 19, a ballot measure in 2010 to legalize marijuana, while helping his police department clients collect tens of millions in federal marijuana-eradication grants. And it’s not just in California. Federal lobbying disclosures show that other police union lobbyists have pushed for stiffer penalties for marijuana-related crimes nationwide.
2.) Private Prisons Corporations: Private prison corporations make millions by incarcerating people who have been imprisoned for drug crimes, including marijuana. As Republic Report’s Matt Stoller noted last year, Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest for-profit prison companies, revealed in a regulatory filing that continuing the drug war is part in parcel to their business strategy. Prison companies have spent millions bankrolling pro-drug war politicians and have used secretive front groups, like the American Legislative Exchange Council, to pass harsh sentencing requirements for drug crimes.
3.) Alcohol and Beer Companies: Fearing competition for the dollars Americans spend on leisure, alcohol and tobacco interests have lobbied to keep marijuana out of reach. For instance, the California Beer & Beverage Distributors contributed campaign contributions to a committee set up to prevent marijuana from being legalized and taxed.
4.) Pharmaceutical Corporations: Like the sin industries listed above, pharmaceutical interests would like to keep marijuana illegal so Americans don’t have the option of cheap medical alternatives to their products. Howard Wooldridge, a retired police officer who now lobbies the government to relax marijuana prohibition laws, told Republic Report that next to police unions, the “second biggest opponent on Capitol Hill is big PHARMA” because marijuana can replace “everything from Advil to Vicodin and other expensive pills.”
5.) Prison Guard Unions: Prison guard unions have a vested interest in keeping people behind bars just like for-profit prison companies. In 2008, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association spent a whopping $1 million to defeat a measure that would have “reduced sentences and parole times for nonviolent drug offenders while emphasizing drug treatment over prison.”

 
RELATED: Why Can’t You Smoke Pot? Because Lobbyists Are Getting Rich Off of the War on Drugs
 
 

The Uruguayan government will present its marijuana legalization plan to its parliament, but the issues is dividing the country, and president Mujica hopes to change minds with an open debate.
Guatemala is pushing its agenda and building up the case for drug policy reform in order to create a regional coalition. The topic will be discussed at the next SICA meeting of regional leaders.
Meanwhile, mixed signals are coming from the US with Oregon joining Colorado and Washington to put marijuana legalization initiatives on the ballot on November, and more politicians joining the growing club of vocal anti-prohibitionists while the Fed escalate its crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries by going after the iconic Harborside in Oakland, the largest dispensary in the world.
http://www.world-war-d.com/2012/07/18/good-news-and-bad-news-for-drug-policy-reform/

Action-wise, the time has come to renew our support for the Guatemalan leading role in drug policy reform: http://signon.org/sign/support-guatemalan-president?source=s.em.cr&r_by=2387903&mailing_id=5080. Help spread it through social networks and emails.

From: Rev. Steven B. Thompson <BenziecountyNORML@...>
Subject: [THC-Ministry Yahoo group] For Your Information
To: minorml-talk@...
Cc: universal_life_church@yahoogroups.com, thc-ministry@yahoogroups.com, entheogens@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, July 18, 2012, 9:33 AM

