Crossposted from GreenState Project and Diatribune
The DEA and the ONDCP have launched a surge of their own: against sick Americans on American soil and it has gone totally under the radar of the ever-hopeless and pathetic Mainstream Media.
Of course, the "insurgents" are the medical marijuana and cannabis reform movement, its patients, their dispensaries and the people who, for whatever reason, have rented them space to exist and do business.
Being below the MSM radar means it gets zero national attention: news coverage is limited to the local market, where the bulk of Americans are supportive of medical marijuana and general reform.
Much more below the fold.
First, here's an excerpt from an e-mail I got from being on the mailing list for Americans for Safe Access an activist group in California dedicated to creating safe access to medical marijuana for those legally entitled to have it. They have their work cut out for them for certain. Excerpt has been edited for brevity:
Thu, 26 Jul 2007
Yesterday, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided at least eight medical cannabis dispensaries in Los Angeles, breaking down doors and stealing medicine. Two weeks prior to this, the DEA sent over a hundred letters to landlords of dispensaries in Los Angeles, telling them that the dispensaries were operating illegally under federal law and that the landlords could be subject to asset forfeiture.
*****
ASA has continuously worked with the City of Los Angeles to protect dispensaries. Yesterday morning, City Council Member Dennis Zine, a former Los Angeles Police Officer, held an unprecedented press conference with ASA to present a letter calling on the DEA to abandon its latest attack on landlords who rent to medical cannabis dispensaries and allow the City Council to move forward with regulations without further federal interference. City Council President Eric Garcetti joined patients and dispensary operators to support Zine’s courageous stance. Then, the City Council unanimously approved the first reading of a moratorium on new collectives that marks the first step towards sensible guidelines and greater legitimacy for collectives in the city – a step for which ASA has advocated for over two years.
*****
Later on Wednesday, the DEA balked at the requests of the City Council and raided several dispensaries in Los Angeles. ASA immediately activated our emergency response plan, sending out email alerts, blasting a text message, calling all neighboring dispensaries, and alerting all local media outlets within a half hour of the raids beginning. Just two hours after the raids started, over 200 patients and advocates had gathered at one Hollywood dispensary to protest the raids. Dozens of protesters blockaded the entrances to the facility, blocking DEA agents from leaving the building. These courageous activists helped successfully negotiate for the release of the employees being held inside by DEA agents.
Yesterday’s actions and the work of ASA’s communications staff resulted in dozens of positive stories about the DEA raids and the Los Angeles City Council’s commitment to medical cannabis. All of the major television and radio networks in Los Angeles covered the stories from the patients’ perspective – not the DEA’s. ASA also worked with reporters to produce several Los Angeles Times articles and one editorial, as well as a story in USA Today. Hundreds of national television networks, radio stations and newspapers subsequently picked up the story.
Here's a video of one raid on July 24th, 2007. Can you tell the real Americans from the tools of Empire?
I often like to read at COUNTERPUNCH and recently found Fred Gardener's article Prohibitionists Attack, Reformers Fundraise. Mr. Gardener is an expert in the field of Medical Marijuana and edits a professional journal called O'Shaughnessy's, the Journal of Cannabis in Clinical Practice.
From Mr. Gardener's COUNTERPUNCH article:
DEA raids closed eight Los Angeles dispensaries this week; no arrests were made. Proprietors of dispensaries raided the week before in Bakersfield, Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, Corona, Riverside, and Palm Springs face federal cultivation-for-sale charges. DEA spokeswoman Sarah Pullen has characterized the raided clubs as "the most egregious traffickers." Meaning they were serving the most people.
Some of the raids evoked militant responses. In Los Angeles a crowd of more than 200 supporters assembled outside the California Patients Group on Santa Monica Boulevard. Their presence may have convinced the raiders not to arrest the staff and customers being detained within. In Corona, as DEA agents were taking down the "Healing Nations" dispensary, there was an outpouring of support on the street outside. The "boisterous and emotional" demonstration was described in the Inland News:
"With signs and chants and spontaneous cries, they invoked state law and patients rights, and berated federal agents and police. 'What are the police going to do for people like me? Do they care that people are going to suffer?' said Corona resident David Martinez, 45, who suffers from painful tumors and back problems and has patronized Healing Nations Collective since it opened in May 2006. Many others said that medical marijuana was the best treatment for their host of painful and life-disrupting conditions. 'It gave me my life back,' said 47-year-old Riverside resident Kathy Jones, who said a regimen of heavy painkillers taken for fibromyalgia and other conditions had previously left her incapacitated. 'I'm not a druggie, I'm a patient,' she said through tears
Brief aside: "Druggie" and "pothead" are cultural slurs that "tread upon people" egregiously and more or less reflect the ignorance of those who hurl these offensive terms. We will see in a moment how this denigration of people translates into excuses for killing them.
