Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
THE FAILED WAR ON DRUGS
PROHIBITION DOES NOT WORK
POLITICIANS WHO SUPPORT PROHIBITION
SUPPORT ORGANIZED CRIME!
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END PROHIBITION NOW
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Scientists have discovered evidence suggesting Stone Age peoples used herbal mixtures to get high.
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The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly ``cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
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The war on marijuana is insane; our officials keep sacrificing tax dollars, lives, civil liberties, and their own credibility in this misguided and losing effort.
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So what has the war [on drugs] done? It has made a mockery of an anti-drug law that is simply ignored by millions ...
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“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs. What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure."
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For too long, advocates of prohibition have framed their arguments on the false assumption that the continued enforcement of said laws “protects our children.” In fact, just the opposite is true.
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Recent scientific reports suggest that pot doesn't destroy your brain, that it doesn't cause lung damage like tobacco -- but you won't hear it in the corporate media.
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Obama was frank about his own drug use, so why isn't he more honest about what a disaster war on drugs has been?
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While marijuana is more mainstream than ever, legalization still faces backlash from the powers that be.
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As FDR did in 1933, Obama must now help end an utterly failed, socially destructive, reactionary crusade against marijuana.
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The current budget is still overwhelmingly skewed in favor of the drug war approach -- indeed, it allocates more to drug enforcement and less to prevention than even George Bush did.
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The drug war has never been about facts—about soberly weighing which policies might alleviate suffering, save taxpayers money, rob the cartels of revenue. Instead, we've been stuck in a cycle of prohibition, failure, & counterfactual claims of success.
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The government keeps pushing the BS that pot is addictive and has serious health consequences. And no wonder -- lying about pot is a lucrative business.
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Anti-pot propaganda drives most people to drink alcohol instead. But booze is far more dangerous than marijuana.
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Marijuana is virtually non-toxic to healthy cells & major organs. The active components in marijuana – known as cannabinoids -- actually mimic chemicals naturally produced by the body (endocannabinoids) that are necessary for proper health
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For decades many academics and professionals have regarded the current blanket prohibition on recreational drugs (though not alcohol or tobacco) as absurd, counter-productive and destructive.
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We are handing one of our biggest industries over to armed, criminal gangs
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New research shows there seems to be something in pot that actually undermines cancer, instead of causing it. -- and the media are doing their best to ignore it.
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75 years later, we still think we can prohibit a popular, socially accepted drug -- marijuana (which, by the way, is undeniably safer and less addictive than alcohol) -- despite all the evidence that marijuana prohibition isn't working.
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The Americans who voted in 1933 to repeal prohibition differed greatly in their reasons for overturning the system. But almost all agreed that the evils of failed suppression far outweighed the evils of alcohol consumption.
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Prohibition - and the violence, corruption and health hazards that followed - lives on in its modern version, the so-called War on Drugs.
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Join MPP’s Dan Bernath as he takes a look at the failures of Alcohol Prohibition and examines how we have still not learned our lesson. Prohibition doesn’t work. Taxation and Regulation does.
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WHO survey of 17 countries finds that we have the highest rates of marijuana and cocaine use.
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Now that noted stoner magazines like The Economist and Foreign Policy are calling for an end of prohibition and even the federal drug czar wants to retire the phrase "war on drugs," is it time for a new US drug policy?
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Pot has lots of medicinal and financial benefits and millions of people use it without harm, but TV stations still do everything they can to avoid mentioning it.
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The United States has been spending $69 billion a year worldwide for the last 40 years, for a total of $2.5 trillion, on drug prohibition -- with little to show for it. Is anyone actually benefiting from this war? Six groups come to mind.
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Does Cooley really believe it's better for either patients or communities to have the state's medical marijuana patients - who number more than 200,000 by most estimates - getting their medicine from street dealers?
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We know — repeat, we know — that marijuana can be effective against certain types of pain. As The Lancet Neurology put it a few years ago, “cannabinoids inhibit pain in virtually every experimental pain paradigm.”
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A top drug cartel chief expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it 'a sham put on the American tax-payer' that was 'actually good for business'." He was right -- prohibition is the dealer's friend. They depend on it. They thrive on it.
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Regardless of how one might feel about drug users, syringe exchange is effective, is essential and there is momentum for change.