The Uruguayan government will present its marijuana legalization plan to its parliament, but the issues is dividing the country, and president Mujica hopes to change minds with an open debate. Guatemala is pushing its agenda and building up the case for drug policy reform in order to create a regional coalition. The topic will be discussed at the next SICA meeting of regional leaders. Meanwhile, mixed signals are coming from the US with Oregon joining Colorado and Washington to put marijuana legalization initiatives on the ballot on November, and more politicians joining the growing club of vocal anti-prohibitionists while the Fed escalate its crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries by going after the iconic Harborside in Oakland, the largest dispensary in the world. http://www.world-war-d.com/2012/07/18/good-news-and-bad-news-for-drug-policy-reform/ Action-wise, the time has come to renew our support for the Guatemalan leading role in drug policy reform: http://signon.org/sign/support-guatemalan-president?source=s.em.cr&r_by=2387903&mailing_id=5080. Help spread it through social networks and emails. Uruguay needs our support more than ever. Share on social networks and email. http://www.world-war-d.com/2012/06/22/petition-in-support-of-the-controlled-legalization-of-marijuana-in-uruguay/ Finally, Obama needs to hear from you. Ask him to leave medical marijuana alone: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments   Keep up the fight. Thank you for your support. Jeffrey Dhywood Investigative writer, Author of "World War D – The Case against prohibitionism, roadmap to controlled re-legalization" Download a free 42 pages excerpt of  “World war-D” Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/worldward Follow me on Twitter: @JDhywood Become a better informed activist and support global drug policy reform! I do not ask for donations, I invite you to order a book filled with valuable information. Order your own copy of “Word War-D” ·        The reference book on the War on Drugs and prohibitionism ·        A guide to psychoactive substances and substance abuse ·        A blueprint for global drug policy reform and controlled legalization (Click here to order “World War-D” from Amazon) If you agree with our views, please share this message to support our cause. Send this message to at least 5 of your friends, post it on social networks, on your blogs, etc. Media inquiries- book reviews – speaking engagements: contact promo@...  Rev.Steven B.Thompson,Chapter Director Benzie County NORML 6215 Smeltzer Rd. Benzonia,MI 49616 (231) 882-4496 www.minorml.org  (Former Executive Director of Michigan NORML from May,2007 to November,2011)                                  Help end Cannabis Prohibition at www.repealtoday.org   WE DO NOT MANUFACTURE A DRUG...WE GROW A PLANT!!

http://freedomoutpost.com/2012/09/obamas-doj-grants-atf-new-gun-grab-authority/

September 12, 2012 by Tim Brown

Obama’s DOJ Grants ATF New Gun Grab Authority

10 Comments

The Obama administration via the Department of Justice has given authority to the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to “seize and administratively forfeit property involved in controlled-substance abuses.” This means now that people who are not dealing illegal drugs, just using them and anyone who might associate with them in the same residence or be in a vehicle can have their God-given right of keeping and bearing arms revoked by the government god. In fact, no conviction is even required in these instances.

The Washington Times reports,

The Obama administration is making it easier for bureaucrats to take away guns without offering the accused any realistic due process. In a final rule published last week, the Justice Department granted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) authority to “seize and administratively forfeit property involved in controlled-substance abuses.” That means government can grab firearms and other property from someone who has never been convicted or even charged with any crime.

It’s a dangerous extension of the civil-forfeiture doctrine, a surreal legal fiction in which the seized property — not a person — is put on trial. This allows prosecutors to dispense with pesky constitutional rights, which conveniently don’t apply to inanimate objects. In this looking-glass world, the owner is effectively guilty until proved innocent and has the burden of proving otherwise. Anyone falsely accused will never see his property again unless he succeeds in an expensive uphill legal battle.

Such seizures are common in drug cases, which sometimes can ensnare people who have done nothing wrong. James Lieto found out about civil forfeiture the hard way when the FBI seized $392,000 from his business because the money was being carried by an armored-car firm he had hired that had fallen under a federal investigation. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Mr. Lieto was never accused of any crime, yet he spent thousands in legal fees to get his money back.

The problem is two fold. One, government seeks to take a God-given, Constitutionally protected right from a citizen that has not been convicted of a crime. Two, it ends up creating a perverse profit motive, that leaves bureaucrats with strong incentives to abuse a process that doesn’t sufficiently protect those who are wrongly accused.

The Obama DOJ and the ATF have demonstrated their own disregard for the safety and laws of the land as they knowingly allowed guns to walk over the border into Mexico , resulting in hundreds of deaths. Both Attorney General Eric Holder and Barack Obama have a hatred for the Second Amendment and gun owners and that fiasco demonstrates that they desired to gain a political upper hand to bring in more gun control laws. Now they are stonewalling federal investigations to keep the truth from coming out. Yet they have the audacity to grant this kind of authority to an organization that has demonstrated that it abuses its power, and all in the name of the ‘war on drugs.’

