new illuminati: marijuana prohibition

Showing posts with label marijuana prohibition. Show all posts

Sunday, 1 May 2016

Nixon’s Chief Advisor Confesses: Real Reason for Drug War was to Criminalize Blacks & Hippies

Nixon’s Chief Advisor Confesses:

Real Reason for Drug War was to Criminalize Blacks & Hippies

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John Daniel Ehrlichman was counsel and domestic policy chief to President Richard Nixon. He was a key figure in events leading to the Watergate first break-in and the ensuing Watergate scandal, for which he was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and served a year and a half in prison.

Aside from the conspiracy of Watergate, which when compared to today’s politicians seems like schoolyard pranks, Ehrlichman, while serving under Nixon, was part of a much larger, and far more detrimental conspiracy that is still playing out today — the war on drugs.

In a new report, in Harper’s Magazine, written by Dan Baum, Ehrlichman comes clean on the real reason behind the war on drugs — to criminalize blacks and hippies.

According to Baum, he tracked down Ehrlichman in 1994 at his engineering firm in Atlanta, Georgia.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman bluntly asked Baum of the war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

According to Baum, that was the end of the conversation, “he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door,” recalls Baum.

What has ruined millions of lives and ended countless others, has been nothing more than a political play to remove the party’s opposition.

We’ve seen police departments turn from Andy Griffith to storm troopers armed with MRAPs tearing down entire houses, throwing grenades into the cribs of babies, and stripping the rights away from hundreds of millions of people — for what?

Epileptic children across the country continue to suffer and die because cops will lock their parents a cage for attempting to treat them with cannabis and they do so only because they believe in some fraud idea concocted decades ago by corrupt fat cats in D.C. looking to silence their opposition.

Thanks to the black market trade of drugs, pushed into dark alleys, by a system of oppression and prohibition, drug peddling violent gangs now plague places like Chicago, New York, and Detroit.

Democrats blame guns for the violence while Republicans blame gun control. Meanwhile, both sides are missing the giant pink elephant in the living room.

At the center of this tragic violence plaguing American streets is a giant Leviathan which lays waste to all lives it comes across, it’s called the American Drug War.

America has the largest prison population in the world. It is estimated that victimless crime constitutes 86% of the federal prison population. That means the only reason that these individuals are incarcerated is because the state deemed their non-violent personal choices, “illegal.” The majority of that 86% is for illegal drugs only.

Most of the people who are thrown in prison are non-violent. However, when they are locked in cages with society’s worst and treated like cattle in a factory farm, they come out forever changed. America is breeding a torturous and violent environment, and they have the audacity to call this the “justice system.”

As former Congressman Ron Paul pointed out prior to the revelation admitted by Ehrlichman;

[Black peope] are tried and imprisoned disproportionately. They suffer the consequence of the death penalty disproportionately. Rich white people don’t get the death penalty very often. And most of these are victimless crimes. Sometimes people can use drugs and get arrested three times and never committed a violent act and they can go to prison for life. I think there’s discrimination in the system, but you have to address the drug war. I would say the judicial system is probably one of the worst places where prejudice and discrimination still exists in this country.

The war on drugs has done more to destroy black communities than any amount of bigotry and racism ever could. And, on the other side, the antiwar, consciousness-expanding hippies were marginalized, ended their experimentation with psychedelics, and got in line with the status quo. Instead of turning on, “tuning in and dropping out,” the hippy movement enrolled, voted, and became the politically correct class.

A potentially paradigm-shifting movement of love and peace was effectively neutered by the political and warmongering aspirations of a few corrupt politicians.

Thanks to the unquestioning order followers, carrying out the immoral orders of their oligarchs on high, generations of lies have been perpetuated and millions throughout the world have suffered.

The War on Drugs takes good people and turns them into criminals every single minute of every single day. The system is setup in such a way that it fans the flames of violent crime by essentially building a factory that turns out violent criminals.

The system knows this too!

When drugs are legalized, gang violence drops — drastically. Not only does it have a huge effect on the localized gangs in America, but the legalization of drugs is crippling to the violent foreign drug cartels too.

Until Americans educate themselves on the cause of this violence, uninformed and corrupt lawmakers will continue to focus on controlling the symptoms.

We will see more senseless killings and more innocent lives stripped of opportunity by getting entangled in the system.

The solution is staring us in the face. End the war on drugs.

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs and opened up clean injection facilities for addicts to utilize. These facilities offer clean needles, which has stopped the spread of disease. Users are also monitored by medical staff, which has stopped drug overdoses. Portugal has cut their country’s needle drug use in half since they changed their drug policies. They went from having the worst heroin problem in Europe, to having one of the lowest.