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"There's a real drug war weariness in Latin America and its bad enough to feel like a policy had been imposed, and its worse when the policy doesn't work."
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Fernando Henrique Cardoso urges global decriminalisation of cannabis use
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The "war on drugs" has been a disaster say some of Latin America's most powerful politicians and writers.
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The evidence from Portugal since 2001 is that decriminalisation of drug use and possession has benefits and no harmful side-effects
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In the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped
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Ironically, the only real gateway that exists is created by marijuana prohibition, yet proponents of harsh marijuana laws cynically cite the damage they've caused as evidence that the drug itself is acutely harmful. It's truly the height of absurdity.
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The pro-war idealogues have less credibility then ever before. This is a time to put big ideas on the table. We have to learn how to coexist with drugs. They have been around for thousands of years and will be around for thousands more.
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Once derided and dismissed by lawmakers, law enforcers and the law-abiding alike, marijuana reform is now sweeping the nation.
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Our professional experiences have led us to conclude that the more dangerous an illicit substance--from crack to krank--the greater the justification for its legalization, regulation, and control.
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A new poll shows that most Americans are ready to legalize marijuana, but not drugs like cocaine or heroin. A 34-year police vet says it's time to legalize them all.
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Researchers, physicians and social workers say alcohol is responsible for much more health and social damage than any other substance or drug in Canada.
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The costs of criminalization have proved to be enormous, perhaps unsustainable. Would legalization be any worse?
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Even the most mainstream figures are now taking the idea of legalizing and taxing pot seriously -- budget-crunched governments should listen.
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Wasted resources are further compounded by the total capitulation of the massive pot market to an underground economy to gangsters who laugh all the way to the bank.
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Our country is creating criminals, not citizens.
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Tens of millions of Americans have voluntarily quit smoking a legal, yet highly addictive intoxicant. Many others have refused to initiate the habit. And they've all made this decision without ever once being threatened with criminal prosecution.
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Enough is enough. It's time to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws, a 36-year failed experiment in racism, injustice and government waste.
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The Rockefeller Drug Laws represent not just bad, expensive policy, but a misguided and ineffective regime for addressing drug use and addiction -- health issues, not criminal issues. Imagine if we incarcerated people for being addicted to cigarettes.
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Voters dealt what may be a fatal blow to America's longest-running and least-discussed war -- the war on marijuana.
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John Walters has misused treatment statistics to suggest that marijuana is dangerously addictive when the government's own data suggest that arrest-driven treatment admissions have wasted tax dollars by treating thousands who were not truly drug-dependent
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The numbers are in. Marijuana prohibition is a wasteful farce. And John Walters' tenure as drug czar has been a failure.
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The federal government must turn the decision on drug policy back to the states and the citizens themselves.
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Cannabis arrests now comprise nearly 47.5 percent of all drug arrests in the United States, 89% of them for mere possession.
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Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to enforce Canada's drug laws, with little to show for it.
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In the United States, however, conservative politics and "Drug-Free America" rhetoric keep punishment as the primary response to drug use.
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The Downtown Eastside has been the country's most notorious centre for illicit drugs for a century now. Recent law enforcement campaigns have either been ineffectual or have simply shuffled drug activity onto the streets.
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The push for enlightened drug reform in Vancouver is 50 years old. Government crushed it then, as it wants to now.
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Now that the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal has struck down the government's monopoly on supplying medical marijuana, commercial agricultural production of pot is around the corner and the sky's the limit.
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As long as Washington continues to focus on cutting the supply to the US rather than treating the drug problem from within, questions must be asked about its complicity in the escalating violence seen across the border.
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Looking to the U.S. as a role model for drug control is like looking to apartheid South Africa for how to deal with race.
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Law enforcement has "little adverse effect" on the availability of drugs in Britain, new research claims.
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Britain is losing the war against cocaine with new figures showing a dramatic increase in people using the drug over the past decade and a slump in the volume seized by police
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2m Britons take illegal drugs each month; 1 in 3 adults has tried banned substances; 1 in 4 school-aged children has used drugs
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British think-tank publishes report for next year's United Nations Strategic Drug Policy Review, suggesting that a decriminalised, regulated market in cannabis would cause less harm than the prohibition of the drug currently in force in most countries.
