Great website on pros and cons of medpot

[firefox]

The biggest thing to know on the medical marijuana debate is that prohibition is the reason we have the questions before us instead of behind us. Laughing grass should be legal in its own right. Besides that anyone that uses cannabis should now the miracle it does on rage. If it can calm rage, it only follows it could calm anyone down from an elevated feeling of stress.

The one argument from the criminals in government that want to perpetuate prohibition that really gets me is that somebody like me would use medical marijuana to advance legalization. That is bullshit. They are two different issues. Besides that it is the criminals in government that want to use their precious prohibition to deny laughing grass to everyone despite the fact that it is something from the garden that can do so much to help the human condition.

Well, this really is a very done website and I wanted to record it for the Drug Forum- http://www.wwoz.org/live_broadcast_stream_wm.html

[wli]

1. the "war on drugs" is bullcrap; I don't care about medpot

I'm far more concerned about racial bias, excessive prison population and bad prison conditions, and incursions on the freedom to commit acts in which all parties have informed consent.

[Dez]

2. The drug war will be the black mark

on America for a long time to come. It is one of the many current evil actions of our time. In future times, people will look back in time with disbelief that a drug war could have happened. People need to wake up, and be willing to dissent this evil war. The politicians need to know that they're participating in an illegal drug war. The penalities for those caught up in this bloody war are cruel and unusual punishment, and I am sick and tired of hearing the horror stories about this war. Write your Congressman/woman and tell them that you're sick and tired of hearing about them building more prisons, at a time when tuition goes sky high! Sick and tired of hearing of drug war casualities, and how the family members are terribly affected by it.. WE NEED A CHANGE, AND WE NEED TO MAKE IT HAPPEN!

[Asgaya Dihi]

3. The system

Some resources that might be useful in attacking the system itself are these...

Current prison statistics and racial distributions can be found at the following two sites.

http://www.prisonsucks.com/
and the related site for more details
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/index.shtml

This is where it starts to get really nasty, when we get into why... the following two are what I see as two of the main driving forces behind the prison boom. It's just so useful in a power/politics sense for some people, and we don't think about that aspect enough.

http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/
That explains how our prisoners are deprived of the right to vote in their home towns but used in the census of prison towns to increase their political representation beyond anything the real population can justify. With so many in the system that's a lot of redistributed power.

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/corrections/index.html
Link to audio toward lower left side in resources section, hour long but worth it. This explains how our laws really are written and by who, and some of what goes on behind the scenes in the prison lobbyist world. It doesn't apply just to prisons, but that's the aspect they explore here.

If anyone has an angle that I missed let me know, if we don't get at what's behind this we aren't going to change it.

[wli]

4. 98% of NY's prison cells are in Republican Senate districts

Holy s**t!!!!! This is terrifying beyond words!!!

[Asgaya Dihi]

5. It's not just partisan though, it's power

During the Clinton years we had three consecutive years of record number of marijuana arrests and increased spending on the drug war in general. Both sides have done it, the comparison is more a matter of degree and the years we're looking at.

That's why I always try to impress on people that we have to be as calm and reasonable as possible, the facts themselves are bizarre enough that if we come across as easily excitable or impressed with even possibly questionable information we hurt our ability to carry them on what we can really prove. We don't need to attack anything but the policies and the results, let people draw their own conclusions rather than alienate them.

Between this type of stuff and the kind of stuff I mentioned in the "Potential problem with making all drugs legal" thread we've got enough to carry about any crowd on the facts alone, and there's still more to it than that. Just have to get them to sit still and listen for a while. We may have to go back to school for a bit ourselves, but this is a fight we can win. It's all right there in the Governments own records.

[sweetheart]

6. That is really nauseating to discover

I did not realize that prisoners are being used to boost census in
republican districts, AND their black populations. What a heinous
abuse of a "justice" system... to put people without voting powers in
to districts that support their criminalization and imprisonment.