photo source: Tokeofthetown.comEvery demonstrator for civil justice, every cop, every governor, every citizen who cares about his fellow man, should read this book. I can't think of another book with more practical wisdom to teach about what cops deal with, and how the larger forces behind government work on police departments to shape ideas and policy.
Mr. Stamper's article, linked above, deals with Washington State's and Colorado's legalization of marijuana--for recreational purposes.
Someone has figured out that smoking the peace pipe doesn't kill brain cells---it actually fosters connectivity between neurons that otherwise don't fire in sync, and this leads to an ability to think outside the box on things.
Don't want any of that!! God knows the pharm companies, and others, including police departments, have their own reasons for not wanting to believe what I just said. But it's true. I mean, I live in California. California is different, about pot, than other states I've lived in (Ohio and Texas). Different attitudes, ideas. In California, many people know that the "Father of our County"--George Washington--grew marijuana plants on his farm.
Consider this:
"In his diary for August 7, 1765, Washington writes, "Began to separate the Male from the Female hemp … rather too late." Female marijuana plants are the ones that contain enough THC to be worth smoking. Some take this to mean Washington was cultivating the plant not just for fiber. Of course, two days later Washington says he put the hemp in the river to soak and separate out the fibers, and later in September that he started to harvest the seed. That suggests he divided the plants because the males made stronger fiber while the female plants produced the seed needed for the next year's crop. Jefferson in his Farm Book wrote that a female plant would produce a quart of seed, and a bushel of seed was enough to plant an acre.
Do these guys sound like midnight tokers? No, they sound like farmers. Just shows how clever they were at covering their tracks."
Source: Straightdope.com
Check out the comments in this thread. And photos of hummingbirds feasting on buds.
From Patients4medicalmarijuana.wordpress.com:
On the one hand, United States federal government officials have consistently denied that marijuana has any medical benefits. On the other, the government actually holds patents for the medical use of the plant.
Just check out US Patent 6630507 titled “Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants” which is assigned to The United States of America, as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The patent claims that -
“Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia.”
The patent was obtained in October of 2003.
Here is the comment I left on the Huffington Post article written by Chief Stamper...I have been meaning to write to him via the good old USPS, but haven't gotten around to it. Why not just leave a note on his article?
Norm Stamper, what do I have to do to get you to come to Los Angeles and talk to Chief Beck about what's going on down here? I'm not sure he even knows how messed up things are, or realizes. He has two kids in the department so I'm pretty sure he wants it to be GOOD place to work.
An L.A. taxpayer, working mother of two school-age kids told me about getting pulled over not long ago here by an LAPD officer. She said she was up early, (before 7), had to go somewhere she didn't usually go, and ended up making a right turn without seeing the sign that said not to turn on right. She said she pulled over when the motorcycle cop put on his lights, pulled into a gas station. She said right off the bat the guy was really in her face, saying "Do you know what you did back there?" --And she said yes, I realize (she wasn't giving him any grief) and that he was making comments and getting impatient (not taking off the shades) as she looked through her stuff for her registration, which she couldn't find right away because her purse was full of papers. She said he went around behind the car, stood back there filling out the ticket, and that she got out of the car and approached him with the registration, which she sort of shoved his way at him. Then she went back and sat in the front seat. Next thing she knows he's next to the car telling her she needs to get out of the car and he's going to arrest her. She was like, "For what?" "Assault with a deadly weapon," he told her. And, she said, he was serious. The deadly weapon being the paper she shoved at him, the registration. She insisted he call his supervisor, a woman, who also told her they could arrest her if they wanted.
In the end they did not arrest her, and she --a five-foot-three 120-pound-soaking-wet woman, was extremely upset by the encounter. She wasn't sure what they were going to do, and she was like, "look at me. Obviously I'm not a threat to anyone. It's early in the morning. I pay my taxes, take my kids to school, I'm a PTA mom, that's my life. In what world are the people who protect and serve us, supposed to act like that?"
She didn't even know about what's been going down elsewhere in So Cal, like Anaheim, where demonstrations over police brutality turned nasty and the OCRegister reported on possible provacateur infiltration and posted a video showing police standing over a man they'd shot for three minutes, standing over him as he twitched, doing nothing to help him. She had no idea of any of that---just that she had this encounter with the L.A. cops and it really freaked her out. She's like, "this is protect and serve? And I pay their salaries!" She said a motorcycle cop friend of hers suggested she file a complaint, but that some time had gone by and she didn't do it.
The last time cops stopped me in L.A. they were really sweet and nice. I had a tail light out and they were two young latinos who I actually enjoyed meeting, and I was glad they told me about the tail light, because I didn't know.
And you know what, especially from reading your book, and my friend said this too---we like cops. We get it. We know that you guys deal with the worst of the worst of the worst, you're society's garbagemen. You have to deal with things most of us never see. It's just that, in this day and age, especially with what happened to the demonstrators, last year, people are realizing that cops don't understand regular people are not the same as the genuine dirtbags that are out there that you all have to deal with. And they are out there, and they are nasty. You stand in that firing line, damaged by that psychic violence. And regular people don't have a sense of it, or what it's like, how could we?
Anyway, we are at a time in our country when genuine civic unrest is likely to happen again. Because people feel they are not really represented by their government, and they don't know what to do. Civil rights advocates like Connie Rice have gone silent on the treatment of these citizen activists, like Scott Olsen in Oakland who was nearly killed during a demonstration, after serving two tours in Iraq.
We need police who understand the difference in importance between the Constitution, and the parks ordinances, who understand that civil protesters are not the criminals that they often have to deal with.
Norm Stamper, I loved your book. Can you help?
Find it on Amazon.com: Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Expose` of the Dark Side of American Policing
When military fighters come back to the states and join the police, the following can happen. Source: USA Today
"In the midst of anti-war demonstrations and riots, the District's police force was beefing up from 3,000 in 1968 to 5,100 in 1971. Many new recruits, like Davis, came right out of the military, and many were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, former Fraternal Order of Police president Gary Hankins says. The treatment some vets were getting at home inflicted more wounds."
But, back to the topic of prohibition, what's really crazy is that outlawing drugs is supposedly to protect people from themselves, while as consumers, people are not protected from predatory commercial interests.
For example, it appears from This article by the Safe Patient Project, on the "FDA Safety and Innovation Act," suggests that medical implants and other devices can be put on the market without clinical testing.
Just think about that a moment and what it means.
Think about what happens to people when they are sick, vulnerable, and mistreated by the medical profession. The Safe Patient Project has some real case studies about that, here at this link.
Then consider the discovery by a Canadian man that hemp oil could cure his neighbors of serious illnesses, including cancer. Source: PhonenixTears.ca
The more facets of this plant one sees, the less it looks like the devil. I am not a regular marijuana smoker, but I do like incense blends, which are also pursued by the feds, because...why? For our own good?
I'm not so sure about that.
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