No one is claiming that it will be easy, but the science is there to support this move. Now all we need is for the masses to understand that prohibition is immoral and causes far more problems than it ostensibly prevents. Please share this article with your friends and family so that they may know the history of this unethical and vile — war on people.

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist

From The Free Thought Project @ http://thefreethoughtproject.com/nixons-chief-advisor-confesses-real-reason-drug-war-criminalize-blacks-hippies/

For more information about the spurious ‘war on drugs’ see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/war%20on%20drugs

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Saturday, 20 June 2015

Marijuana Prohibition Is Unscientific, Unconstitutional and Unjust

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by Jacob Sullum

Marijuana Prohibition Is Unscientific

A few days before the House of Representatives passed a federal ban on marijuana in June 1937, the Republican minority leader, Bertrand Snell of New York, confessed, “I do not know anything about the bill.” The Democratic majority leader, Sam Rayburn of Texas, educated him. “It has something to do with something that is called marihuana,” Rayburn said. “I believe it is a narcotic of some kind.”

Harry Anslinger (Image: California NORML)

That exchange gives you a sense of how much thought Congress gave marijuana prohibition before approving it. Legislators who had heard of the plant knew it as the “killer weed” described by Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger, who claimed marijuana turned people into homicidal maniacs and called it “the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.” Anslinger warned that “marihuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes” and estimated that half the violent crimes in areas occupied by “Mexicans, Greeks, Turks, Filipinos, Spaniards, Latin Americans, and Negroes may be traced to the use of marihuana.”

Given this background, no one should pretend that marijuana prohibition was carefully considered or that it was driven by science, as opposed to ignorance and blind prejudice. It is hard to rationally explain why Congress, less than four years after Americans had emphatically rejected alcohol prohibition, thought it was a good idea to ban a recreational intoxicant that is considerably less dangerous.

It is relatively easy, for example, to die from acute alcohol poisoning, since the ratio of the lethal dose to the dose that gives you a nice buzz is about 10 to 1. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 2,200 Americans die from alcohol overdoses each year. By contrast, there has never been a documented human death from a marijuana overdose. Based on extrapolations from animal studies, the ratio of the drug’s lethal dose to its effective dose is something like 40,000 to 1.

There is also a big difference between marijuana and alcohol when it comes to the long-term effects of excessive consumption. Alcoholics suffer gross organ damage of a kind that is not seen even in the heaviest pot smokers, affecting the liver, brain, pancreas, kidneys, and stomach. The CDC attributes more than 38,000 deaths a year to three dozen chronic conditions caused or aggravated by alcohol abuse.

Another 12,500 alcohol-related deaths in the CDC’s tally occur in traffic accidents, and marijuana also has an advantage on that score. Although laboratory studies indicate that marijuana can impair driving ability, its effects are not nearly as dramatic as alcohol’s. In fact, marijuana’s impact on traffic safety is so subtle that it is difficult to measure in the real world.

Last February the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released the results of “the first large-scale [crash risk] study in the United States to include drugs other than alcohol,” which it described as “the most precisely controlled study of its kind yet conducted.” The researchers found that once the data were adjusted for confounding variables, cannabis consumption was not associated with an increased probability of getting into an accident.

That does not mean stoned drivers never cause accidents. One challenge in assessing the extent of the problem is that many of the drivers who test positive for marijuana are not actually impaired, since traces of the drug can be detected long after its effects wear off. That means marijuana-impaired drivers get mixed in with drivers who happen to be cannabis consumers but are not under the influence while on the road, which would tend to mask the drug’s role in crashes. Still, alcohol is clearly a much bigger factor in traffic fatalities.

Jeff Michael of NHTSA (Image: House Oversight and Government Reform Committee)

Last year, during a congressional hearing on the threat posed by stoned drivers, a NHTSA official was asked how many traffic fatalities are caused by marijuana each year. “That’s difficult to say,” replied Jeff Michael, NHTSA’s associate administrator for research and program development. “We don’t have a precise estimate.” The most he was willing to affirm was that the number is “probably not” zero.

The likelihood of addiction is another way that marijuana looks less dangerous than alcohol. Based on data from the National Comorbidity Survey, about 15 percent of drinkers qualify as “dependent” at some point in their lives, compared to 9 percent of cannabis consumers. That difference may be especially significant given the link between heavy alcohol consumption and premature death.

