Pot // Current TV

Obama was a Hawaii pothead, biography reveals

WASHINGTON — President Obama was once Hawaii’s pothead-in-chief, according... more

Radical_Centrist
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4 days ago
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A Judge’s Plea for Pot

THREE and a half years ago, on my 62nd birthday, doctors discovered a mass on my pancreas. It turned out to be Stage 3 pancreatic cancer. I was told I would be dead in four to six months. Today I am in that rare coterie of people who have survived this long with the disease. But I did not foresee that after having dedicated myself for 40 years to a life of the law, including more than two decades as a New York State judge, my quest for ameliorative and palliative care would lead me to marijuana.

My survival has demanded an enormous price, including months of chemotherapy, radiation hell and brutal surgery. For about a year, my cancer disappeared, only to return. About a month ago, I started a new and even more debilitating course of treatment. Every other week, after receiving an IV booster of chemotherapy drugs that takes three hours, I wear a pump that slowly injects more of the drugs over the next 48 hours.

Nausea and pain are constant companions. One struggles to eat enough to stave off the dramatic weight loss that is part of this disease. Eating, one of the great pleasures of life, has now become a daily battle, with each forkful a small victory. Every drug prescribed to treat one problem leads to one or two more drugs to offset its side effects. Pain medication leads to loss of appetite and constipation. Anti-nausea medication raises glucose levels, a serious problem for me with my pancreas so compromised. Sleep, which might bring respite from the miseries of the day, becomes increasingly elusive.

Inhaled marijuana is the only medicine that gives me some relief from nausea, stimulates my appetite, and makes it easier to fall asleep. The oral synthetic substitute, Marinol, prescribed by my doctors, was useless. Rather than watch the agony of my suffering, friends have chosen, at some personal risk, to provide the substance. I find a few puffs of marijuana before dinner gives me ammunition in the battle to eat. A few more puffs at bedtime permits desperately needed sleep.

This is not a law-and-order issue; it is a medical and a human rights issue. Being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, I am receiving the absolute gold standard of medical care. But doctors cannot be expected to do what the law prohibits, even when they know it is in the best interests of their patients. When palliative care is understood as a fundamental human and medical right, marijuana for medical use should be beyond controversy.

Sixteen states already permit the legitimate clinical use of marijuana, including our neighbor New Jersey, and Connecticut is on the cusp of becoming No. 17. The New York State Legislature is now debating a bill to recognize marijuana as an effective and legitimate medicinal substance and establish a lawful framework for its use. The Assembly has passed such bills before, but they went nowhere in the State Senate. This year I hope that the outcome will be different. Cancer is a nonpartisan disease, so ubiquitous that it’s impossible to imagine that there are legislators whose families have not also been touched by this scourge. It is to help all who have been affected by cancer, and those who will come after, that I now speak.

Given my position as a sitting judge still hearing cases, well-meaning friends question the wisdom of my coming out on this issue. But I recognize that fellow cancer sufferers may be unable, for a host of reasons, to give voice to our plight. It is another heartbreaking aporia in the world of cancer that the one drug that gives relief without deleterious side effects remains classified as a narcotic with no medicinal value.

Because criminalizing an effective medical technique affects the fair administration of justice, I feel obliged to speak out as both a judge and a cancer patient suffering with a fatal disease. I implore the governor and the Legislature of New York, always considered a leader among states, to join the forward and humane thinking of 16 other states and pass the medical marijuana bill this year. Medical science has not yet found a cure, but it is barbaric to deny us access to one substance that has proved to ameliorate our suffering.

Gustin L. Reichbach is a justice of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.THREE and a half years ago, on my 62nd birthday, doctors discovered a mass on my... more

rodstradamus
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12 days ago
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2 comments

Richard Branson says Spain can solve its economic problems by legalizing marijuana

Sir Richard Branson believes that the ideal way for Spain to get out of its current... more

Vierotchka
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16 days ago
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15 comments

Super Frat: Motivation

The bros get to smoking.