From: Rev. Steven B. Thompson <BenziecountyNORML@...>
Subject: [THC-Ministry Yahoo group] NH Jury Nullifies Felony in Cannabis Grower's Trial
To: minorml-talk@...
Cc: benziedemocrats@..., "First District" <michiganfirstdistrictdems@...>, pda-michigan@yahoogroups.com
Date: Saturday, September 15, 2012, 4:10 PM

It is slowly catching on,so please continue to educate about it!! www.fija.org     http://freekeene.com/2012/09/14/huge-news-jury-nullifies-felony-in-cannabis-growers-trial/  Rev.Steven B.Thompson,Chapter Director Benzie County NORML 6215 Smeltzer Rd. Benzonia,MI 49616 (231) 882-4496 www.minorml.org  (Former Executive Director of Michigan NORML from May,2007 to November,2011)                                  Help end Cannabis Prohibition at www.repealtoday.org   WE DO NOT MANUFACTURE A DRUG...WE GROW A PLANT!!

America’s Schools: Breeding Grounds for Compliant Citizens

October 15, 2012
By John W. Whitehead

“[P]ublic school reform is now justified in the dehumanizing language of national security, which increasingly legitimates the transformation of schools into adjuncts of the surveillance and police state… students are increasingly subjected to disciplinary apparatuses which limit their capacity for critical thinking, mold them into consumers, test them into submission, strip them of any sense of social responsibility and convince large numbers of poor minority students that they are better off under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system than by being valued members of the public schools.”—Professor Henry Giroux

For those hoping to better understand how and why we arrived at this dismal point in our nation’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security, expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than America’s public schools.

Once looked to as the starting place for imparting principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, America’s classrooms are becoming little more than breeding grounds for compliant citizens. The moment young people walk into school, they increasingly find themselves under constant surveillance: they are photographed, fingerprinted, scanned, x-rayed, sniffed and snooped on. Between metal detectors at the entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in the hallways and surveillance cameras in the classrooms and elsewhere, many of America’s schools look more like prisons than learning facilities.

Add to this the epidemic of arresting schoolchildren and treating them as if they are dangerous criminals, and you have the makings of a perfect citizenry for our emerging police state—one that can be easily cowed, controlled, and directed. Now comes the latest development in the sad deconstruction of our schools: “smart” identification cards containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that allow school officials to track every step students take. So small that they are barely detectable to the human eye, RFID tags produce a radio signal by which the wearer’s precise movements can be constantly monitored.

A pilot program using these RFID cards is being deployed at two schools in San Antonio, Texas’ Northside School District. In the so-called name of school safety, some 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School are being required to carry these “smart” ID cards embedded with an RFID tracking chip which will actively broadcast a signal at all times.  Although the schools already boast 290 surveillance cameras, the cards will make it possible for school officials to track students’ whereabouts at all times.

School officials hope to expand the program to the district’s 112 schools, with a student population of 100,000. As always, there’s a money incentive hidden within these programs, in this case, it’s increased state funding for the school system. Although implementation of the system will cost $500,000, school administrators are hoping that if the school district is able to increase attendance by tracking the students’ whereabouts, they will be rewarded with up to $1.7 million from the state government.

High school sophomore Andrea Hernandez, who is actively boycotting the RFID cards, was told that “there will be consequences for refusal to wear an ID card.” Students who refuse to take part in the ID program won’t be able to access essential services like the cafeteria and library, nor will they be able to purchase tickets to extracurricular activities. Hernandez was prevented from voting for Homecoming King and Queen after school officials refused to verify her identity using her old ID card. According to Hernandez, teachers are even requiring students to wear the IDs when they want to use the bathroom.  School officials reportedly offered to quietly remove the tracking chip from Andrea’s card if the sophomore would agree to wear the new ID, stop criticizing the program and publicly support the initiative. Hernandez refused the offer.

This is not the first time that schools have sprung RFID chips on unsuspecting students and their parents. Schools in California and Connecticut have tried similar systems, and Houston, Texas began using RFID chips to track students as early as 2004. With the RFID business booming, a variety of companies, including AIM Truancy Solutions, ID Card Group and DataCard, market and sell RFID trackers to school districts throughout the country, claiming they can increase security and attendance. For example, AIM Truancy Solutions, a Dallas-based company, claims that its tracking system boosts attendance by twelve percent.

RFID tags are not the only surveillance tools being used on America’s young people. Chronically absent middle schoolers in Anaheim, Calif., have been enrolled in a GPS tracking program. As journalist David Rosen explains:

Each school day, the delinquent students get an automated ‘wake-up’ phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time. In addition, five times a day they are required to enter a code that tracks their locations: as they leave for school, when they arrive at school, at lunchtime, when they leave school and at 8pm. These students are also assigned an adult ‘coach’ who calls them at least three times a week to see how they are doing and help them find effective ways to make sure they get to school.

