Posted on 09/15/2002 8:38:29 AM PDT by JediGirl
Early in the morning of Sept. 5, dozens of armed men stormed a respected medical facility where nearly 300 people desperately ill from cancer, AIDS and other illnesses got their medicine. Brandishing semiautomatic weapons in the faces of terrified patients, including a woman paralyzed from childhood polio, they destroyed all of the medicine and took prisoner the facility's operators.
The work of Osama bin Laden? Hamas? Some other international terrorists?
No. This particular terrorist raid was carried out by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
The facility they attacked was the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana ( WAMM ) in Santa Cruz, Calif. A co-op run entirely by and for seriously ill people - 80 percent of whom have terminal diagnoses - WAMM sold nothing. All of the medical marijuana grown was given to members without charge.
The facility was supported by the community and worked closely with local officials. According to County Supervisor Mardi Wormhoudt, WAMM operated in an "exemplary" fashion. After the raid - which had been planned and executed with no warning to the local government - Wormhoudt told reporters she was "appalled" by the DEA's action.
The patients WAMM served are desperately ill. For many with AIDS or cancer, marijuana is the only thing that allows them to tolerate the horrendous side effects of the harsh treatments that keep them alive. Others endure excruciating pain that conventional medicines have failed to relieve, but which marijuana helps.
Because of this raid, many of these people will die prematurely - agonizing, horrible deaths - because the only medicine that helped them has been taken away.
What could possibly motivate such cruelty?
Desperation.
All around the world, governments and scientific experts are coming to believe that marijuana shouldn't be illegal - that it is simply not dangerous enough to warrant arresting and jailing even social or recreational users, much less people using it to relieve symptoms of cancer or AIDS. The British government has already moved to make marijuana possession a nonarrestable offense.
On Sept. 4, Canada's Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs released the most exhaustive investigation of marijuana data and policy options ever conducted by any government. The 650-page report declared that criminalizing marijuana amounted to "throwing taxpayers' money down the drain in a crusade that is not warranted by the danger posed by the substance."
But marijuana - which accounts for the vast majority of illegal drug use and arrests - is the engine that drives the war on drugs and keeps massive drug-control budgets pumped up.
So even as DEA agents were shoving machine guns in the faces of sick people, White House drug czar John Walters and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson stood in front of a Washington, D.C., press conference, spouting long-discredited myths as if they were proven facts.
Marijuana, said Thompson, is "a clear and present danger to the health and well-being of all its users" - a statement contradicted by reams of scientific research.
Indeed, in 1995, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet stated flatly, "The smoking of cannabis, even long term, is not harmful to health." This year, the British government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and the Canadian Senate committee came to similar conclusions after extensive study.
But our government's drug war ideologues don't care about science. And they don't care how many sick people they literally torture to death in their desperate effort to pump up a collapsing policy.
I'm STILL waiting for ANY Liberteen to provide evidence of ANYONE being imprisoned for smoking pot.
Anyone?
Bingo!
Problem is, lots of people call themselves libertarians when they are actually anarchists, so it is easy for the uninformed to get the wrong idea.
Was it that Jeffrey Adams?
I can imagine. Dodger fan - eh?
Try twelve. The Liberteen utopia usually turns colors after that...
PLEASE name one individual in jail for smoking pot.
Are there ANY?
Agreed, and that's where I come apart from many libertarians. Some libertarians think that the government has no business regulating plutonuim.
I think that heroin and cocaine and possibly crystal meth could be reasonably regulated by the government as toxic because of their predictable addictive and psychosis-inducing properties.
Marijuana just has no business in the same legal category.
Not that I expect any of the VERY DISHONEST pro-WOD posters on this thread will ever be persuaded to see reason.....
Nope. Possession is different from use. When you finally come around, this ain't such a big deal.
In other words, this guy is in prison only because pot is illegal...
Sometimes the easiest message is the easiest...
Genital warts? Male pattern baldness? Heartbreak of psoriasis?
Steve Kubby has been dying of terminal cancer for a quarter of a century, and still the JBTs dog him for using his oral doobie suppositories to combat the insufferable pain as he lies gasping for life on his deathbed.
We'll he's not always on his deathbed. Sometimes he's out tending his marijuana farm.
You still have a chance. A slim one, but still, a chance...
This is your thread - no?
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