On another note, the ‘drug war’ only succeeds in perpetrating the drug trade, as every seizure drives the price up for a while. All drug dealers I have met are for the war on drugs as they all know that without it they would be out of a job. indeed, the only reason I started smoking weed was because it was illegal. and once you discover that all the government propaganda is bullshit, you are VERY inclined to disbelieve ANY official information on drugs at all.

sorry to go on a bit, the war on drugs is my personal bugbear!

The government would improve its credibility (while trimming its coffers) if it either made marijuana legal or made worse drugs like tobacco and alcohol illegal. As it stands, its policy looks uninformed and extremist at best, cynically calculating at worst.

lsd what a drug!

jonathan, i presume you are aware that clinical trials HAVE been conducted on LSD and indeed LSD was applied therapeutically for quite a while with good results? there were about 1000 papers published about psychedelic therapy in the 60s. i had a psychiatrist professor in college who said that it was one of his most effective therapies, that he experienced the greatest breakthroughs with clients who were dosed. i personally have never done it, not from lack of desire but more from lack of opportunity. given the opportunity i’d probably give it a shot.

I completely agree that the drug war is a farce. We need to step back and reconsider our strategy.

Harry Anslinger, ‘father of the drug war’ used the Mexican Spanish word ‘marihuana’ because if he’d tried to get Congress to outlaw cannabis, a mainstay of this nation, he knew he wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. So he used a foreign word to induce ‘fear of the unknown’ in Congress.

Read tinyurl.com/1mn and tinyurl.com/potconviction and if you are so inclined you can order a copy of ‘The Marijuana Conviction’ from half.com, the book which the latter tinyurl above was the preliminary research for, first published in 1974 and written by two UVa law professors who investigated the matter and had full access to both the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ articles contained within the Library of Congress.

We learned what the consequences of prohibition are because we attempted to outlaw alcohol from 1919 to 1933; it prevented the government from receiving *any* money while pushing alcohol to the black market, which created bootleggers, Al Capone, and violence in the streets. Prohibition of naturally growing drugs is no different.

Take it easy on the conspiracy theories. We’re going for respectable in this joint. I believe there are plenty of reasons to rethink the drug war without taking a dip in the loony pool.

I nearly lost my life drunk on alcohol, had no recollection of the event, when I woke up 6 months later in a hospital bed I had no idea how I got there, I couldn’t walk and I couldn’t talk because after 6 months in a coma all your muscles atrophy.

To make a long story short, after my extensive rehabilitation (and with my hearing being chipped away by LEGAL ‘ototoxic’ drugs (which means ‘possibly detrimental to ones hearing) I’m now 80% deaf.

Because of legal drugs.

Anyone who’s ever smoked pot knows it’s nowhere near as dangerous as the government says it is. So why is it outlawed? Why is it still schedule 1 according to the DEA, even though FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS it was used for it’s medicinal properties?

TO REPLACE SLAVE LABOR WITH PRISON LABOR.

You did me the dishonor or suggesting i was ‘loony.’ I DID 5 years of online research after my physical rehab when i was deaf and my mother graciously got us hooked up with Comcast internet because I’M UNABLE TO USE A TELEPHONE.

Go fuck yourself. And read the fucking links I left you before you flap your gums at me again.

I’m sorry for the suffering you’ve experienced. I wish you the best of what life can offer you.

I never intended to call you loony. Your conspiracy theory is. I’m calling on you to step away from it. Do our cause a favor and keep crackpot theories to yourself (or perhaps try to be less credulous in the first place). We will never be able to end the drug war if everyone thinks we’re all out-to-lunch. Focus on facts that are more supportable. Our cause doesn’t need conspiracy theories.

By the way, if the links you refer to is maps.org, then I scanned them and provisionally subscribed to the RSS feed before you became Phil E. Drifter for this thread. Otherwise, I’m unaware of any links that you, Phil, have posted.

tinyurl.com is simply a great tool on the internet; it allows you to take ANY url and assign it a ‘tiny url’ so that instead of having to post long-ass urls (which may be clipped because many comment boards have limitations, take alternet.org for example, which hosts a story about how in 1974 (for President Nixon’s ‘Shaeffer Commission’ to investigate if cannabis should be legal or not) they showed that cannabis cures many different types of cancer, including breast (women, mostly), prostate (men only) and lung cancer. See tinyurl.com/gov74

See, you copy ‘ tinyurl.com/gov74 ‘ and you paste it into a new browser window. Tinyurl *automatically* redirects you to the intended page. Then you read.