Some schools in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri are tracking obese and overweight students with wristwatches that record their heart rate, movement and sleeping habits. Schools in San Antonio have chips in their lunch food trays, which allow administrators to track the eating habits of students. Schools in Michigan’s second largest school district broadcast student activity caught by CCTV cameras on the walls of the hallways in real time to let students know they’re being watched.

Some school districts have even gone so far as to electronically track students without notifying their parents. In 2010, it was revealed that a Pennsylvania school district had given students laptops installed with software that allowed school administrators to track their behavior at home. This revelation led to the threat of a class-action lawsuit, which resulted in the school district settling with irate students and parents for $600,000. Similarly, in 2003, a Tennessee middle school placed cameras in the school’s locker rooms, capturing images of children changing before basketball practice. Thankfully, the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the practice in 2008, ruling that students have an expectation of privacy in locker rooms.

Clearly, there’s something more sinister afoot than merely tracking which students are using the bathroom and which are on lunch break. Concerned parent Judy Messer understands what’s at stake. “We do not want our children to be conditioned that tracking is normal or even acceptable or mandatory,” she shared.

“Conditioned” is the key word, of course. As Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham recognized in their book, Work Redesign, laboratory animals, children, and institutionalized adults “are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they most want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with relative ease.” Taking those ideas one step further, psychologist Bruce Levine noted, “Behaviorism and consumerism, two ideologies which achieved tremendous power in the twentieth century, are cut from the same cloth. The shopper, the student, the worker, and the voter are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable objects.”

To return to what I was saying about schools being breeding grounds for compliant citizens, if Americans have come to view freedom as expedient and expendable, it is only because that’s what they’ve been taught in the schools, by government leaders and by the corporations who run the show.

More and more Americans are finding themselves institutionalized from cradle to grave, from government-run daycares and public schools to nursing homes. In between, they are fed a constant, mind-numbing diet of pablum consisting of entertainment news, mediocre leadership, and technological gadgetry, which keeps them sated and distracted and unwilling to challenge the status quo. All the while, in the name of the greater good and in exchange for the phantom promise of security, the government strips away our rights one by one—monitoring our conversations, chilling our expression, searching our bodies and our possessions, doing away with our due process rights, reversing the burden of proof and rendering us suspects in a surveillance state.

Whether or not the powers-that-be, by their actions, are consciously attempting to create a compliant citizenry, the result is the same nevertheless for young and old alike.

NJ “Weedman” Found Not Guilty in Jury Nullification Victory

By J.G. Vibes

With few options left for people to protect themselves from the ever growing police state, an old and long forgotten aspect of constitutional law is making a huge comeback, and becoming very popular in cases where people are facing jail time for nonviolent offenses.

From: Rev. Steven B. Thompson <BenziecountyNORML@...>
Subject: [THC-Ministry Yahoo group] NJ "Weedman" Found Not Guilty In Jury Nullification Victory!
To: minorml-talk@...
Cc: entheogens@yahoogroups.com, thc-ministry@yahoogroups.com, universal_life_church@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thursday, October 25, 2012, 5:17 AM