TonyDiGerolamo
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22 days ago
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0 comments

The Weed Man

song about marijuana.

minimumjohn
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1 month ago
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1 comment

US Authorities Crack Down on Medical Cannabis

US Authorities Crack Down on Medical Cannabis... more

LT4456
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1 month ago
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0 comments

Stinky fish helps limit potfest at Colo university

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — Stinky fish fertilizer and two dozen law-enforcement... more

cabinettags
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1 month ago
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27 comments

It’s 420 day, dudes, celebrate the Waldos!

It’s 420 Day!! 420 has been a euphemism or code-speak for marijuana for... more

robertruiz
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1 month ago
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DHS-Searches your Facebook & Twitter for "marijuana" and other key words!

Recently released documents reveal that the Department of Homeland Security is keeping... more

figgdimension
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3 months ago
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31 comments

Super Frat: If the War Continues You Haven’t Lost It

Mistah Shit gets the latest update on the drug war.

TonyDiGerolamo
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3 months ago
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I Hate My Kids: Collateral Breakdancing

Greg and Tim experiment with breakdancing.

TonyDiGerolamo
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3 months ago
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Virginia Is For Potheads?

When this country got torpedoed by the Great Recession of 2007, we experienced the largest collapse in state revenues on record. Now, nearly two years after the bottom fell out of the economy, all but four states have been forced to cut services for residents. More than 30 states have raised taxes and 29 still face budget shortfalls.

Among the states struggling to dig itself out of the financial abyss is Virginia, whose budget deficit reached $2 billion in 2012. Even at 8.3% growth in 2011, Virginia won’t fully restore its losses from the recession until 2019.

But David Englin, a Democratic delegate from Arlington, is unwilling to wait seven more years for a recovery and has a creative proposal to give Virginia’s economy an instant shot of adrenaline. It’s House Joint Resolution 140 and it’s raising eyebrows among some of his fellow lawmakers and constituents.

Englin wants Virginia's state-owned liquor outlets, called ABC stores, to start selling marijuana.

At least, for now, he wants the General Assembly to allow for a study on the economic impact of the sale and taxing of pot in Virginia as well as the feasibility and practicality of legalization.

“Right now, people are smoking marijuana, Englin told his local CBS affiliate. “Respectable members of society are out there secretly purchasing and smoking marijuana and the money they spend on that is going into the hands of criminals. So this legislation just seeks to find out how much money we could potentially be raising to fund core services of the Commonwealth.”

“What’s next? Selling it at Walmart (WMT)?” countered Wayne Frith of Substance Abuse Free Environment (SAFE) who believes marijuana’s health and safety implications are far too serious to allow this measure to pass.

Northern Virginia resident Bernard Hill thinks the proposal is “crazy” and opposes his tax dollars being spent to explore it. All told, the study, taken on by a joint subcommittee, would set the state back a little more than $15,000.

Hill may not be familiar with the old business adage “You have to spend money to make money” because if he was, he may be more comfortable knowing what kind of a return he’d be guaranteed on his investment. In 2011 alone, states like Colorado and California -- where medical marijuana is legal -- reaped $1.7 billion in sales.

To put this figure into perspective, consider that Pfizer (PFE) made $1.9 billion off Viagra -- which is legal everywhere.When this country got torpedoed by the Great Recession of 2007, we experienced the... more

Vierotchka
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4 months ago
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New research about cannabis use

Michael Balderstone of the Hemp Embassy in Nimbin is hopeful that new research will... more

Vierotchka
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5 months ago
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2 comments

Stoned seniors: Germany faces epidemic of hippy pensioners

They include sixty-plus grandmothers spaced out on LSD and 70-year-old grandpas in... more

joeeddy
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5 months ago
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Woodstock, Forever In My Heart

____________ Click here to read the CNN iReport:... more

EthicalVegan
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2 years ago
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15 comments

Super Frat: Newt World Order

Mistah Sh*t watches one of the GOP candidates talk about weed.

TonyDiGerolamo
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6 months ago
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0 comments

Washington & Rhode Island governors petition DEA to reclassify marijuana

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire and Rhode Island Gov.... more

cabinettags
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6 months ago
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Comment: Reefer madness in a final frenzy

As the Leveson Inquiry looks at media standards, we should investigate the lies written about cannabis in the British press.

