Vancouver // Current

Vancouver Planning Olympic Homeless Evictions | End Homelessness | Change.org

I've been waiting for news of this, how Vancover, my old stomping grounds will begin... more

quanta
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15 days ago
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Pumpkin Patch Adventure

Smush, smush, smush. If you plan on going to the pumpkin patch this year, be sure to... more

urlspotter
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19 days ago
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RIP:Matthew Ferrer who will be missed

Early Saturday day morning in Vancouver, Washington a high school student was found in... more

coke_man420
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22 days ago
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BC's Business Case For Legalizing Marijuana

As economic cutbacks continue to slice up our social infrastructure, it's time to look more seriously at the futility of paying vast sums to keep pot illegal.

I'm writing this on the day marijuana entrepreneur Marc Emery is being taken in handcuffs to the U.S. to plead guilty for selling marijuana seeds from his multimillion-dollar Vancouver-based mail-order business.

Leaving aside all the galling issues about U.S. legal control over a Canadian business, the arrest of a Canadian citizen who has never visited the U.S., the inexplicable length of his expected sentence - five years incarceration in the U.S. for a one-month offence in Canada - the victimless nature of his crime and the self-defeating wounds he inflicts on himself from incendiary pro-pot campaigning, his case highlights the role of pot as the elephant in the B.C. economy.

A 2004 Fraser Institute study roughly estimated the B.C. marijuana crop's value at around 2% to 4% of the province's GDP. That was before the recession. Go to any small town in B.C., look around at the pine-beetle kill and the shuttered mills and ask yourself what's still selling.

As economic cutbacks continue to slice up our social infrastructure, it's time to look more seriously at the futility of paying vast sums to keep pot illegal: last week's Union of B.C. Municipalities motion asking for more federal money to fight gangs is only the latest indicator of how our widely-flaunted anti-pot laws are hurting communities financially - as well as generating crime and disrespect for the law. Pot sales are fuelling the franchising of Hell's Angels subsidiaries in small towns all over the province as other economic opportunities dry up.

Who pays and who benefits from keeping pot possession a criminal offence? Ordinary citizens pay, in police, fire-inspection, court and jail costs, while access to the plant stays as high as ever.

As the Fraser Institute study concluded: "The broader social question becomes not whether we approve or disapprove of local production, but rather who shall enjoy the spoils." The current beneficiaries are organized criminals, small-time dealers, illegal growers, police, lawyers and related law-enforcement industries.

Legalizing and taxing pot would immediately save money. An open letter signed by 500 U.S. economists, including Milton Friedman, suggested that replacing pot prohibition with taxation and regulation in the U.S. would save $7.7 billion annually and generate $6.2 billion a year in new revenue if legalized marijuana were taxed like alcohol or tobacco. The Washington legislature is looking at a 2010 bill that would reclassify possession from a crime to a civil infraction with a $100 penalty. A legislative committee estimates a net financial gain of $17 million a year if the bill passes.

Tobacco-like controls, regulations, age restrictions and warning labelling would mitigate abuse. Police could cut back forces and focus on real dangers.

There are a multitude of barriers to making this happen, not least of which is jeopardizing our relationship with our American neighbours. But how long are they going to hang onto anti-drug laws that have turned their southern flank into a drug state run by warlords? Pressure to decriminalize is very much alive south of the border. As far back as 1972, a bipartisan Congressional commission recommended decriminalization. Fourteen states representing a third of the U.S. population have since decriminalized marijuana use. Cities like Seattle have officially made adult marijuana use the "lowest law-enforcement priority."

B.C. has an edge in the pot business. Give Emery credit for putting Vancouver on the international map as a pot hot spot. Canada already has more than 2,000 federally sanctioned medical-marijuana growers - some in grow-ops near you. We have expert growers in every municipality in the province. Just think if they could grow in greenhouses instead of converting wood-frame homes CONT'D>>As economic cutbacks continue to slice up our social infrastructure, it's time to look... more

copperdragon
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24 days ago
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Report on weed use prompts call for legalization

A report released Thursday that shows the number of pot smokers in the world has grown... more

copperdragon
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26 days ago
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15 comments

Vancouver design firm, Signals celebrates 25 year anniversary with “Leaf a Legacy” for Cancer

This beautifully illustrated site, harness's the power of social media to raise money... more

Chelsea_McK
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27 days ago
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Livestock Block Party

http://www.getgrounded.tv gets down with Gman & Risk at the Livestock Block Patry!... more

Grounded_TV
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1 month ago
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Save The Wild Salmon

Wild Salmon need our help

franksalot
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1 month ago
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NDP to Conservative Government: Don't Extradite Marc Emery!

CANNABIS CULTURE - NDP Leader Jack Layton and his party are calling on the... more

copperdragon
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1 month ago
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Cannabis Has Always Played an Important Role in Religion

I read Jacob Sullum's article 'Can Smoking Marijuana be Considered a Religion?!' with some interest, as I myself currently have a case against the Canadian Government in response to their refusal to grant me an exemption for my own spiritual use of cannabis. As well, the historical role of the religious use of cannabis has been a subject I have personally researched for 20 years, having written 3 books on the subject, Green Gold the Tree of Life: Marijuana in Magic and Religion (1995); Sex, Drugs, Violence and the Bible (2001); and the forthcoming Cannabis and the Soma Solution (2010); as well as dozens of published articles on this same subject, and some of this material has been reviewed in a report prepared by the Canadian Justice Department. Thus it is clearly a subject I have put some thought into, and which I have considerable knowledge about.