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The international community is not able to report unequivocal success in anti-drug programmes as drugs are purer, cheaper, and more widely available than ever before.
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Billions of pounds spent on attempts to reduce the availability of drugs on the streets have been in vain.
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Gordon Brown is expected to announce tougher laws against cannabis possession, even though medical experts and the police believe he is wrong
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The day we legalize drugs is the day we can begin to clean up the mess that the drug prohibition experiment has created.
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The U.S., with its harsh user penalties, outpaced all other countries on use of pot and coke -- way beyond even the Netherlands, where legal action is not taken for pot possession for personal use.
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Will Bolivia's increased drug control achievements actually reduce the global supply of cocaine?
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The war on drugs is politically, emotionally and spiritually corrupt. This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on drug addicts.
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When discussing treatments for drug addiction, instead of arguing about ideology, let's look at science.
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Tobacco smuggling causes 4,000 deaths a year, four times the number of deaths caused by the use of all smuggled illegal drugs combined, but the UK government is not doing enough to tackle the problem, claim experts on the British Medical Journal website.
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Tobacco killed 227 people a day in England in 2007 – equivalent to a jet airliner crashing every 24 hours – and caused 1,200 hospital admissions
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The alcohol poisoning death rate in the United States is shockingly high, consistently between 300 and 400 a year. It's zero for pot.
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We're a race of well-practiced, high-functioning junkies. After all, regular human consumption of caffeine began at least 2,000 years ago, and until recently there was no reason to think our little global addiction posed any threat.
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Many prescription drugs have effects similar to those of illegal drugs. But we still view some users as criminals -- the others as patients.
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Easing pain is arguably as important as saving a life. But far too many U.S. physicians focus only on the latter.
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Rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs is three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.
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Oxycontin, Lorcet, and other pain control drugs are the leading cause of the tens of thousands of annual drug overdoses -- why the silence?
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The media pounced on his admitted love of weed and coke but did little to investigate the prescription drugs that did him in.
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Half of all Americans take prescription medications. Eighty one percent take some type of pill. 100,000 die every year from a prescription med that they either didn't need or that was not properly prescribed.
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Scientific studies indicate that marijuana can halt the spread of numerous cancer cells, including the type that Kennedy suffers from
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Rhetoric should not be driving drug policy. Legalization would strip addiction down to what it really is: a health issue.
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The first casualty of any war is truth and the war on drugs is no exception. The Church of Prohibition is based on faith and a perverse idea of creating security. It is so overwhelmingly counterproductive that only propaganda can sustain support for it.
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"If policy on drugs is in future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral"
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Lord Ramsbotham argued that the huge number of people in jail with a drug problem proved that current policy, based on "prohibition", was not working.
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A two-year study from a British commission is recommending a reality-based approach to drug law, rooted in science and focused on reducing harm. Americans should take note.
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Twenty years ago a DEA chief judge concluded that doctors should be allowed to prescribe pot -- and the government is still ignoring his ruling.
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Should drugs like marijuana, heroin, and cocaine be legal? Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, clashes with David Murray, chief scientist at the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy.
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Interview with Adam Scorgie and Brett Harvey, makers of the documentary, 'The Union - The Business Behind Getting High.'
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The drug war's built on a myth that we can create a drug free society. But there has never been a drug free society in human history.
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A considerable body of data shows that no state with a medical marijuana law has experienced an increase in youth marijuana use since its law’s enactment. All states have reported overall decreases...
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Prohibition has failed to control the use and domestic production of marijuana -- it's time everyone faced this and the rest of the compelling arguments for legalizing it.
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Five signs that pot might become legal soon -- and five reasons why it probably won't.
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With key medical marijuana ballot initiatives likely to pass, and a more pot-friendly majority in Congress, there is room for optimism.
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Congress is for the first time in a generation (1978) taking a serious look at reforming components of cannabis prohibition laws.
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"The Canadian government has never provided a valid reason for the criminalization of marijuana," said Osborne. "This study indicates that people who use marijuana are no more a criminal threat to society than are alcohol and cigarette users.
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Lou Dobbs talks nonsense to explain Mexican drug violence. Face it: Drug prohibition creates a profit motive that people are willing to kill for.
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An ex-convict says we cannot address poverty and race in America, nor can we talk about needless death and expense, without addressing the drug war.