This is why I now offer a $2 booklet on "Jury Nullification" on the Michigan NORML merchandise table. This is why teaching the public about Jury Nullification is so important!       http://www.blacklistednews.com/NJ_%E2%80%9CWeedman%E2%80%9D_Found_Not_Guilty_in_Jury_Nullification_Victory/22093/0/0/0/Y/M.html NJ “Weedman” Found Not Guilty in Jury Nullification Victory October 19, 2012 Print Version By J.G. Vibes With few options left for people to protect themselves from the ever growing police state, an old and long forgotten aspect of constitutional law is making a huge comeback, and becoming very popular in cases where people are facing jail time for nonviolent offenses. This reemerging defense is the act of jury nullification, which is basically the right for any juror to not only judge the facts of the case, but to also actually judge the validity of the law itself. This means that if a jury feels that a defendant is facing an unjust charge they actually have the right to rule in their favor even if they are technically guilty. Ed Forchion is a medical cannabis user and cancer patient known as the “NJ weedman”. Ed claims dual residency in Pemberton Township, New Jersey and Los Angeles, California.  Due to his residency in California he has a prescription for Cannabis and is legally allowed to grow and consume the plant in that state. However, he is not legally allowed to possess the plant in the state of New Jersey and unfortunately while in New Jersey on April 1, 2012 Forchion was stopped by police and found with a pound of cannabis and $2,000, enough to get slapped with a distribution charge. At an earlier trial last spring, he was convicted of possession, but that jury could not reach a unanimous decision on the more serious distribution charge, leading to this week’s retrial. With the distribution charge he was facing 10 years, and it is likely that the jury couldn’t send him away with a clear conscience. Ed’s primary strategy throughout his whole ordeal has been jury nullification, much to the dismay of Superior Court Judge Charles Delehey, who presided over both trials. Forchion was passionate in his closing arguments, wearing a shirt that said “Marijuana … It’s OK. It’s Just Illegal” and telling the jury that he had been munching on pot cookies throughout the whole trial. Then at one point he was nearly held in contempt of court for trying to advance his jury nullification argument. Considering the fact that most of the nonviolent offenses on the books today are extremely unpopular for a variety of reasons, you would think that jury nullification would be household knowledge, or taught in schools even. However, this is a very well guarded secret, with many judges actually preventing the defense from informing juries of their right to nullify laws that they feel are unjust. When Forcion started to talk about nullification, Delehey quickly stopped him, reminding him that he wasn’t allowed to go there, but Forchion fought back with intelligence and intensity. Frustrated, the judge ordered the jury out of the room and told him he would be held in contempt if he continued to speak the truth. According to Phillyblurbs the judge told him “If you want to make a martyr of yourself, the court will deal with you.  You’ve done everything you can to disrupt this trial.” There has been a constant tug of war between the defendant and the judge for the past year. During last May’s trial, Forchion and his supporter’s placed pamphlets about jury nullification on cars parked in the jury parking lot and were very vocal about the illegitimacy of the law and the juries right to decide the validity of the law. In pretrial motions, which were subsequently barred from being argued before the jury, Forchion challenged the constitutionality of the state’s criminal code now that New Jersey has a Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana law that recognizes the benefits of cannabis. He said Thursday he looks forward to the state Appellate Division reviewing that motion when he appeals the possession conviction, which he still faces sentencing on. Oddly enough, it will be the same judge who decides his sentence, but he will still have the ability to appeal, which can possibly lead to another acquittal. J.G. Vibes is the author of an 87 chapter counter culture textbook called Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance and host of a show called Voluntary Hippie Radio. He is also an artist with an established record label and event promotion company that hosts politically charged electronic dance music events. You can keep up with his work, which includes free podcasts, free e-books & free audiobooks at his website www.aotmr.com Rev.Steven B.Thompson,Chapter Director Benzie County NORML 6215 Smeltzer Rd. Benzonia,MI 49616 (231) 882-4496 www.minorml.org  (Former Executive Director of Michigan NORML from May,2007 to November,2011)   "Kaneh bosm" in the old Hebrew scrolls, quite literally the Biblical Tree of Life, used by early Christians to treat everything from skin diseases to deep pain and despair.                                  WE DO NOT MANUFACTURE A DRUG...WE GROW A PLANT!!

The Prison System Expands at Frightening Pace Following Declaration of War on Drugs

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws…For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Either the official U.S. housing numbers were total fabrications; or, more than half of these ‘housing starts’ were units which did not require a ‘sale’ to an individual owner in order for the builder to be paid (since no builder can stay in business building twice as many units as they sell).

In attempting to come up with an answer to the question ‘how could millions of new U.S. housing units not require sale to an owner?,’ I could only formulate one possibility. All of these phantom housing starts were in fact prison cells.

Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance — unless, that is, you traveled back to the nineteenth century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide…It was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy — at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.

‘We pay employees $9 on average,’ [a company executive] said. ‘They get full medical insurance, 401(k) plans and paid vacation. Yet we’re competing against a federal program that doesn’t pay any of that.’