All told, the CDC estimates that alcohol causes 88,000 deaths a year in the United States. It has no equivalent estimate for marijuana. We may reasonably assume, along with Jeff Michael, that marijuana’s death toll is more than zero, if only because people under the influence of cannabis occasionally have fatal accidents. But the lack of a definitive answer highlights marijuana’s relative safety, which points to a potentially important benefit of repealing prohibition: To the extent that more pot smoking is accompanied by less drinking, an increase in cannabis consumption could lead to a net reduction in drug-related disease and death.

The comparison of alcohol and marijuana presents an obvious challenge to anyone who thinks the government bans drugs because they are unacceptably dangerous. If anything, that rationale suggests marijuana should be legal while alcohol should be banned, rather than the reverse. Judging from this example, the distinctions drawn by our drug laws have little, if anything, to do with what science tells us about the relative hazards of different intoxicants.

Marijuana Prohibition Is Unconstitutional

When dry activists sought to ban alcoholic beverages, they went through the arduous process of changing the Constitution, which prior to the ratification of the 18th amendment in 1919 did not authorize Congress to prohibit the production and sale of “intoxicating liquors.” When Congress banned marijuana in 1937, it did so in the guise of the Marihuana Tax Act , a revenue measure that authorized onerous regulations ostensibly aimed at collecting taxes on production and distribution, with severe penalties for noncompliance. But by the time marijuana prohibition was incorporated into the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, there was no need for such subterfuge. Instead Congress relied on its constitutional authority to “regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states.”

The Commerce Clause, which was part of the original Constitution, did not change between 1937 and 1970. But beginning with a series of New Deal cases, the Supreme Court stretched its meaning to accommodate pretty much anything Congress wanted to do. In the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn, for example, the Court said the Commerce Clause authorized punishment of an Ohio farmer for exceeding his government-imposed wheat quota, even though the extra grain never left his farm, let alone the state.

The Court went even further in the 2005 case Gonzales v. Raich, ruling that the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce extends even to homegrown marijuana used for medical purposes by a California patient in compliance with state law. That decision, unlike Wickard, applied not just to production but to mere possession. According to the Court, the Commerce Clause encompasses the tiniest trace of marijuana in a cancer patient’s drawer. “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause,” observed dissenting Justice Clarence Thomas, “then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”

Justice Clarence Thomas (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Many conservatives who pay lip service to the Constitution and the system of federalism it is supposed to protect nevertheless seem comfortable with this audacious assertion of congressional authority. In fact, they complain that the Obama administration is not using the Controlled Substances Act to shut down the newly legal marijuana markets in Colorado and Washington. Either they do not really believe in federalism or they cannot think straight when they smell marijuana.

Marijuana Prohibition Is Unjust

Even if marijuana prohibition were consistent with science and the Constitution, it would be inconsistent with basic principles of morality. It is patently unfair to treat marijuana merchants like criminals while treating liquor dealers like legitimate businessmen, especially in light of the two drugs’ relative hazards. It is equally perverse to arrest cannabis consumers while leaving drinkers unmolested.

Peaceful activities such as growing a plant or selling its produce cannot justify the violence that is required to enforce prohibition. In the name of stopping people from getting high, police officers routinely commit acts that would be universally recognized as assault, burglary, theft, kidnapping, and even murder were it not for laws that draw arbitrary lines between psychoactive substances.

The main justification for those laws is protecting people from their own bad decisions. The hope is that prohibition will deter a certain number of people who otherwise would not only try marijuana but become self-destructively attached to it. Toward that end, police in the United States arrest hundreds of thousands of people on marijuana charges each year—nearly 700,000 in 2013, the vast majority for simple possession. While most of those marijuana offenders do not spend much time behind bars, about 40,000 people are serving sentences as long as life for growing or distributing cannabis. And even if marijuana offenders do not go to jail or prison, they still suffer public humiliation, legal costs, inconvenience, lost jobs, and all the lasting ancillary penalties of a criminal arrest.

Jeff Mizanskey, who is serving a life sentence in Missouri for marijuana distribution (Image: YouTube)

Note that the people bearing these costs are not, by and large, the people who receive the purported benefits of prohibition. The person who, thanks to prohibition, never becomes a pathetic pothead goes about his life undisturbed while other people—people who never hurt him or anyone else—pay for the mistakes he avoids. Even paternalists should be troubled by the distribution of these burdens.

I am not a paternalist, because I do not believe the government should be in the business of stopping us from hurting ourselves. I am with John Stuart Mill on this:

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant….Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Marijuana prohibition, along with the rest of the war on drugs, is a flagrant violation of this principle. It is a moral outrage built on a mountain of lies.

From Forbes @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2015/05/14/marijuana-prohibition-is-unscientific-unconstitutional-and-unjust/

For more information about marijuana see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/marijuana