It's awesome that this issue made the local news in the areas affected but this is a direct result of Federal Reefer Madness and these events illustrate, yet again, how vastly important this is to the Federal Government, particularly the Bush Administration.
The following excerpt is what prodded me to post this: From the "You cannot make this shit up" file -
While the DEA was terrorizing medical-marijuana users in Southern California, Drug Czar John Walters flew into Redding to publicize an eradication program called "Operation Alesia." It’s named after a battle in 52 BC at which the Roman Empire finally defeated the Gauls. (Walters’s father helped direct Operation Phoenix in Vietnam.) Operation Alesia involves 17 agencies, including the California National Guard. The crews arrive in Black Hawk helicopters and the campesinos fade into the forest, resulting in no arrests as of July 18, the date of Walters visit. The Redding Record-Searchlight reported that Walters said "the people who plant and tend the gardens are terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties. ‘Don't buy drugs. They fund violence and terror,’ he said."
Takes one to know one, they say.
Runs in the family, too, apparently.
"Operation Phoenix"
was designed to identify and "neutralize"—capture; induce to surrender; kill; or otherwise disrupt—the civilian infrastructure supporting the Vietnam insurgency
So We see that John Walters, the Drug Czar of the Bush Administration - by far the worst presidential administration in American history - is acting like the medical marijuana movement are "insurgents" and attacking them with the DEA as stormtroopers footsoldiers and with the ONDCP as the major propaganda organ. Walters named his program after a hyper-violent assassination program from the Vietnam War and in a way that celebrates the freakin' Roman Empire. I was quite surprised to learn his dad helped that program. What a small world. I can see why Team Bush wanted him as drug czar over the howls of protest.
Ideology Uber Alles
So...what is it about marijuana that requires the government to result to this level of violence,thuggery, and unmitigated bullshit? Are medical marijuana users standing in the way of Empire?
The answer, of course, is "Ideology", plain and simple. Though stealing money and assets through "forfeiture" and protecting the profits of GOP contributers is doubtlessly a very close second. This "war" is essentially one face of capitalism.
Over and above their commitment to protecting the profits of huge GOP contributers Big Pharma, which just hates the thought of any competition from unpatented cannabis use (however tiny that "competition" might be). It can't be related to this government's concern about your health - you KNOW that's laughable.
Medical marijuana users have to hop through so many stupid hoops and there have to be so many stupid discussion of plant limits, how much cured pot a person can have, how much is needed etc, but tobacco smoker and alcohol drinkers can drink and smoke themselves into the grave without so much as a note from their mommies. And that's just beyond wrong.
This $20 billion-doller-per-year war waged against Americans on American soil is fucking outrageous. There's no other words to convey the complete wrongness of all this. It is protected by the Mainstream Media which refuses to give the issue the time of day.
The DEA has stormed many dispensaries over the past 10 years but this utter Gestapo nonsense hasn't yet snuffed out the movement, which, of course,the goal as expressed by Walter's highly-militaristic operation title. Prop 215 is over 10 years old and it's the law. Medical cannabis laws have spread to at least 12 states and more will be added despite John Walters' counter-insurgency program.
Did I mention cash?
Fighting the scourge of cannabis reform insurgency requires stealing all their money whenever possible.
One of the dispensaries was open again the next day, thought the DEA stole their pot and $50,000. Video at link.
"They completely robbed us," store owner David Chavez Sr. said Wednesday of federal and local law agents who raided his business Tuesday.
Only a few jars of marijuana were on display at the front of the store in the 300 block of Roberts Lane on Wednesday afternoon. Fifty pounds of marijuana and several pounds of pot-laced cookies, candy and ice cream were seized during the raid, as well as about $50,000 from Chavez's bank accounts, Drug Enforcement Agency agents said.
Rob Elissague, who suffers from cancer, said medicinal marijuana is the one thing that gives him an appetite. Without it, he'd probably be dead, he said.
"If the government got smart, they'd legalize (pot) and then tax the hell out of it," Elissague said.
Chavez said he was at his residence on Montalvo Drive preparing to take a shower Tuesday morning when federal agents smashed in his front door. He at first thought he was being robbed by thugs, not raided by government agents.
They dragged Chavez naked from the bathroom and made him lay on the living room floor while they searched the house, Chavez said. His son, David Chavez Jr., was arrested on suspicion of possession of a small amount of cocaine, but David Chavez Sr. says his son doesn't use coke and he's not sure how it got in his room.