[The private prison] is not required to pay its workers minimum wage and instead pays inmates 23 cents to $1.15 an hour. It doesn’t have health insurance costs. It also doesn’t shell out federal, state or local taxes.

Looking Beyond Election Day: The Issues That Threaten to Derail the Nation

October 31, 2012
By John W. Whitehead

While it may be months before the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy can be fully resolved, Americans cannot afford to lose sight of the very real and pressing issues that threaten to derail the nation.

What follows is an overview of the major issues that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, despite their respective billion dollar war chests, have failed to mention during their extensive campaign trail stumping and televised debates. These are issues that aren’t going away anytime soon. Indeed, unless we take a proactive approach to the problems that loom large before us, especially as they relate to America’s ongoing transformation into a police state, we may find that they are here to stay.

Militarized police. Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local law enforcement agencies without charge, police forces are being transformed from peace officers to heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. As Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, observed, “Today, 17,000 local police forces are equipped with such military equipment as Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers, battering rams, explosives, chemical sprays, body armor, night vision, rappelling gear and armored vehicles. Some have tanks.” In other words, what we are witnessing is an inversion of the police-civilian relationship.

Drones. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000 drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020, all part of an industry that could be worth as much as $30 billion per year. These machines will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat sensors and radar. Some drones are capable of hijacking Wi-Fi networks and intercepting electronic communications such as text messages.

SWAT team raids. With more than 50,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties is on the rise. Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling.

Suspect society. Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Making matters worse are Terrorism Liaison Officers (firefighters, police officers, and even corporate employees) who have been trained to spy on their fellow citizens and report “suspicious activity,” which includes taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements and drawings, taking notes, conversing in code, espousing radical beliefs and buying items in bulk. TLOs report back to “fusion centers,” which are a driving force behind the government’s quest to collect, analyze, and disseminate information on American citizens.

VIPR Strikes. Under the pretext of protecting the nation’s infrastructure (roads, mass transit systems, water and power supplies, telecommunications systems and so on) against criminal or terrorist attacks, VIPR task forces (comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams) are being deployed to do random security sweeps of nexuses of transportation, including ports, railway and bus stations, airports, ferries and subways. VIPR teams are also being deployed to elevate the security presence at certain special events such as political conventions, baseball games and music concerts. Sweep tactics include the use of x-ray technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs, among other things. These stings inculcate and condition citizens to a culture of submissiveness towards authority and regularize intrusive, suspicionless searches as a facet of everyday life.

Invasive surveillance technology. Police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

USA Patriot Act, NDAA. America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, has chipped away at our freedoms, unraveled our Constitution and transformed our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. These laws completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, re-orienting our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law—our U.S. Constitution—becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States.

Schoolhouse to jailhouse track. The paradigm of abject compliance to the state is being taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. As a consequence, school districts are increasingly teaming up with law enforcement to create what some are calling the “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. In this way, young people find themselves in an environment where they have no true rights and government authorities have near total power over them and can violate their constitutional rights whenever they see fit.

Overcriminalization. In the face of a government bureaucracy consumed with churning out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, we are all petty criminals, guilty of violating some minor law. In fact, the average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal and an inclination on the part of prosecutors to reject the idea that there can’t be a crime without criminal intent. Consequently, we now find ourselves operating in a strange new world where small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community are finding their farms raided, while home gardeners face jail time for daring to cultivate their own varieties of orchids without having completed sufficient paperwork. This frightening state of affairs—where a person can actually be arrested and incarcerated for the most innocent and inane activities, including feeding a whale and collecting rainwater on their own property—is due to what law scholars refer to as overcriminalization.

Privatized Prisons. At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business. In exchange for corporations buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years. Such a scheme simply encourages incarceration for the sake of profits, while causing millions of Americans, most of them minor, nonviolent criminals, to be handed over to corporations for lengthy prison sentences which do nothing to protect society or prevent recidivism.

Endless wars. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe. Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.

Rise of the Imperial President. During his two terms in office, George W. Bush stepped outside the boundaries of the Constitution and assembled an amazing toolbox of powers that greatly increased the authority of the Executive branch and the reach of the federal government. Bush expanded presidential power to, among other things, allow government agents to secretly open the private mail of American citizens; authorize government agents to secretly, and illegally, listen in on the phone calls of American citizens and read our e-mails; assume control of the federal government following a “catastrophic event”; and declare martial law. Thus, the groundwork was laid for an imperial presidency, a state of affairs that continued after Barack Obama’s ascension to the Oval Office and one that will likely not improve, no matter who wins on Election Day, unless something is done to restore the balance between government and its citizens.

