Posted on 11/26/2005 5:10:56 AM PST by JTN
The federal war on medi-pot patients hit a new low last month when Royal Canadian Mounted Police nabbed 38-year-old Steven W. Tuck from his Vancouver, B.C., hospital bed, whisked him to the border, and relinquished him to the custody of U.S. officials, who wanted him on charges related to a 2001 marijuana bust in California. Tuck, an Army vet, uses marijuana to help treat chronic pain associated with injuries he received in a parachuting accident back in the 1980s (reportedly his parachute failed to open during a jump). In 2001, after his marijuana-growing operation in California was busted, Tuck fled to Canada in an effort to avoid prosecution, reports The Washington Post. For four years, he had been navigating the Canadian system, seeking asylum, but was abruptly, and surprisingly, denied that safe harbor last month, says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML.
Police arrested Tuck on Oct. 7 after he checked himself into a Vancouver hospital seeking treatment for prostate problems. According to friend Richard Cowan, Tuck was on a gurney, fitted with a catheter, when RCMP nabbed him, cuffed him, and put him in an SUV bound for the border. "I would not believe it unless I had seen it," Cowan told the Post.
Tuck was turned over to authorities and thrown in jail, where he remained for five days with the catheter in place and with only ibuprofen for his pain – pain for which he'd been prescribed morphine and Oxycontin, among other narcotic drugs, says St. Pierre. He was finally taken to court on Oct. 12. "This is totally inhumane," Tuck's lawyer Douglas Hiatt told the Post. "He's been tortured for days for no reason." U.S. Magistrate James P. Donohue re-leased Tuck, at least temporarily, so that he could be taken to a hospital. Tuck's trip to the hospital was waylaid, however, by law enforcement officials who immediately picked him up on a detainer issued by Humboldt Co., Calif., officials in connection with state drug charges related to his growing medi-pot for him-self and others. (Although Tuck is a California state-registered medi-pot patient – meaning he's authorized under state law to possess and grow marijuana for medical purposes – he was also growing for others. At the time, California law enforcers were working under a patchwork of local regulations that defined who could grow for dispensary purposes and exactly how much each person could grow. Tuck had been busted in two different California jurisdictions for growing more than the local law allowed.)
After a flurry of phone calls, Tuck was taken to the hospital, and since then his attorneys have negotiated his release from jail – with the promise that he'll make his various California state court appearances. Sources tell "Weed Watch" that given Tuck's medical condition and the current state of California's medi-pot laws, his supporters are cautiously optimistic that the state charges against him will be dropped. If that happens, whether Tuck will face any prosecution will be left solely up to the feds, who want him on one count of unlawful flight to Canada to avoid the California charges. Whether the federal narcos will exercise their right to bully the sick remains to be seen.
"Not intended". You can't be real!
Did God "intend" that chicken eggs should produce new chickens, or did God intend that chicken eggs should be manufactured in warehouses where a hen never moves from her perch from the time she's placed there until as many months or years go by that she can no longer produce eggs? Is that what God "intended".
Ah, so man has a brain and experience and he learns to investigate everything in creation, and in doing so he discovers all the chemical properties of everything, and he finds many chemical properties that nature uses for the survival of the plants and animals and man figures out how those properties might help, or hurt him. And some he finds he must be careful about their use, they can help as well as harm, depending on how careful or careless we are. None of those properties are "evil".
There is nothing "evil" about THC and there is nothing "evil" about its affect in human chemistry. Now then, if you want to posit that someone who turns the constant use and over-indulgence of the chemical into their own addiction, is doing a morally self-abusing thing?; that I would grant you. But the THC and its affect on a person, in and of themselves are not "evil".
"And, yes, Marijuana causes death. Every person who has ever smoked marijuana has died."
Huh? Did you mean every person WILL die? And lots of cops think marijuana should be legal and believe me, most cops let a lot of people go when they have pot on them. They often just dump it out (small amounts) and let them go. I would venture to say with an estimated 14 million pot smokers in the US, our "war on pot" isn't very effective.
I think you are correct about most cops' view on marijuana. I can't speak for every cop, but I know that a lot of them tend to ignore the pot laws because they truly are out there to protect and to serve, and upholding those laws would do nothing of the sort.
