June 06, 2005

• on delayed preview: Koko posted here first.
• Let me say it first...Bush is an asshole. (well, let me say it first, here, today, in this little space, because millions of people worldwide have already said it) I have friends that need/use marijuana for serious medical problems when nothing else will work... May Bush and his whole gang of evil doers rot in hell for this kind of crap.. wow...
• How does this work? Let's say Maine allows medical marijuana. If I'm in Maine and have medical marijuana, can I be prosecuted, or would I have to be smoking it in a state that doesn't allow medical marijuana? Or smoking on an interstate highway? Or what? Of course the whole situation is hypothetical because I live in Canada where it's technically illegal, but only large-quantity dealers and grow-ops get busted, mostly because cops have nothing better to do. It's a nice place. You guys should come here.
• HuronBob: Your comments have been duly noted. Please stand by for political reeducation. Thanks! -- Dept of Das Homeland Security
• At this late stage of the game, with the original 1930s "Reefer Madness" generation either dead or dying, and the hippies of the 1960s nearing retirement age, it astonishes me that there are still people who believe that the War On Some Drugs - particularly the War On Pot - is winnable. Or that it's important or desirable to do so.
• It is worth noting that the three of Bush's most favorite Justices -- Rehnquist, Thomas, and O'Connor -- dissented.
• How does this work? Let's say Maine allows medical marijuana. If I'm in Maine and have medical marijuana, can I be prosecuted, or would I have to be smoking it in a state that doesn't allow medical marijuana? Or smoking on an interstate highway? Or what? There is an article over at Volokh Conspiracy that should clear up the issue. What it breaks down to is that allowing intrastate mj will inevitably lead to interstate mj (which no one is arguing that the government has a right to regulate). Or in other words "it would make things too HARD!" It is worth noting that the three of Bush's most favorite Justices -- Rehnquist, Thomas, and O'Connor -- dissented. I haven't read the dissenting position, but I'd imagine it contains a fair amount of federalist thought. I'm not particularly fond of legalizing all drugs, although I must admit that criminalizing mj makes no sense from almost any view point you take. The reason I disagree with the SCOTUS here is because I'm a federalist at heart. The states need to stop bowing to every wish and whim of the federal government and re-assert their constitutional rights. One of which is the right to regulate their own intrastate commerce. Also, I hate, hate the logic that says we shouldn't do something -- or in this case, judicate away the difficulty -- because it's "HARDDDD!" (put a nice whine on that). If a thing is truly worth doing then the benefits will outweigh the cost. And if you find that you're task has become impossible then perhaps you need to ask if it was ever worth doing in the first place. PS: I use the term mj because I'm too lazy to lookup how to spell marijuana. It's left as an exercise for the reader to find the irony in the previous sentence.
• Just one more argument for secession from the U.S. and forming one's own country. . . Oh, and prancing around naked in wheatfields without any fear of arrest or harassment. . .
• six.oh.six - it "works" (and I use the term loosely) because state medical marijuana laws don't trump the Federal laws that make them illegal. your town can decriminalize, but if the feds want to prosecute you, they'll still come and prosecute you.
• Remember when Republicans were all about States' Rights? Of course, that was when appealing to the anti-abortion, pro-Jim Crow crowd.
• The federal government has been harassing and threatening the doctors who prescribe medical pot legaglly in California anyway. The bottom line is, if a state does something the federal government doesnt like, the federal government will find a way to hold them over the barrel- usually blackmail involving withholding federal funds for this or that. I actually think the Supreme Court might have made the right decision here- as long as its illegal federally, the states dont have the right to change that. If states could ignore laws they didnt like, we might still have Jim Crow in the south. Maybe this will call attention to the abusrdity and cruelty of federal drug laws.
• $DEITY knows that busting folks with cancer or other serious illnesses who are trying to ease their pain is more important than any of the other things federal law enforcement is doing. Salon has a blog aggregator thing called the Daou Report that gets a lot of stuff from political blogs on the right and left. I skim it every now and then, and I happened to hit it this morning. The top "right wing" blog post was something about this ruling and the blogger was applauding it because most of those folks who are using it for "medical reasons" really just want to get high. I suppose I should be happy for this guy that none of his friends and relatives have ever had the kind of illness that people use pot as relief from, but the lack of compassion for sick people really cheeses me off.