David Chavez Sr. said he won't be able to pay the $50,000 in state taxes the business owes this month because officials seized the pot and his money. His employees, including five armed guards, are working without pay.
Note that this is at least the second time Mr. Chavez has been assailed by the DEA.
Now, back to the "pot smokers are less than human" meme and to show how this issue bleeds (literally) into other issues - this time: immigration. He talks about the Hinchey-Rohrabacher Amendment and Dana Rohrbacher a rather notable republican who sponsors cannabis reform efforts at lest on the surface, but is not the greatest guy to ever walk the Earth by a long shot. Furthermore, Gardner has little to no respect for the established Cannabis Reform Organizations out there:
Our leaders who art in Washington fancy themselves brilliant public relations strategists. You'd think they'd want to appeal to Mexican Americans (13.5 million strong and very aware, politically). Yet they court the likes of immigrant-basher Dana Rohrabacher and glory in getting him as a co-sponsor for their unwieldy stop-the-DEA bill!
Last week Rohrabacher and Lou Dobbs outdid each other in demanding clemency for two US border patrol guards who shot an unarmed man in the back and then lied about what happened. The man had been caught trying to smuggle marijuana into the US and was fleeing in retreat when the guards opened fire. The INS pressed charges against them and Dobbs is outraged that a US government agency would consider an illegal alien marijuana smuggler a human being.)
Something seems to have happened to the rest of the article. It seems truncated right in the middle of the Rohrbacher-Dobbs lovefest. Usually COUNTERPUNCH has his bio-blurb and e-mail at the end and that's missing.
Well, this is another blog post that's way too long on a subject most progressives DO support yet still seem to think is almost completely unimportant.
I think that belief stems from the complete absence of this issue from the television. If it ain't on TV it ain't Real. A war rages on out streets and the tax payer funds it and most likely does not support it but is absolutely in the dark about it unless one lives in an affected area or is actively pursuing this information.
The New Democratic Party has an awesome opportunity to do a lot of good (though, unfortunately, that's NOT what politics is usually about) and to royally damage the GOP while they are currently reeling from a constellation of scandals and George Fucking Bush is like a stone around their neck.
The GOP doesn't have the luxury, currently, of getting too huffy about cannabis reform and this is exactly why smart new Dems would jump on this with both feet.
I don't think they need to fear the GOP whining on about "soft of crime" anymore.
Update [2007-7-31 8:54:46 by xxdr zombiexx]: I am updating this with contextual information.
While the Federal Government wages its jihad against our useful plant and sick people who wnat to use it, The FDA says Avandia can stay on the shelf
FDA panelists suggest that Glaxo's diabetes drug Avandia remain on the market, while acknowledging studies showing links to increased heart attack risks.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Food and Drug Administration panelists voted Monday that GlaxoSmithKline's diabetes drug Avandia should remain on the market, despite an analysis showing links to increased risk of heart attack.
Advisers voted 22-1 in favor of keeping Avandia on the U.S. market, while acknowledging the risks of the drug. This is not a binding vote, but is taken as a suggestion to FDA regulators.
Nonetheless, the panel - meeting in Gaithersburg, Md. - also voted 20-3 that data shows that Avandia increases the risk of cardiac ischemia, a condition that blocks blood flow and oxygen to certain parts of the body, in patients with the most common type of diabetes.
Diabetes has become an epidemic in America directly due to the ultra-crappy American diet - soft drinks and fast food and lack of exercize - have caused the obesity and the diabetes. Marijuana doesn't do this nor does it cause the problems this PROFITABLE drug does.
"We disagree that Avandia should be taken off the market," said Glaxo spokeswoman Nancy Pekarek, in an e-mail to CNNMoney.com. "Dr. Graham is just one person on the panel - there are many other presentations to be heard today, including [Glaxo's,] which reinforce our position that Avandia is safe when used appropriately."
The FDA has grown increasingly cautious about drug safety, after Merck & Co. (up $0.00 to $50.12, Charts, Fortune 500) pulled its FDA-approved anti-arthritis painkiller Vioxx off the market in 2004 because of links to heart attacks and strokes. Dr. Nissen was also an outspoken critic of Vioxx, and since the withdrawal of the drug, about 27,000 lawsuits have been filed against Merck.
So you can take dangerous medications that Big Phrama profits from, profits that see their way into the Republican party coffers, but you cannot have access to a non-harmful plant one can grow in one's yard (assuming one has a yard).
And that, my friends, is absolute bullshit.