By Peter Reynolds

In the mid 1930s, after the end of alcohol prohibition, Harry Anslinger, former assistant commissioner at the Bureau of Prohibition, was settling into his exciting new job as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and working on his next campaign.

"This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with negroes, entertainers and any others," he wrote in one of Randolph Hearst's newspapers. Hearst was behind the organised campaign against cannabis hemp, then one of America's most successful crops, by timber, oil and paper interests. The strategy was to slur the plant with the racist term "marijuana", demonise it, outlaw it and wipe it out.

Come forward about 80 years to the present day. In the US there is the White House drugs czar Gil Kerlikowske and the head of the DEA, Michelle Leonhart. In Britain we have James Brokenshire, the Home Office minister. These people are faithful in style and message to their role model Anslinger. They use arguments and propaganda of exactly the same type and value but adjusted to politically correct 2011 terms. Their weapon is deceit and their strategy is intransigence. The prejudice, discrimination and media scaremongering continues. As Anslinger had Randolph Hearst's media empire, so Brokenshire has the Daily Mail.
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The Mail came out all guns blazing last week in response to the Global Initiative on Drug Policy Reform and the ex-head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, calling for legal regulation. Despite the furious propaganda war it has waged against cannabis and cannabis users the issue won't go away. Why? Because millions of British citizens regularly use and enjoy cannabis with no ill effects and many find it of enormous therapeutic benefit for conditions such as chronic pain, MS and Crohn's disease. Also, because this war on cannabis is just another war on people. It is futile, expensive and causes far more harm than it prevents. It has created the modern phenomenon of rented property being destroyed, electricity being stolen with human trafficked gardeners and intensive production of high potency cannabis.

(much more at link)As the Leveson Inquiry looks at media standards, we should investigate the lies... more

Vierotchka
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6 months ago
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1 comment

The drug cartels Thank You to CA for keeping them in Business

US authorities find major drug tunnel in San Diego

SAN DIEGO (AP) — An estimated 17 tons of marijuana were seized in the discovery of a cross-border tunnel that authorities said Wednesday was one of the most significant secret drug smuggling passages ever found on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The tunnel discovered Tuesday stretched about 400 yards (400 meters) and linked warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana, authorities said.

U.S. authorities seized about nine tons of marijuana inside a truck and at the warehouse in San Diego's Otay Mesa area, said Derek Benner, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent in charge of investigations in San Diego. Mexican authorities recovered about eight tons south of the border.

Authorities spoke at a news conference near packages of seized dope festooned with labels of Captain America, Sprite and Bud Light. The markings are codes to identify the owners.

Photos taken by Mexican authorities show an entry blocked by bundles that were likely stuffed with marijuana, said Paul Beeson, chief of the Border Patrol's San Diego sector. Tunnel walls were lined with wood supports. The passage was equipped with lighting and ventilation systems.

The tunnel was about four feet high and three feet wide. It dropped about 20 feet on the U.S. side.

Two men allegedly seen leaving the warehouse in a truck packed with about three tons of pot were pulled over Tuesday on a highway in suburban La Mesa and arrested. A California Highway Patrol officer was overwhelmed by the smell, according to a federal complaint.

Cesar Beltran and Ruben Gomez each face a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted of conspiracy to distribute marijuana, said Alana Robinson, chief of the U.S. attorney's narcotics enforcement section in San Diego. They were scheduled to be arraigned Thursday.

Cross-border tunnels have proliferated in recent years, but the latest find is one of the more significant, based on the amount of drugs seized.

Raids last November on two tunnels linking San Diego and Tijuana netted a combined 50 tons of marijuana on both sides of the border, two of the largest pot busts in U.S. history. Those secret passages were lined with rail tracks, lighting and ventilation.

read more: http://news.yahoo.com/us-authorities-major-drug-tunnel-san-diego-185929368.htmlUS authorities find major drug tunnel in San Diego SAN DIEGO (AP) — An... more

cabinettags
added this
6 months ago
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6 comments

Truck fire leads to 50 pounds of Marijuana found in panels

A massive truck fire leads to firefighters finding 50 pounds of marijuana hidden in a... more

vancitysage
added this
7 months ago
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0 comments

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