• Everyone knows that marijuana is a gateway drug to more serious and addicting drugs, like painkillers and morphine. Especially when you're on chemo.
• As has been noted all over the internet, this does not make medical marijuana illegal. It's simply a ruling in favor of the power of congress to regulate noncommercial activities, and can only strengthen the precedent for New Deal-like policies. Also note that the Judiciary is an independent branch of government. It is prima facie wrong to blame Bush for this ruling, no matter how much you may think that it's all his fault. I, like many conservatives, think this was a poor ruling. Not because I want marijuana to be legalised-- on the contrary, I am in favor of the federal ban on marijuana; in this instance I am not ashamed to reveal my illibertarian views. I think it's a poor ruling because the coming Democratic majority in Congress will see it as a mandate to try some left-wing stunts. We might, for instance, see an attempt to legalize abortion through federal legislation (rather than the present contortive interpretation of abortion rights a right of privacy). I can barely tolerate the status quo, and am opposed to attempts to further legalize abortion. Gay marriage is slightly less clear-cut in my mind. If a Democratic majority doesn't materialize soon, I am strongly opposed to any attempts by the Dobson wing of the Republican party to sneak their Gods into our underpants. This ruling is a victory for the political extremes. I am surprised that Scalia and Kennedy concurred. Scalia seems to be sniffing the maverick glue, or perhaps he just dislikes the Warren court rulings as a matter of principle. Kennedy sways with the political winds, so he probably thinks that an anti-Federalist wind blows. If he's right, it's a scary thought. The loss of Rehnquist and O'Connor--two of the dissenters and also the two top candidates for retirement--might tilt the court even further in this direction. I don't like it.
• On a possibly-only-tangentially-related note, it may soon be impossible to buy cold medications containing pseudoephedrine over-the-counter, because pseudoephedrine can be used to make methamphetamine or some damn thing. Apologies to people with glaucoma and colds, but we have to stop The Bad People from doing The Bad Things. So- to sum up: our vision for a safe America is one in which you can buy machine guns over the counter, but not cold medicine. The machine guns are okay because otherwise we'd have Big Government, and the cold medicine is proscribed because somebody might do something bad with the cold medicine. Here's the meth/cold medicine article- of course, I probably saw this on Monkeyfilter or Metafilter in the last forty-eight hours, so this may or may not be news to anybody...
• Stan the Bat: Wow, that sucks. In Canada we can still buy pseudoephedrine cough medications, though the true ephedra is bannded because it causes heart attacks. The pseudo stuff doesn't work as good though. On the plus side, we can get codeine over the counter. Whee!
• >It's a nice place. You guys should come here. >Wow, that sucks. In Canada we can still Yeah yeah yeah. Look, unless Canada is granting refugee status to registered Democrats, or you're offering to marry me, I can't live there anyway, so I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your relative satisfaction with your present government to yourself. !@#$% Canadians...
• oh great now "Oh Canada" is stuck in my head once again, as it always is anytime anyone anywhere mentions ANYTHING about canada.
• Sidedish - it's your fault for not knowing more Canadian music. Personally, I always hear "Canada is really big" or "Rocks and Trees" by the Arrogant Worms. :) (Sometime I'm going to do a Canadiana mix, just to get those on.)
• I hear every song Rush ever made, simultaneously. The instrumental break is insane...
• If you feel that the Supreme Court did the wrong thing today, then please contact your representative in the House and ask him/her to please support the Hinchey-Rohrabacher medical marijuana amendment when it comes to the floor during consideration of the Science-State-Justice-Commerce Appropriations bill. Incidently, if anyone ever created a website that would match hot Canadian chicks to liberal American guys (and every other Canadian->American pairing you can think of, whatever), the Republic would be pretty damn screwed.
• Sorry, forgot link to form that doesn't allow you to edit its contents.
• I'd like to see pot legalized for a variety of reasons, the main one being that it is really really sad that that the greedy have trampled all over a good buzz with all their violent groping for the big buck that Ronny Reagan first promised them with his ill-conceived war on drugs. A good tear-jerk story about a cancer ridden person toking the weed for relief and getting a stay at Club Fed will do wonderful things to the emotions of voters when it comes time to pull the lever. I'm getting some good feelings about the powers that be sliding into self-destruct mode in the name of that good old time religion. This fuckin` train wreck is just getting more and more expensive and the tourists are all going home.