Cannabis goes five for five in Michigan!

Congrats to Decriminalize Grand Rapids, the Coalition for a Safer Detroit, Eastern Michigan Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and all the other activists around Michigan who made this historic sweep happen! Help us carry the momentum forward by asking your legislators to decriminalize marijuana throughout the state.

From: Rev. Steven B. Thompson <BenziecountyNORML@...>
Subject: [THC-Ministry Yahoo group] On Christmas Day
To: minorml-talk@...
Cc: universal_life_church@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, December 24, 2012, 7:18 PM

My Dear Friends & Enemies, As you sit down to Christmas Dinner, I hope you will take time to remember that  you – both alone and in concert with others – have been the difference between life and death for so many.  Already in your lifetime you have helped in countless ways to bring warmth where it was needed, or a cooling touch to banish life’s fevers.  In ways you may have thought to be small, your presence, your actions, your compassion – have brought those around you back to life.  Every time you look outward to another person - where the warmth you have to share is all they need – and then share it – you do the work of God.  Sometimes it may be a letter of conviction to an elected official, a moment of quiet communion with a dying neighbor, a smile to a stranger, or thoughts of gratitude as you serve dinner to your loved ones, you are gently and surely creating a space for life.  And haven’t we all been blessed when others have done the same for us?  I hope as you close your eyes around the Christmas table in gratitude, you will take a moment to think of those who have loved you into being – whose very presence was exactly what you needed at that very moment.    At our table there will be a candle lit for you, with deep gratitude for all you do for so many in your circle of care.    With Peace & Love, Rev.Steve     Turn your speakers up!! Click here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAckfn8yiAQ  Rev.Steven B.Thompson,Chapter Director Benzie County NORML 6215 Smeltzer Rd. Benzonia,MI 49616 (231) 882-4496 www.minorml.org  (Former Executive Director of Michigan NORML from May,2007 to November,2011)   "Kaneh bosm" in the old Hebrew scrolls, quite literally the Biblical Tree of Life, used by early Christians to treat everything from skin diseases to deep pain and despair.                                  WE DO NOT MANUFACTURE A DRUG...WE GROW A PLANT!!

From: Katie Bethell, Change.org <mail@...>
Subject: Rev.Steven B.: watch this
To: BenziecountyNORML@...
Date: Friday, January 11, 2013, 10:29 AM

Rev.Steven B. - 2012 was the year that wildfire fighters finally won health insurance. It was the year three teenage girls decided it was time for a woman to moderate a presidential debate, the year a gay Boy Scout fought for his Eagle award, the year Trayvon Martin's parents got justice for their son. You and 25 million people won all of these victories -- and thousands more -- by starting, signing, and sharing petitions on Change.org in 2012. Take a look: Watch the video. We're blown away by all you accomplished in 2012, and we know this is just the beginning. We can't wait to see what you'll do in 2013. Thank you, - Katie and the Change.org team

.

As I read this, my mind is filled and my heart heavy from thinking about all my brothers & sisters who have been affected by Cannabis Prohibition. Their freedom turned into slave-labor in prisions, their possessions & children stolen away from them, and many murdered by law enforcement & criminals. All because they believed that they had a moral responsibity to disobey an unjust law. All because they wanted to use a "natural plant" instead of man-made poisons. Listening to our President speak today and how it related to us as cannabis growers & consumers, I am more determined than ever to continue OUR REVOLUTION until we finally put an end to this insanity and ALL our brothers & sisters are truely free. I hope & pray that youns will join me. Rev.Steve                                                                                                                                   

Sleeping Through a Revolution: It’s Time for President Obama to Wake Up to the True Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

January 21, 2013
By John W. Whitehead

~

As King recognized, there is much to be done if we are to make this world a better place, and we cannot afford to play politics when so much hangs in the balance. It’s time, Mr. President, to wake up. To quote your hero: “[O]ur very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world-wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.”

Collars for Dollars

How the drug war sacrifices real policing for easy arrests.