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Not acknowledged anywhere either by Associated Press or most other news outlets, is the very large body of evidence suggesting that the whole "it's not your father's marijuana" scare story is phony.
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Claims that a large increase in the strength of cannabis over the last decade is driving the occurrence of mental health and other problems for users are not borne out by a study of the worldwide literature, say researchers in Australia
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For years now, British police and news reporters have blamed everything from psychosis and suicide to criminal acts like rape and murder on the after-effects of smoking “skunk,” aka allegedly super-potent pot.
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So for the second month in a row we have researchers from New Zealand telling us that pot smoking has little-to-no association with cancer.
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Headlines suggested a study proved pot is a greater cancer risk than tobacco -- but the media didn't even wait for the report to be released.
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So why does the mainstream media continue to get the story wrong when it comes to pot?
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It's laughable that the Feds are pushing the concept of pot addiction when science shows that withdrawal symptoms from caffeine are far worse.
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Join Marijuana Policy Project's Sara Cannon as she takes a look at some untruthful statements made by the Drug Free America Foundation
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Since 1972, U.S. taxpayers have spent well over $20 billion enforcing criminal marijuana laws and 16.5 million people have been arrested. It's time to put an end to this waste
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Marijuana has been proven one of the safest therapeutically active drugs known to mankind. I have used it with little or no harm for 40 years. My mind still finds cannabis fun and enlightening after decades of inter-cranial adventures.
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Canada should learn from America's mistakes in the war on drugs and just say no to mandatory minimum sentencing, because of mounting evidence that it doesn't work.
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The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent and millions of Americans incarcerated, illegal drugs remain cheap, potent and widely available in every community.
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The government's war on marijuana users has done real harm to our nation while chewing up billions of dollars every year.
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U.S. arrests for pot possession were up to 739,000 in 2006. And the cost to tax payers? $1 billion a year.
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President Bush's plan for battling the war on drugs will only cost taxpayers dearly and make trafficking more profitable.
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The 'war on drugs' has evolved into a war on weed. Billions of dollars spent, tens of thousands incarcerated, and marijuana is still as popular as ever.
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74 percent of all Americans busted for pot are under age 30, and one out of four are age 18 or younger. An entire generation has been alienated to believe that the police and their civic leaders are instruments of oppression rather than protection.
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Across Mexico, the carnage is impossible to hide, with severed heads and decapitated bodies turning up, sometimes nearly a dozen at a time. There have been more than 3,700 killings related to drugs and organized crime this year
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The "war on drugs" has led to an explosion in the female incarceration rate.
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Pot isn't illegal because the paper industry is afraid of competing with hemp -- it's because of racism and the culture wars.
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Recent surveys of drug habits among Americans found that blacks and whites use drugs at equal rates, yet blacks are more often prosecuted because the laws are biased against them.
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The drug war is still being waged only on some people and on some drugs. In other words, it's still a racist crock.
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The attorney general's last-ditch attempt to preserve our federal crack cocaine sentencing guidelines was pure "War on Drugs" propaganda.
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The newest exhibit in the DEA's museum is a desperate attempt by the flailing agency to hitch its wagon to the 'war on terrorism.'
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Cannabis is proven to be a fairly harmless drug -- so why is the American right still waging a massive war on weed?
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Last week's ludicrous governmental report, which denied the efficacy of medical marijuana, is the Bush administration's latest attempt to divorce science from policy.
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Cocaine may be considered a scourge in America's cities, but in the Andes, the plant from which it's derived is a way of life that provides food, shelter, healthcare and education.
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Why are we still incarcerating people who use controlled substances, when we have ample evidence that this "cure" is worse than the "disease"?
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After a 40-year moratorium, credible research for treating illnesses and addictions with psychedelic compounds has made a miraculous comeback.
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In 1986 he founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and is on the board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a body working to repeal laws banning medical and recreational use of cannabis.
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It's the refusal to look at the evidence that keeps pot illegal. They misrepresented marijuana as an evil weed. I've always had a libertarian attitude toward drugs. I believe people should be able to do anything as long as it's not harmful to someone else
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Police caught Hoffman with pot but promised to drop charges if she agreed to go undercover in a drug bust. She was killed soon afterward.
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Californians have chance with the NORA initiative to reject decades of fear mongering and try alternatives to jail for drug abuse.
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