• I used to be all for legal pot, but the fact that it seems to be a trigger for schizophrenia in some susceptible persons tends to give me cause for pause.
• >a trigger for schizophrenia Hmm... Well, that may be true for all I know. But I seem to recall reading somewhere that LSD could cause 'chromosome damage'. Then I read somewhere else that by the standards of the study which produced that report, stuff like orange juice and toothpaste could *also* cause chromosome damage. So- my gut reaction to the schizophrenia claim is: beware of possibly-politically-motivated scientific findings. (But like I said, I don't know nothin' about it- it might give you big dark greasepaint circles around your eyes like in Reefer Madness for all I know.)
• Has anyone mentioned that Bush is an asshole AND an idiot? Just want to throw that out.
• This may be worth a look re my comment above. Unproven, sure, but worthy of consideration in my view.
• rodgerd are you saying that the republicans were 'for' states' rights before they were against them? like, they flip-flopped? no fucking way! (btw "up or down vote" is the new "flip-flop". pass it on.) also: the bush admin = evil fucks, so i can't say i'm surprised by any of this. :/
• If someone smoking pot has schizophrenia 'triggered' then they were already schizophrenic. Stopping people smoking dope will not stop schizophrenia.
• Yeah, Chyren, that's what they said about D&D and Satanism...but now that the imagination it takes to even play D&D has been extinguished in all our young peoples, the world is safe from dat ole Debbil. So there you go.
• Here's an intersting read with regards to the "correlation" between smoking pot and schizophrenia...
• Will you assholes get out of my bedroom and medicine chest?
• Wolof, there are two points here. 1)What's the type of mental "illness" implicated here? Recently, there was a much-publicized NZ 20+ years observational study that reported that heavy cannabis users showed signs of psychosis. Pretty quickly, there were tons of media reports with headlines of "Cannabis and psychosis - strong evidence"..etc. Then, I read an interview with the lead researcher, in some NZ publication. He said that the study, among other things, presented 10 questions to the subjects. On average, non-smokers reported around 0.5 symptoms, light smokers around 0.9 symptoms and heavy smokers around 1.9 symptoms. A few of these questions were "do you have thoughts that others normally don't share?" and "do you get paranoid about some things?"..etc. As per my recollection, a proper diagnostic instrument involves close to 100 questions. The survey didn't even ascertain whether these symptoms were during cannabis intoxication, although that's (hopefully) a weak point. The broader point remains, that although beyond a certain point, psychosis is a pathological state, upto that point, psychosis remains a socially-derived 'clinical label' rather than a pathology. Researchers should figure out the severity of the 'psychosis' induced by cannabis. As it is, the power vested in the connotation seems to drive the fears, rather than the actual specific symptoms reported. 2)In the US, an estimated 95 million have already tried cannabis, and an estimated 20-25 million regularly smoke it, despite illegality. It is supposed that those susceptible to schizo/BiPoD are more likely to try cannabis, LSD..etc So, the illegal regime doesn't actually protect those most vulnerable. Cannabis is pretty easy to get, anyway. Legalization may not improve the situation, I don't see how it would cause it to deteriorate.
• Marijuana is for liberals, Cocaine is for conservatives. When can I expect my medical cocaine?
• sugarmilktea links to a very rational article re: marijuana and mental illness. Those forming opinions based on this discussion are well-advised to read it.
• Oops, sugarmilktea linked to an article that covers part of my first point.
• Forget meth and other hard-core drugs -- the administration would rather waste taxpayer dollars in an all-out assault on marijuana
• linky no worky for me :( I get RS but just a blank page. this worked though By almost any measure, however, the war has been as monumental a failure as the invasion of Iraq. Oh Snap!
• Worked for me. Good article. /mind reels
• "America. Prison Nation."
• Two Years in Jail for a Joint?
• (... and that's just for a fingered joint ...)
• FDA Shames Itself Again
• Congress Votes on Medical Marijuana Tomorrow
• U.S. Marijuana Arrests at All-Time High
• The Feds vs the Sick
• LA Pot Raids Surpise Local Cops
• Another tax dollar well-spent. *sigh*
• Mmmmm chocolate!
• *throws a cannabutter banana chewie to pete* Oh, a fine linky there!