I don't personally smoke pot, but I was at a bachelor party one time, and a friend of mine arranged for a cop friend of his to show up and bust us. It was hilarious because some of us could tell it was a setup and others were really scared. In the end we all laughed, and the cop and his backup sat around with us while we were smoking. I didn't know them at the time, but I have become friends with both of the cops, and they are really decent, family men. They just understand that in order to really serve the best interests of the public, you sometimes have to ignore the law.
My brother is about to become a police officer, and I brought this up with him. He told me that he would probably just dump it out as well, assuming it was a small enough quantity. If it were a huge amount, he would have to arrest them, though, if for no other reason than his job could be at stake over letting something go like that.
You need to read the book "Denial Is Not A River In Egypt", written by a former alcoholic (Sandi Bachom) and "Addiction Is A Choice" by Dr. Jeffrey Schaler.
The fact that a chemical produces a craving does not substantiate "addiction", because, as I said, other than with the opiates, we can chose, as difficult as it is sometimes, to not give in to the craving. Can we also take an addiction so far that we need some other chemical to get through withdrawal. Sometimes. But (1)the addict does not even take the step to try to withdraw except by choice, (2)it is never successful no matter how much help one gets, if they have not made a committed choice to quit being addicted, and (3)many addicts, including alcholocs quit with no help, chemical or otherwise, by choice. The evidence is enough to realize that it is and was a choice all along.</p>
Why do we need the word "addiction" - if there is no addictive substances? Or how do we know addiciton when we see it?
Or you could say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
There is an article on the USDOJ website which backs that up:
In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal — and, like some drugs today, seen as benign medicine not requiring a doctor's care and oversight. Addiction skyrocketed. There were over 400,000 opium addicts in the U.S [my notes: ¹The article attributed much of this figure to addicted Civil War veterans. ²The census in 1880 was ~50,000,000, which = a 0.8% addiction rate]. By 1900, about one American in 200 [=0.5%] was either a cocaine or opium addict.
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/demand/speakout/06so.htm
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My calculations show that opiate addiction dropped from 0.8% in 1880 to at least 0.5% in 1900. That is at least a 37.5% reduction. If you toss out cocaine addicts included in the 1900 figure, the drop would be even greater. Now on to 2000:
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"There were an estimated 980,000 hardcore heroin addicts in the United States in 1999, 50 percent more than the estimated 630,000 hardcore addicts in 1992."
--www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/heroin.htm
"The demand for both powdered and crack cocaine in the United States is high. Among those using cocaine in the United States during 2000, 3.6 million were hardcore users who spent more than $36 billion on the drug in that year."
--http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/cocaine.htm
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Using year 2000 figures from the USDOJ, and a population of 285,000,000, the rate of addiction to either cocaine or heroin is about 1.5%, or triple the rate in 1900.
As an ironic side note, the title of the USDOJ article is, "Legalization has been tried before, and failed miserably".
ROTFL! You know nothing of the laws of supply and demand. Guess you've never heard of Al Capone.
You really don't have a clue. You're not just mildly ignorant about libertarianism and medical marijuana...you're black hole ignorant. You also sound a heck of a lot like a DU troll trying his best to do a Fred Phelps imitation.
No more contemptable than "I'm smarter than you are because I get stoned all the time and make six figures."
An observation by Kinsey - a man who thought pedophilia was recreational.
But Man is not born good; he is fundamentally evil, and needs society and law to live a decent life.
Well, that settles that argument. You are self-inflated tyrannical little s&I$ who is trying to play god for the rest of us. If your own life is a mess don't go crapping on everyone else's.
....
Nope. Just an orthodox Christian reminding you of a truth you already know. The stand I take is called "original sin."
Appalling, I'm starting to think you are one of those drug warriors who are motivated by their fear that someone, somewhere is enjoying life.>>
Nope, jus the fear that someone, somewhere is dying of drugs and that some criminal is making a lot of money from it.
Bad intentions too, I guess. What gets me is that there is a definite school of conservatism that maintains, just as progressivism does, that it is up to government to arrange and order our lives.
Fake conservatism.
It's not a conservatism which embraces the traditonal American ideals of individual freedom, but I have come to the conclusion that it is still a form of conservatism. Not one that I respect, though.
Scratch a libertarian, find a sensualist who doesn't want to be held accountable to anybody for what they do to others.
Of course I have--he's your guys' hero, whether you acknowledge it or not.
Al Capone made money because alcohol was illegal. Do you support making alcohol illegal once again?
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