I didn’t know you expected me to preclude links with ‘http://’ because this isn’t 1992, it’s 2008; more than that, many comment boards also prevent hotlinking, another reason I don’t bother to include http:// because that alerts the scripts to a url, which then may be rejected.

Just do yourselves a favor and copy my tiny urls and paste them into a new tab and then read them:

tinyurl.com/1mn
(this was before tinyurl allowed you to add your own suffix, it would just generate the next unused character keystrokes, because tinyurls are permanent)
tinyurl.com/potconviction
tinyurl.com/gov74

Here are some more:
tinyurl.com/waltershatesmexico
(John Walters is the current ‘Drug Czar,’ i.e. the director of the DEA)
tinyurl.com/waronminorities
tinyurl.com/carlylegrp
tinyurl.com/religitards
tinyurl.com/mccainsbiglie

Phil E. Drifter is my internet handle, and I use stumbleupon (stumbleupon.com) to stumble around the web, and when I come to pages on drug use I add what I’ve learned to the comment boards.

The word ‘conspiracy’ has taken such a negative connotation because MSM (that is, mainstream media) is in Uncle Sam’s pocket. Just throwing the words ‘conspiracy theory’ out automatically makes most sheeple disregard it as nonsense.

Do you really think your government is being honest with you? Not a single charge brought forth by Bush as a reason to invade Iraq was true. This was no accident, this was no ‘faulty intelligence.’ He’s playing the American people because the American people are, for the most part, STUPID.

I’m already on your side as far as legalization of drugs, but even I—someone who should be on your side—tuned you out. Throwing out “MSM” and “sheeple” doesn’t help your case either. I already left one cult that thought it had the Secret Truth. I have no time to waste on another.

1865: north wins the civil war and outlaws slavery
1866-1900: Various politicians write ‘grandfather clauses’ (google the term if you’re unfamiliar, but I learned about it in grade school) to prevent newly freed slaves from voting
1904: In California, it was outlawed for Asians to operate opium dens. Not just ‘opium dens are illegal,’ only Asians were barred from operating opium dens. Because white people had no interest in opium, it was only an Asian custom that they’d brought with them.

I’m tired of explaining it to you. If you don’t want to believe me that’s up to you, but you’re still wrong. it’s not a war on (some) drugs, it’s a war on minorities, and the federal government uses it to bypass the constitution. 4th amendment right to be free of illegal search and seizure? yeah right; pigs confiscate anything they want from *suspected* drug dealers, then it’s up to them to prove they DIDN’T buy their stuff with ‘drug money.’ 5th amendment protection against incriminating yourself? Then why do we have pre-employment drug testing?

Do yourself a favor and read *at least* tinyurl.com/1mn it’s the transcription of a speech given to the CA Judges Association before Prop 215 passed, legalizing medicinal cannabis. it’ll take you about 20 minutes to read it, and like I think i said, it was written by one of the UVa law professors who had full access to the library of congress.

Oh and check out
http://s269.photobucket.com/albums/jj48/phillydrifter/drugs/cannabis/
and it’s sub-directories and you can see all the bottles used to distribute cannabis tinctures by doctors before it was outlawed.
And if you go up one level you can see my research on other drugs; under ‘coca’ you can see some business cards used to advertise cocaine tooth drops.

I’m sorry, Phil, this certainty sounds just like the Mormonism I escaped.

I’ll read the one you suggested that I shouldn’t do without.

As serendipitous as it was after I left a comment last night, I received my daily (ok, nightly; I get them right around 2 am each morning) google alert I set up about 3 months ago. It sends me a once-a-day notification on any news articles containing ‘marijuana OR cannabis OR hemp’.

Check out http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/8/2009/3343 which isn’t nearly as long as tinyurl.com/1mn but just to give you a taste, it ends with:

“As a whole, the violent, repressive War on Drugs has been forty years of legal, cultural and economic catastrophe. Like FDR, Obama must end our modern-day Prohibition, and with it the health-killing crusade against this ancient, powerful medicinal herb.”

And I’m not trying to offend anyone, just trying to open their eyes to the truth their own government has been lying to them about. Did you know in the Drug Czar’s job description, it allows him to lie if he needs/wants to?

Sorry to hear you were a mormon; glad to hear you escaped. I myself escaped christianity after being sent to catholic schools for 12 years. I took AP precalc & calc, 2 years ap bio, 2 years ap chem… but the religion courses were an insult to my intelligence.

The federal government considers their job to keep you in fear, so they can better control you. Just like religion, as far as i see.

I’ve heard that synthesizing LSD is not a simple process and can be easily botched. Personally, if I ever took LSD, it would probably be part of controlled experiment.