In regards to the sacramental use of cannabis and religious freedom, I would first point out the right to cannabis, indeed all plants, cacti and fungi, is a natural right that supersedes even the religious use issue, more akin to our right to air, earth and water - this is about life on earth and indigenous natural relationships. I can say to you with confidence, there is no religious doctrine not transcribed by the hand of man, but no matter what god or goddess one believes in, they should also believe that god created the plants of the earth. Indeed, in the case of the popular belief of our own culture, the Biblical God quite clearly states: "Behold, I have Given you Every Herb Bearing Seed which is Upon the Face of all the Earth" (Genesis 1:29).

That said, historically cannabis has played a paramount role in the spiritual life of man, dating further back than any existing religion. The late archaeologist Andrew Sherratt of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, pointed to the use of cannabis incenses at a gravesite of a group known as the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the Kurgans, who occupied what is now Romania 5,000 years ago. The discovery of a smoking-cup which contained remnants of charred hemp seeds at the site documents that at 3,500 years before Christ humanity had already been using cannabis for religious purposes for millennia.

These same people were the first to domesticate the horse, and it was with them that we find the linguistic roots of the term 'cannabis', which comes from an ancient Proto- Indo-European root word, "kanap"; the "an" from this root left traces in many modern terms for cannabis, such as French "chanvre", German "hanf", Indian "bhang", Persian "bhanga", Dutch "Canvas", Greek "Kannabis," and so on. Through their high mobility, these ancient ancestors of numerous modern cultures spread not only the plant and name, but also the religious and magical connotations that had grown around it. Evidence of this has even left their traces in some of the world's oldest existing religions.

Anthropologist Sula Benet initiated decades of theological debate by identifying the Hebrew terms keneh, and keneh bosem , (cane, fragrant cane) as cannabis, noting the similarities to the modern term cannabis, and also the name used by contemporary Assyrians for the plant, qunubu, as well as the similar way they used it. In Assyria, qunubu was not only a widely used medicine , but also a key ingredient used in incenses and other preparations for the "Sacred Rites" and a means to commune with God: 'So that god of man and man should be in good rapport: - with hellebore, cannabis and lupine you will rub him'"

Interestingly, a similar scenario appears in the Biblical narrative, where the Lord, who curiously first appears to Moses as a burning bush, commands him to make a holy anointing oil with roughly 6 pounds of cannabis, mixed with myrrh, and cinnamon into about a gallon and a half of olive-oil. When Moses is to seek the Lord's advice, he enters the enclosure of the "Tent of the Meeting" anoints his body with this cannabis infused preparation (THC is fatty solublI read Jacob Sullum's article 'Can Smoking Marijuana be Considered a Religion?!' with... more

copperdragon
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1 month ago
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TOP FIVE CANADIAN EXPRESSIONS: TRIP ON A DEAL EPISODE 39

http://www.triponadeal.com As a companion to our segment on the 2010 Vancouver... more

triponadeal
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1 month ago
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2010 Olympics Vancouver Travel Guide – Trip on a Deal Episode 38

http://www.triponadeal.com February 2010 Vancouver, Canada will host the Winter... more

triponadeal
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1 month ago
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Filming Locations for September 17

Criminal Minds is filming at 183 Hammond, 24 E. Union St, 1113 N. Marengo Ave in... more

beforethetrailer
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1 month ago
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Vancouver Drug Czar Slams Harper Gov't As He Exits

- Donald MacPherson resigned as Vancouver's Drug Czar, calling the War on Drugs a failure and criticizing Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government.

The author of Vancouver's ground-breaking Four Pillars drug strategy criticized the federal government's "utterly failed" approach to drug use in his resignation notice this week.

Donald MacPherson said in an e-mail Tuesday to city staff: "[T]he approach to the drug problem that we have in Canada . . . [a] war-on-drugs approach has utterly failed over the past 40 years and must come to an end.

"The emperor truly has no clothes in this case," said his e-mail.

"People who use drugs should not be criminalized, especially those that develop addictions and/or have mental-health problems or are vulnerable in some other way." MacPherson said he was resigning after 12 years as the city's drug-policy co-ordinator -- the only municipal position of its kind in Canada -- "for personal reasons." "It is time for me to move on to the next adventure and to act on the strong desire to move beyond the municipal realm, build on what we have achieved here in Vancouver and work for policy change at the provincial, national and international level in the area of drug policy," he wrote.

MacPherson blamed the criminalization of drugs for social ills and associated problems.

"Much of what plays out on the streets of Vancouver in the never-sleeping drug market -- the selling, the using, the killing, the infections, the dying and the property crime -- is a direct result of the criminalization of drugs," said the e-mail.

"The nonsensical and seemingly never-ending struggle to keep a small program like Insite open for a population of seriously marginalized and at-risk injection drug users is another example of the counterproductive consequences of bad public policy at the federal level." Four Pillars was struck as a comprehensive approach to reducing drug-overdose deaths and HIV infection caused by illegal drugs. It combines prevention, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction.

The approach has involved much debate. Insite, Vancouver's safe-injection site, has drawn particular heat. It operates under an exemption from federal drug laws from Health Canada, but has received little support from the ruling minority Conservative government.

Vancouver Coun. Kerry Jang said MacPherson's Four Pillars approach will remain central to Vancouver's housing and social programs.

Jang said council has yet to decide whether to replace MacPherson. His resignation takes effect Oct. 2.- Donald MacPherson resigned as Vancouver's Drug Czar, calling the War on Drugs a... more