Tag: cannabis

Marijuana Reform Omitted From Biden Transition Plan On Racial Equity Despite Campaign Pledges

Marijuana reform advocates have been looking for signs that an incoming president-elect Joe Biden will make good on his campaign pledge to pursue cannabis policy changes since the former vice president has been projected to win the election. But they didn’t get any such sign in a new racial equity plan his transition team has put forward.

While Biden emphasized on the campaign trail that cannabis decriminalization and expungements would be part of his racial justice agenda, the plan released over the weekend omits any specific mention of marijuana reform.

Many of the proposals are broadly described, however, and it’s possible that a policy like decriminalization could be folded into broader commitments to eliminate “racial disparities and ensuring fair sentences,” for example.

In any case, there’s been some skepticism on the part of advocates that Biden’s stated support for cannabis reform will be matched with administrative action. And although he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have repeatedly promised to follow through with decriminalization and expungements if elected, that issue did not make the cut in the new “commitment to uplifting Black and Brown communities.”

The page says Biden is working to “strengthen America’s commitment to justice, and reform our criminal justice system” and lays out other specific promises that were often mentioned on the campaign trail alongside marijuana reform, such as a ban on police chokeholds and creating a national oversight commission to track law enforcement abuses. But cannabis reform is nowhere to be found in the transition team document.

In contrast, a still-live page on Biden’s separate campaign site for his “Plan for Black America” that he rolled out while running for president, includes the pledge to “decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions.”

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It’s Time To Admit: Drugs Won The War On Drugs

As I write this, we still don’t know who won the presidency. It is, however, time to declare at least one winner. After almost sixty years of fighting, it’s clear that the War on Drugs is almost over and drugs have won. As the Associated Press reports, recreational marijuana has been legalized in New Jersey and Arizona, it looks like it is about to be legalized in Montana and South Dakota, medical marijuana has been approved in Mississippi, and Oregon has loosened restrictions on hard drugs.

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Congresswoman Says She’ll Break the Law if Her Daughter Needs Medical Cannabis

In the United States, cannabis is legal for recreational use in 11 states while 33 other states allow some form of medical use. One would think that with this widespread legalization, which seems to be speeding up, that police officers would start concentrating their efforts elsewhere and arrest actual criminals who hurt people — not kidnap and cage innocent people for using a plant. Sadly, however, the incentives for arresting cannabis users are too addictive and the police state marches on, laying waste to all the lives it touches along the way.

Despite a massive number of anecdotal accounts coupled with an equally massive amount of research on the medical benefits of using cannabis as medicine, most states in the “land of the free” still kidnap and cage people for using it.

Sadly, in the land of the free, realizing the true benefits of cannabis is limited by the plant’s schedule 1 classification by the federal government. As cops continue to kidnap and cage people for cannabis, this plant’s life-saving potential is hindered. This seems especially egregious knowing the plant’s promise for alleviating the horrific opioid epidemic we are currently facing along with its numerous other potential treatments.

The good news is that most people now see cannabis prohibition for the tyrannical horse manure that it is and are willing to disobey. After all, most positive change comes — not in the form of begging politicians — but when good people choose to disobey bad laws.

This disobedience seems to be spreading too — all the way to Congress, aparently.

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Innocent 74yo Grandmother Strip Searched in Public After Cops Claimed to Smell Weed

A stop for an alleged traffic violation turned into a nightmare for a 74-year-old grandmother when the police officer conducting the stop claimed to have smelled a plant. Because the police state claims the authority to violate innocent grandmothers over plant smells, the officers involved will face no punishment and now the taxpayers will be held liable instead.

Phyllis Tucker, 74, is now suing the city of Jamestown and Fentress County, claiming the city police and county sheriff departments have illegal policies involving the use of strip searches, according to News Channel 5.

Tucker tells reporters that the incident which unfolded earlier this year has left her and her family traumatized, and rightfully so. According to the lawsuit, Tucker was forced to pull down her pants and remove her bra in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant as bystanders watched.

“If it wasn’t for my mother, I would never go back to Jamestown, never, and I wouldn’t advise anybody else to go through there either,” Tucker said.

Tucker was visiting her mother that night. She had her grandson, his girlfriend, and an infant in her car when a cop pulled them over and claimed to smell weed on her grandson’s girlfriend, Kira Smith, 19.

Instead of simply letting this family go, who had harmed absolutely no one, the cop escalated the situation to what amounts to a public roadside sexual assault — all to search for a plant.

According to the lawsuit, officers from the Jamestown police and the Fentress County Sheriff’s Department strip searched the two women in public view. According to the suit, Smith was ordered to “pull her pants down to her knees” and Tucker was told to remove “her blouse and bra” “exposing her breasts to the public.”

“I just started crying and was humiliated. I didn’t know if there was somebody who was going on the street that was seeing me with my top off,” Tucker said.

The lawsuit states the forcing both men and women to strip on the side of the road is a common practice by law enforcement in Frentress County.

“It is the custom of Frentress County to conduct these type of strip searches,” said attorney Wesley Clark who represents Tucker and Smith.

News Channel 5 reports that Clark also represents two other women who say there were pulled over in Fentress County in July, “stripped completely nude and searched” including being told to “squat” and “cough” while flashlights inspected their “genital areas,” according to the lawsuit.

In that case officers found no drugs and the women left with a ticket for an “improper tag.”

“To argue that it’s appropriate to strip women naked on the side of a public highway in search of marijuana is completely insane,” Clark said.

We agree. Nevertheless, it continues to happen all across the country in spite of marijuana being legal in some form in over half the states.

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USC researchers think THC in marijuana may be able to treat deadly COVID complication

Top University of South Carolina researchers think the chemical in marijuana that induces a “high” may be effective in treating a potentially lethal coronavirus complication, according to three newly released studies

The studies, co-published by Prakash Nagarkatti, found THC, the most potent mind-altering chemical in cannabis, can — in mice — prevent a harmful immune response that causes Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and cause a significant increase in healthy lung bacteria.

The studies, published in Frontiers in Pharmacology, the British Journal of Pharmacology and the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, were conducted by giving mice a toxin that triggered the harmful immune reaction that causes ARDS and then injecting mice with THC, according to the studies’ abstracts.

“The underlying mechanism is your immune system goes haywire and starts destroying your lungs and all your other organs,” Nagarkatti said of ARDS.

“Its’ like a car where you’re putting on a lot of accelerator, but the brakes aren’t working,” Nagarkatti said. “Basically what’s going to happen is your car is going to crash because you can’t stop it. And that’s basically what’s happening with ARDS.”

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